Contents
- The reason for the day gets lost before the supplier hears it
- Purchasing compares activities, not problems
- The hour after the rafting is where the day pays off
- Does the hierarchy really stay in the office?
- A Saturday is taken, not given
- Leaderboards split teams that were already split
- Half a day spent on a real problem
Team building is sold as the opposite of a meeting, and that sales pitch explains most of its failures. Most team building activities fail because nobody connects them to the work: the reason for the day never reaches the supplier, the hierarchy comes along for the ride, and the conversation that should follow the activity is never planned.
The pitch is familiar to anyone who has worked in corporate events in almost any market. Take people out of the office, away from screens and agendas, into nature or a workshop, and let them discover each other through something enjoyable. In practice that means a coach to a lake, a mountain resort or the forests an hour or two outside the city, a day of paintball or orienteering, rafting on a nearby river if the company is already at a coastal resort for a meeting, a drumming session in a hotel ballroom, a cooking competition, a treasure hunt across a resort. Photos are taken, someone gets soaked, and on the way home everyone agrees it was a nice day. On Monday nothing in the way the team works has changed.
The activities themselves are seldom to blame; many are run well by firms that know their job. A break from work and a different way of looking at work are two very different products, and companies usually pay for the first while hoping for the second.
The reason for the day gets lost before the supplier hears it
Team building, in its plain sense, means planned activity intended to improve how a group works together: how its members communicate, trust each other, share roles and handle disagreement. The last of those is the part that usually disappears.
The research is kinder to team building than its reputation in many offices. A meta-analysis by Klein and colleagues, published in 2009, found a moderate positive effect overall, strongest on how team members feel about each other and how they work together. What it studied, though, were days built around goal setting, relationships, problem solving and clarifying roles, which is to say structured work on a team’s own issues, and that is a long way from whatever a catalog happens to file under team building.
When a company decides it needs such a day, there is nearly always a reason, even if nobody writes it down. Two departments do not talk to each other. A new manager has arrived and the team has not accepted them. A merger has put two cultures in one office. A team has had a hard year and is exhausted. Each is a different problem calling for a different kind of day. The reason gets discussed in a meeting, and then the request that reaches the supplier reads “a team building activity for sixty people, one day, outside the city, within this budget”. By then the reason has vanished, and the activity company does what any supplier would do with a request like that: it offers its best-selling product.
Purchasing compares activities, not problems
The way team building is bought makes this almost inevitable. In many companies human resources handles it as part of a yearly plan, usually without anyone trained in event planning, under time pressure and with a fixed budget per head. Several outdoor or activity firms are asked for offers, the offers are compared mainly on price and on how attractive the activity sounds, and one wins. Nobody in that process is doing anything wrong. It is a purchasing process, and purchasing processes are good at comparing products, not at matching a product to a problem.
So a team struggling with communication between departments ends up in an activity where each department competes as its own group, which hardens exactly the divide the day was meant to soften. A tired team that needed rest is taken on a physically demanding outing that leaves half of them drained and a few of them quietly resentful. The most valuable thing a client can do happens before any supplier is called: a short paragraph, in plain words, describing what is wrong or what should be different, shared with every firm invited to propose. The good firms will change their offer in response, and the ones who send the same proposal anyway have told you something useful too.
The hour after the rafting is where the day pays off
The widest gap in the team building days I have watched is simple: the activity ends, and the day ends with it. Outdoor and activity companies are usually very good at running the activity itself, often with seasonal guides and temporary teams who know the river or the forest well. Far fewer are asked to lead the conversation that should follow, or have people able to do it. What happened during the task? Who took which role, and was it the same role they take at work? Where did communication break down, and what does that suggest about the office?
A team does not change because it did something unusual together; it changes when it talks honestly about what that unusual day revealed about its everyday work.
That conversation needs time, a quiet room and someone who can lead it fairly, ideally not the team’s own manager. It also needs a second, shorter meeting once the team has been back at work for a while, where the team checks whether anything it agreed on actually happened. Those agreements are the only event KPIs a team day really has; a survey asking whether people enjoyed the outing tells you about the outing, and nothing at all about the office. Without that, even a carefully designed day fades within a month and becomes one more set of photos in a shared folder.
Does the hierarchy really stay in the office?
