Working for a different company to the H for H, I once refused to go to an unpaid family day that was a 90 minute public transport commute from my house, and got raked over the coals for “insubordination”
The problem is when you discover that two of the people in the team happen to play in the same server and hate each other’s guts…
Every time I’ve had “teambuilding” stuff that was effective, it was stuff that was chosen by the team, not imposed. Stuff like “hey, since we all want to go visit El Arenal, want to all go together?” or “let’s all go have dinner together on saturday, since we’re stuck here for the weekend over the two-week meeting.” Imposed stuff usually involves such great ideas as a tasting of “fresh” cheese for a team with three lactose intolerants (yeehaw).
The other problem with “team building” bullshit: who does all the work while the team is off doing “trust exercises” or white-water rafting or going to an old-folks home and singing?
Presumably there’s work that has to be done. And if we’re not badly overstaffed, there’s enough work for each person to do his or her day’s job.
So if the team takes off, wheeee! In addition to being told to “fall back into my partner’s arms! They’ll catch you!”, I get to worry about all the goddamned work that’s getting backlogged.
You wanna make me a happier, more productive employee? Take the money you’d spend wasting a day of my time, the money you spent renting the paintball stuff, the money you wasted with the insane insurance coverage for the exercise and the money you spend on the useless “team-building consultant” and divide it among the team as a bonus. Or give a commensurate amount of time-off that matches the dollar-value of the money you’d have otherwise wasted.
So do I. For various values of “care about”. I’ve had one co-worker in ~30 something years of working who was a “friend”. Someone who could call me at 3:00 am on a worknight to cry on my shoulder that his girlfriend left him. Or who’d come over in a blizzard to help me fix a busted pipe. That’s a friend. Most of the people I’ve worked with have been in the friendly aquanitence category “Hey, I’m going out for lunch, wanna join me?” or “Congrats on your kid graduating” and not much further.
But either type comes from me, not an employer mandating it. I don’t want my employer wasting money to make sure I have friends. I’ll manage that on my own, thanks.
My part of the the employer/employee relationship is to work hard, be (at minimum) civil to my co-workers and be productive. The employer’s part of our relationship is to give me money(insurance/benefits/decent working conditions/etc). Full Stop. It’s not to be a fucking social director. If there are co-workers I want to be friends with, I’ll do so on my own without my employer forcing me.
I’m not objecting to them say, buying pizza for everyone at lunch, I’m talking about forced, off-the-clock friendship building crap.
That’s the thing. Too many managers are short-sighted about situations like this. They want the team to work together better and be happier, so they decide on an event. Then, when someone doesn’t want to go, they force them, making the situation worse.
I’ve been to a number of team-building events and they were all essentially worthless. As a supervisor in a call center, we were told we would start doing quarterly supervisor/manager team building events. They actually happened every six months to a year (due to cost) and included such gems as:
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The widely-disliked (and ultimately fired for gross abuse of his position) department manager decided on bowling for his team. He didn’t ask anybody, and nobody liked the idea but him. He was a league bowler. We all went and he made fun of each of our lack of skill, finally beating us by a huge margin and being a smug, gloating asshole about it. Net result: we were less of a team than ever, and resented the manager more than before by a huge degree. Though it was funny to see another supervisor in our group split his pants, the fun stopped when he wasn’t allowed to leave by d-bag manager.
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Another department manager took a group of supervisors who were largely at each others’ throats to paint pottery. Being incredibly underpaid, we had asked to do lunch instead since at least we could get a good meal for the $30+ per person (some people in the group were in social assistance programs, even – we were making 20-25k or so per year, and that doesn’t go far with kids). This was refused. Oh, and we were drastically overworked and didn’t want to leave work to go paint pots since we were on salary and were already doing massive amounts of unpaid overtime just to keep up. Net result: nobody enjoyed themselves, everyone sullenly painted in general silence and ill humor.
