A pétanque tournament. A cooking class. An escape game. A challenge inspired by Koh-Lanta. Today, almost anything can be labelled “team building”… as long as employees are taking part.
But is bringing a team together for an activity really enough to build a strong team?
At Teamway, we don’t think so.
For us, an activity can only truly be considered team building if it goes beyond simply having fun. It must engage participants and, above all, have a meaningful purpose.
Team building is therefore not just about spending a pleasant moment with colleagues. It is a stimulating experience designed around the collaboration challenges teams face in their everyday work. When properly designed, it contributes to the positive development of a team and can support the different stages of team development, notably through the lens of Tuckman’s model.
So, what is team building actually for?
- Getting to know each other and building trust
Before we can work well together, we need to get to know one another.
Discovering our colleagues’ personalities, understanding how they work and sharing a common experience are all opportunities to build interpersonal connections. And these connections matter, because trust is the foundation of effective, smooth and sustainable collaboration.
A well-designed team-building experience can accelerate this process, particularly when a team is going through a period of change:
- when a new team is being created;
- when new employees join the team;
- when several teams are brought together;
- or when colleagues from different departments or countries need to build stronger connections.
The goal is therefore not simply to “have a good time”. It is to create the conditions that will enable people to work better together tomorrow.
- Maintaining strong relationships
The way we work has changed dramatically.
Remote and hybrid work, flex offices, international teams… Opportunities for spontaneous interactions around the coffee machine have become less frequent.
Yet strong relationships don’t happen by themselves: they need to be nurtured.
When informal interactions become less common, it becomes important to deliberately create opportunities for people to connect. A team-building activity can provide exactly that: a different kind of experience, outside the usual constraints of the workplace.
It is an opportunity to reconnect, interact in a different way and strengthen the relationships that make day-to-day collaboration easier.
Team building therefore becomes a genuine tool for maintaining a strong team dynamic.
- Becoming aware of your strengths — and areas for improvement
This is probably where the real difference lies between a simple group activity and genuine team building.
A shared experience can reveal a great deal about how a team operates: its ability to communicate, make decisions, manage disagreements, distribute roles and build trust.
For a team-building experience to be genuinely useful, it should therefore allow participants to put their collaborative skills to the test in a safe environment.
A few ingredients are essential:
- a shared objective that encourages participants to collaborate;
- a challenge that is ambitious but realistic, pushing the team beyond its usual habits;
- and, above all, a debrief, turning the experience into meaningful insights.
Because the activity itself is not the end goal.
The real value of team building often lies in what the team understands about the way it works after the experience.
Which behaviours contributed to success? Which ones got in the way? Who took the lead? How were decisions made? How were disagreements handled?
These insights provide a valuable foundation for helping the team evolve.
What happens after team building?
A team-building experience can create connections, strengthen trust and generate new insights. But its effects are naturally limited over time if there is no follow-up.
The good news is that the experience can become the starting point for a genuine team-development journey.
Depending on the needs identified, the team might then turn to:
- training, to develop new skills;
- facilitation, to identify and implement sustainable solutions;
- team coaching, to support the team in its development and help it achieve greater performance.
Team building is therefore not necessarily a solution in itself. It can be the first step towards understanding where a team stands and what it genuinely needs.
So, should you organise a team-building activity every year?
The answer is… it depends.
Every team has its own history, challenges, level of maturity and needs. There is therefore no one-size-fits-all frequency.
If organised too often, team building can lose its sense of occasion and its ability to engage participants. If organised too rarely, relationships can gradually weaken, particularly in organisations where employees spend less and less time working together in person.
So, rather than looking for the right frequency in a calendar, why not ask the team directly?
What do we need right now?
Do we need to get to know each other better? Rebuild connections? Improve the way we collaborate? Step back and reflect on how we work together? Or simply spend some quality time together?
The answers will help determine the right timing, the right format and, most importantly, the right objective.
Because team building is not always necessary.
Sometimes, a workshop is enough. Sometimes, a collaborative working day is more relevant. And sometimes, a simple drink with colleagues is exactly what the team needs.
The real purpose of team building
Ultimately, perhaps the question shouldn’t be: “What activity should we organise?”
It should be:
“What does our team need to work better together?”
That is the question that gives team building its true meaning.
Because genuine team building is not simply about bringing employees together.
It is about helping a team grow.