The promise is that outside the office, titles fall away and people meet as equals. It is an attractive idea, and the hierarchy travels on the same bus. A junior employee does not forget that the person beside them in the raft decides their bonus. A manager who dominates meetings usually dominates the treasure hunt as well, sometimes more so, because now there is a game to win. Quiet people in the office tend to be quiet on the field, and activities that reward speed, strength or loud confidence hand the stage to those who already hold it.
That is no argument for leaving managers at home; a team building day without its manager is usually about the wrong thing. The activity, though, has to be chosen with the hierarchy in mind. Formats where roles rotate, where the most senior person is deliberately given a supporting part, or where the task depends on skills spread across the team in unexpected ways make the day genuinely different from the office, whereas formats that simply move the office into a forest reproduce it with mud on everyone’s shoes.
Physical formats carry a quieter version of the same problem. A day built on climbing, running or paddling favors the fit and the confident, and it pushes aside the colleague with a bad knee or the one who cannot swim and would rather not say so. A careful supplier tells people in advance what each activity demands and gives anyone who sits out the physical part a role the task genuinely depends on, not a seat beside the photographer. The trust exercises some facilitators love, where people are asked to share something personal in a circle, deserve the same caution. Belonging to a team should never depend on telling colleagues what you would rather keep private, and the way work actually gets done, who decides and who hears about it last, gives a group more than enough to talk about. (If the real issue is a conflict that has gone further than that, a facilitator hired for one afternoon is the wrong kind of help.)
A Saturday is taken, not given
A quieter reason for failure is rarely said aloud. Many companies schedule these days on a Saturday so as not to lose a working day, which looks reasonable from the company’s side. From the employee’s side it means giving up time with family, rearranging childcare and losing a weekend that was already short. Some people genuinely enjoy it; others arrive having already decided they will not, and nothing during the day changes that decision. Distance makes it worse. A day at a lake or mountain resort for a team based in a large city often means a very early meeting point, a head count beside the coaches, a long ride in weekend traffic and a late return, so the activity itself occupies perhaps half of the time people actually give up, and the other half is spent in a coach seat.
A company that takes team building seriously should be willing to give it working hours. It need not be a full day. Half a day during the week with a clear purpose often achieves more than a whole weekend people experience as an obligation. It also fits neatly into a sales meeting or an annual gathering, since anyone planning a conference at a resort hotel already has an afternoon slot to fill. When the company offers its own time instead of borrowing its employees’ time, the message of the day has changed before the bus even leaves.
Leaderboards split teams that were already split
A large share of team building products rest on competition: teams against teams, points, a scoreboard, a winner announced at dinner. Competition is easy to organize, generates energy and photographs well. It also produces losers. In a group that already works well, a friendly contest is harmless. In a group with existing tensions, which is frequently why the day was booked, it sharpens them. The department that lost remembers, and the colleague whose mistake cost the team a point remembers longer.
Sales teams are the obvious exception, and their managers often tell me so. Their people live with targets, rankings and monthly league tables, they enjoy a contest, and a day without a scoreboard can feel to them like a day without salt. I accept that, up to a point. A team that already competes every working day hardly needs one more ranking to learn that it can compete; what it rarely gets is an afternoon where the top seller and the person at the bottom of the table have to solve something together and depend on each other to finish. If a contest is kept for such a group, mixing the teams across regions and seniority, so that the usual rivals end up on the same side, takes most of the sting out of it.
When the problem is cooperation, the activity should be built on cooperation. A task that can only be completed if every group contributes something the others lack, or a single shared goal for the whole company instead of one per team, gives people the experience of needing each other, which is far closer to the purpose of the day than the experience of beating each other.
Half a day spent on a real problem
There is a form of team building that rarely appears in catalogs, and I think it works better than most of what does. The team spends half a day or a day working together on a real problem that matters to it, in a different setting and with more time than usual. It might be redesigning a process that frustrates everyone, preparing next year’s plan at an offsite with every person in the room rather than only the managers, visiting a customer together and then discussing what they saw, or settling one long-standing internal issue with an outside facilitator who keeps the discussion fair.
Such days are less spectacular, and nobody comes home wet. People do return to the office with something they made together and a shared memory tied directly to their work. A good meal somewhere outside the usual canteen is often all the “fun” a day like that needs, and the follow-up meeting a few weeks later has something concrete to look at.
Before booking the next activity, could you write down in two sentences what you expect to be different in the office a month afterwards?