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I was required to do a ‘team building event’ using a craft project from Oriental Trader. For adult employees. For less than $1 per person. Also, they were call center agents and we couldn’t let them off the phone at the same time, so they just worked on it silently at their desks for half an hour alone one by one. ??? Stupidest idea ever, but of course I was given the stink eye for pointing out that this wasn’t going to build a team. Net result: People were pissed about being treated like children. I guess the “team” was united in their general contempt for the “event”.
I’ve seen “let’s all have a good time” type events work really well, especially when done with generosity and class, but whenever it’s called “teambuilding”, it generally sucks. Teambuilding is never the solution to a problem with your team, and if the team works, why not just have a good time and avoid the tasks people don’t want to do? We never got to do anything as cool as paintball, but even then, just because I’d enjoy that doesn’t mean everyone would. Compulsory fun isn’t.
It’s important to note that “Trust Drops” (the falling back into people’s arms) only works if the other person doesn’t lose their balance and drop the falling person (I’ve seen it happen).
It’s interesting that most of the “Team Building” experiences people have described as either being completely useless or even counter-productive… makes you wonder what the next Corporate trend is going to be.
It is intersting reading the above. It pretty much underlines what I wrote above. To build a team, you need an identifiable team. Just a bunch of people that work together is not a team.
If people have to be left behind to do the work - it isn’t a team. Those other people must be part of the team too.
If the company isn’t paying, it is a simple imposition, and not team building.
If the team has already been working together for some time the team building part is probably a waste of effort.
However. Team building isn’t about making friends. Thinking it is misses the point. You will make friends with various people orthogonally to your work relationship. It is about building a proper professional relationship. Too often that doesn’t happen. You have to have the level of relationship where you trust the other team members, and relate to them well enough that you never have any impediment to communicating any issue with the work you do. Anyone can manage a project where things go well. The mark of a good team and good manager is how things work out when things go bad. A poor team member often won’t communicate. Especially when things are not going well. About now things go south real fast. An open and professionally trusting working relationship is critical. Breaking down enough of the interpersonal barriers that this is possible is similarly crucial. Even simple and trivial teambuilding efforts allow these barriers to be breached. What I read above is a littany of idiotic efforts by managers who really should not be managers who just don’t get it. And a few stories where people did get it, and it was a success.
I rather wish I could have documented the difference in outcomes from our student team projects with and without team building tasks. What I can say, is that there was a huge and clear apparent change in the way groups worked, and coped. This was a large and difficult project, and designed so that it would stretch the groups. From my standpoint I am utterly convinced of the merit of team building exercises. But, again, with the caveats above.
My group does a team building exercise every year and I love it. We go out on a coworker’s boat and fish for half of a day. Our boss stays behind to cover everyone’s work, which is slow the time of year we go, and we get to hang out and fish. It helps that all three of us enjoy fishing but it, at least for me, got me more comfortable talking to one of my coworkers who was always quite and standoffish.
On the other hand I hate the annual Christmas parties and potlucks. They feel forced and your expected to relax but at the same time behave in a manner appropriate to work.
At one very cult-like consulting firm I worked at about ten years ago, I was the only member of my team local to our office in Boston where the project was being perfomed. So I go home at night while everyone else lived in temporary corporate appartments. I won’t even get into the logic of paying for temporary appartments in Cambridge that your employees couldn’t afford on their salary.
Anyhow, because they were all visiting, they constantly wanted to do stupid team stuff alltogether. Meanwhile I have an actual life, including business school classes in the evening so I have to keep making excuses to not hang out at the manager’s appartment watching There’s Something About Mary or “Swing Dancing Night” at some local nightclub (as I said, it was late 90s).
It seems a lot of the managers described in the posts above were unclear on the concept.
The stereotypical team building event I went to involved a department of about 50 people. It was held on work time, and since we were doing long term projects we didn’t have work piling up. There were two good things about it. The good exercise was getting over a wall with help from your team members. That actually provided a sense of short term accomplishment that is lacking when you do projects that are short if they take 6 months. The second was getting to know people you rarely ran into in the normal course of work, and in the context of these informal exercises.