The ‘team-building day’ has had both good and bad press recently. The good news has been from psychologists who have discovered that business team building has benefits beyond the business in improving self-esteem and positive thoughts in the individuals who take part both at work and at home. The bad press has centred on the way that many team building events simply set up ‘competition mania’ which divides organisations along team lines and leaves a set of artificial but damaging ‘us and them’ behaviours that can actually damage relationships and harm the workplace and the bottom line, of any business.

This happens because events that pit one group against another are easy to energise – almost everybody has a primal urge to do better than ‘the competition’ which means that it’s a natural way to motivate a large group of people to get behind a series of activities that they might otherwise refuse to invest in.  But in the long term, this has three major downsides:

1.    One group wins – but everybody else loses, and this can lead to demotivation, or the desire to move from the ‘losing’ side to the winning one within the company and that means that some teams in a business are no longer as well-resourced as the ‘winning’ one.

2.    Competition replaces performance – because we strive to do our utmost when we compete, we often get narrow minded. This can mean that a team that ‘wins’ a team building event year after year is spending a lot of the year simply preparing for the team building event, not working in harmony with the rest of the company!

3.    Team building becomes its own purpose – companies that get too addicted to using team building events can actually forget that they are supposed to be taking lessons from the events back into the workplace.

A good team building event should be cost-effective, empowering, supportive and deliver specific learning that is valuable to the business.

This means that the best team building events are likely to be based on one of three key themes:

•    Treasure hunts – these team building activities send teams out to solve clues that lead to a treasure. To make a treasure hunt truly positive, make sure the teams are not in competition – instead ensure they all need to solve their clues to find part of the answer that leads to the whole which rewards all the teams, not just one.
•    Clue based mysteries – these work best if you can relate them to some area of your business, a good events company can be invaluable here in providing actors and props to make a mystery work. So if you’re a food company, rather than having a murder, have a ‘secret recipe’ that’s gone missing and get teams to recreate it using clues and equipment around a country house. If you’re a sports group, why not organise an event where the next Andy Murray, Serena Williams or Ronaldo has been spotted playing in the locality and your talent scouts have to find him or her and sign them up. Get your event organiser to have several ‘stars’ or ‘recipes’ to be found, give your teams colour-coded stylish sweathsirts to add an element of competition without overdoing it, and try to ensure that at some point the teams have to cooperate (by exchanging information for example) if they are all to achieve their aim.
•    Film or music making – these are the biggest growth areas on team building for good reason: they fulfil all the needs of a truly creative event: they generate a huge positive vibe, call on everybody’s creativity, allow people to find their niche in a team, in areas such as costume design (creating themed T-shirts etc) choreography, make-up (not just for women!) and writing, directing and prompting, and give a wonderful finished product.

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