Thinking of booking a team building day? Read this first
When a team is struggling, one of the most common responses is to organise a team building day.
The intention is usually positive.
Bring everyone together. Take them away from the pressures of everyday work. Give them a shared activity. Help them reconnect.
In some circumstances, this can be valuable.
But when trust is low, relationships are strained or people feel psychologically unsafe, a traditional team-building day may not simply fail.
It may make the situation worse.
Team building is an intervention, not a neutral activity
Team-building activities are often treated as broadly beneficial.
The underlying assumption is that if people complete a challenge together, they will communicate better, understand one another and feel more connected.
That may be true for a relatively healthy team that wants to strengthen relationships. It is less likely to be true for a team experiencing conflict, exclusion, fear or resentment. A team can successfully build a raft, solve a puzzle or complete a challenge while the underlying dynamics remain entirely unchanged.
Asking people to cooperate publicly does not mean they trust one another privately.
Worse, the exercise may place people under additional pressure.
What happens when psychological safety is low?
Psychological safety influences whether people feel able to speak honestly, take interpersonal risks and admit difficulty.
In a team where safety is low, employees may already be monitoring what they say and how they behave.
They may fear being judged, excluded or having their comments used against them later.
Placing those employees into a highly interactive workshop can make them feel exposed.
They may be asked to share personal reflections with people they do not trust. They may feel pressured to perform enthusiasm or togetherness. They may watch existing power dynamics play out in a new setting.
For some, the day becomes another experience to endure rather than an opportunity to repair relationships.
The risk of trivialising the problem
Imagine that a team has experienced months of tension, allegations of unfairness, unresolved conflict and poor leadership communication.
They are then invited to an away day involving games, personality exercises and a shared lunch.
Employees may interpret this as evidence that leadership has not understood the seriousness of the situation.
The message they receive may be:
“Management thinks we just need to get along better.”
This can increase cynicism.
It can also reinforce the idea that the organisation is willing to invest in visible activities while avoiding the more difficult work of understanding what has happened.
A workshop cannot solve the wrong problem
Traditional team-building exercises often aim to improve cooperation, communication and group cohesion.
But struggling teams may be dealing with very different issues, including:
unresolved grievances;
exclusion or bullying;
informal power structures;
lack of role clarity;
inconsistent leadership;
perceived unfairness;
poor decision-making;
change fatigue;
conflicting professional identities;
a history of failed interventions.
These problems require different forms of support.
A workshop may form part of the solution, but only if it has been designed around a proper understanding of the team.
What should happen before a team-building day?
Before organising an intervention, leaders should ask:
What problem are we trying to solve?
How do we know this is the problem?
Have we heard from the people in the team?
Is there enough trust for people to participate honestly?
Are there unresolved events that need to be acknowledged?
Are behavioural expectations already clear?
Is the issue primarily relational, structural or leadership-related?
What will happen after the session?
How will we know whether anything has improved?
If these questions cannot be answered, it may be too early to design the workshop.
What a psychologically informed intervention looks like
A useful team intervention does not need to be elaborate.
In some situations, it may involve clarifying roles, objectives and ways of working.
In others, it may involve facilitated conversations about behaviours, impact and expectations.
Where dynamics are more entrenched, confidential interviews and a deeper diagnostic may be needed before bringing the team together.
The important point is that the intervention should reflect:
the history of the team;
the current level of psychological safety;
the emotional intensity of the situation;
the behaviours that have become normalised;
the leadership context; and
the team’s readiness to work together.
Team-building exercises are not inherently bad.
But they solve a particular kind of problem.
They should not be used as a generic response to every team experiencing difficulty.
Before booking a team-building day, make sure you understand what the team actually needs.
How I can help
I design psychologist-led team interventions based on the specific dynamics, history and level of trust within the team.
This can include confidential diagnostic interviews, leadership consultation, practical recommendations and sensitively designed culture repair workshops.
Before investing in another away day, it is worth asking whether it addresses the real problem - or simply offers a temporary change of scenery.
Nicole Williams is an occupational and coaching psychologist specialising in culture repair, team dynamics and psychologically safe workplaces.
Comments