If as much effective team building were done as is talked about, the labour market would probably be an Eden of stratospheric productivity. The reality is that in the corporate world team building gets talked about far more than it gets done, far more than would actually be needed and — above all — what does get done is rarely capable of being genuinely useful. Why?
Because team building sessions are hard to organise and run: they usually come with a mix of high expectations (particularly from whoever is organising them) and a fair amount of resistance or scepticism from the people taking part, often born of past experiences that were less than thrilling. All of it frequently accompanied by resources, including financial ones, that are not entirely adequate. On top of that, team building activities demand a very high level of design, creativity and planning, often well beyond what is needed for events that are larger but more standard and more stable over time.
It gets more complicated still when the team building sessions are expected not only to build the group but also to produce some other result — which is hardly unusual in a system that tends to optimise time and resources. A typical case is when the group is also expected to produce original ideas, perhaps tied to products, services or ways of working. In those cases the event is asked not just to strengthen cohesion between people, but to create the conditions for new ideas to develop.
How do you organise, deliver and evaluate something like that? First, by structuring every stage of the event around a clear objective. And then by looking for the tools that support each stage: from design to organisation, from delivery to reporting.
1. Define objectives and expectations
Setting out the objectives of the event clearly is the one condition without which no result can be expected. It sounds obvious, but in practice the failure — or the incomplete success — of a great many activities comes from too little thought at this first stage. Not spelling out clearly what the session is expected to produce can seriously undermine the effectiveness (and often the efficiency) of everything organised afterwards, starting with the choice of the most suitable activities and tools to put on offer.
An example? If the point of the team building is to encourage creativity and problem-solving, activities based on design thinking, creativity and heuristics will be more useful, because they help people develop innovative solutions starting from real challenges to grapple with.
The second step is to gauge expectations, starting with those of the people taking part: what do they expect in return for the time and energy they are being asked to give? Surveys and quizzes can be very useful for exploring this and then designing something coherent that follows from it — more effective, and at the same time less wasteful of effort and budget.
2. Start from the team to build targeted activities
Every team is different and has different dynamics, because the objectives differ, the people in it differ and so do the relationships that have formed between them. The activities on offer will have to differ too, if they are to produce the best results. Technical teams, for instance — the kind mainly working in research and development — find activities that stimulate problem-solving more useful, because they build on the analytical approach that already shapes their daily work. Groups more focused on creativity and collaboration, by contrast, feel more at ease with activities that lead them to think through solutions in a more open, creative way. Being able to build challenges and activities — including gaming — around different specifications, using flexible, adaptable tools makes it possible to build on qualities the group or its members already have, and so help them reach the final objective.
3. Choose the format of the event
In person, hybrid, virtual? Depending on the structure of the team and the resources available, the various types of event can be organised in person, online or in hybrid form, and that choice can just as easily make concrete results much easier to produce as it can get in their way. Virtual events, for instance, can be ideal for enabling remote members to take part, through online workshops, brainstorming and team games, while keeping engagement high. Conversely, for teams whose daily work requires them to be physically side by side, it can be more useful for the activity to be run the same way, perhaps bringing in hybrid formats for mixed teams.
4. Monitor, gather and, above all, share
A mistake we often see at team building events — and not only there, to be honest — is that once the activities are over, everything is shut down and attention moves to the next project. Or at best a few managers and activity leads shut themselves in a room to glance over the data and information the event produced. Nothing could be more wrong: every event, every activity involving people produces a great deal of information and, if everything was well designed from the start, much of it is of real value and importance. So there is no worse mistake than failing to analyse and assess it and, above all, failing to share as much of it as possible with the very people who produced it through their work, their opinions and judgements, their contributions and suggestions. This is capital in the proper sense: not only must it not be squandered, it must be put to work as quickly as possible, because it is the ground from which ideas and innovations can keep growing. What matters is knowing which data matter, putting them at the centre of your thinking from the very start of designing the event, and identifying the best tools for gathering, analysing and making the most of them.
To sum up: is organising team building events complicated? Yes, undoubtedly. It is in fact one of the highest-risk activities in the whole of event organising — at least as high as the return these sessions can deliver for an organisation when they are done well.
Team building really can produce capital of enormous value for an organisation, but it has to be well designed, well executed and carefully monitored, helped by the many tools available to whoever takes on this demanding job.