What Are Team Building Activities Good For

Jan 21, 2021

I don’t necessarily love the word “team building” but it is a question worth pondering, “What are team building activities good for?” The reason that I’m making this video, even though I don’t love the word “team building” is oftentimes my customers and clients will reach out to me through our site, we and me saying, Hey, we’re looking for team building. Can you help us team build?” That language is important to kind of unpack and define.

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What Are Team Building Activities Good For?

5 things that team building activities are really really good for. I’m also gonna share 3 pieces of data that sit on top of a mountain of research that are (A) pretty shocking and, (B) really insightful into how you should design your team building experiences for your group. Assuming that might be part of the reason you’re watching this video.

5 Impacts Of Doing Team Building Exercises

This does depend because there are really bad team building exercises. When I used to teach team building, we used to put up the exercise “human knot” out as an example. You got like 10 people, 12 people around, everybody grabs somebody’s different hand and everybody’s tangled in a knot, and the goal- the team building activity is to untangle from that knot. I don’t know about you, but for me and I think for a lot of people that’s like, makes me cringe a little bit. Unless you’re  maybe at a summer camp and like, middle school or something like that. But even then, like there’s a lot of touch in there um, and it’s not very not very socially distanced uh sort of experience.

When I say it depends, you may not get these 5 impacts if you do terrible activities. I was gonna say I’m famous for, I’m not actually famous at all um- but I’d like to think that I’m famous for gently eradicating the word icebreaker and team building, and starting to replace it with phrases like “connection before content” and “making connection and engagement really easy.” There’s something that feels much more accessible about that.

Sometimes when people hear team building, their brains immediately get triggered into like 1980- into a trust fall in the woods, all sorts of bad, or like some very uh- hilarious, uh- silicon valley episode where people are mock team building or whatever it is. There’s, there’s something um- to be said for the way that language actually sets us up to succeed or fail from the start, right. Sometimes I think when people say the word “icebreaker”, they say the word “team building”, bloop, fail like it’s done. It’s over right there, like it’s all over, it’s done. 

Getting To Know You

Number one impact of good team building- so everything from this point forward, I’m talking about good team building. Assuming you’ve done good team building, you’ve found some really great resources, activities, etc from our books or you’re using our card decks um- to help create this really great team building exercises help people get to know each other. That getting to know you element is so essential because typically, getting to know someone takes a long time. At work, you don’t have a long time. We live in a culture where there’s way too much to do and too little time, and so you can’t spend 5 hours every day getting to know each other. You’ve got to accelerate that process, and  as I go through these, so that’s number one, getting to know you. That’s a good thing that comes out of team building, but each one kind of leads to the other two. They’re almost like daisy chained to each other.

Communication Shortcut

Going from getting to know you, dropping down to communication shortcuts. Great team building activities help a team create lots of communication shortcuts. In the same way that in like, the movie “Ocean’s 11,” George Clooney could turn to another character and say like, “Hey, let’s do what we did in panama.” Then like, boom. They’re like automatically ready to go. You want to create that level of sophistication and communication with your team. Some people call these inside jokes, and it’s more than inside jokes. It’s not just having a joke shared joke but having shared experiences allows you to reference things in the past and creates really great shortcuts that actually speed up your communication. I would argue that if you were to  do, you know, 5 to 10 minutes of connection or team building related stuff, a week for half a year that your meetings could actually be reduced by 10 minutes every single meeting because you’re actually speaking at the same language. There’s not as much like, “Well, what do you mean by that, Bob?” There’s not as much confusion, there’s not as much people repeating themselves. I would say that creating communication shortcuts in the long run actually saves a team an immense amount of time and increases their performance. By the way, this isn’t just my idea. There’s also a decade of educational psychology research that says when knowledge of personal backgrounds increases, it creates communication shortcuts. That’s a finding that was taken directly from this meta-analysis, I like to say that word like that. On this meta-analysis of a ton of different studies across educational psychology research and an additional finding was knowledge of personal background and a connection with somebody else actually improves memory retention and learning outcomes as well, kind of cool.

Building Trust

Third thing team good team building activities are good for is building trust. Trust is something that is incrementally gained. Somebody gave me  the idea or the metaphor once of it’s kind of like depositing change in somebody’s pocket. Every time you meet with them, you like drop a nickel in there, and that’s the bank of trust. Every time you show up to work on time, a little bit of trust gets built.Every time you deliver an amazing result, every time you teach an awesome workshop, every time you lead an awesome team building exercise. A little bit more trust built, a little bit more trust built, a little bit more trust built. Really great team building activities increase the cadence of connection.

Psychological Safety Of The Team

Related to that trust is also psychological safety, which is, “Can I be myself at work?,” and this has a huge element. When Google trains their employees in how to create psychologically safe teams, the word “inclusion” is quite important. You can’t create a psychologically safe environment and build trust if these person- these people’s opinions are really valued, and these people’s opinions are like kind of not valued as much. That level of inclusion, really great team building, creates a way for everyone to engage and participate, it brings the voices from quieter people out, right. They’ve actually done studies  that some of the most creative outcomes come from conversations where people have equal amounts of time to speak. Literally like, “Dude, shut up, and let this other person share for two minutes before you jump in with your amazing awesome idea right away”. Like just that few minutes, just be able to divide up that time and it’s uh, something a really great facilitator does, um- if you want to learn some of the core skills and ideas of a great facilitator, you can check out this video, I think maybe up here. For inclusion, really great team building activities, not only create inclusion, they actually build a culture of co- collusion? Not a culture of collusion uh, culture of inclusion. Yeah, that was that was nice.

Culture Creation

Number 5, really great team building activities actually create culture. Culture creation can be accomplished through very intentional, well-structured team building  initiatives. Maybe I should say team building strategies, because it’s not about like- you’re not going to create a culture in a half-day, off-site team building. Like, your culture isn’t going to be created by bowling, but, by doing things monthly or regularly and intentionally, you will start to create this culture. That’s really valuable because- and I say create culture which is a little bit of a misnomer because I would argue that you can’t create culture, culture is actually an artifact of all the things that people say, and believe, and do in an organization. You just happen- a culture is just when people notice it and call it something.

What team building does is kind of help shape and guide that culture towards something really uplifting, and positive, and productive for an organization and a team. One of the reasons I would say that team building does that, is from that cultural creation aspect, is that our whole world is created through our speaking and our listening. Team building has a lot of both and it has a lot of both that would otherwise never be said, if you just went about work and you never did any sort of team building anything. You’d just be talking about work, there would be some level of organic natural team development that would happen. But you want to do with team building is accelerate the process of culture creation. You want people to speak and listen, a world that doesn’t currently exist or that improves upon a world that currently exists.

 If you can accomplish all five of these things with team building, one of the things that a whole bunch of research and studies have found is that companies and organizations, actually just all companies this research was done on, companies who have a culture of effective communication, of inclusion, of all the 5 things that I just listed, tend to experience 47 percent higher returns. Even if I’m like 20 percent- or even if that research is 20 percent wrong, that’s a lot of money. If you’re a company that values  money, that’s a really important thing to,  to consider and to take into account. Another end from a loyalty perspective, people who feel really connected and engaged with their team, which really good team building can accomplish, are 87 percent less likely to leave. The average cost of somebody leaving an organization is like 100 to 300 percent of their salary, depending on the organization, and the business, and the culture that you’re in. 100 to 300- because you got to hire that person, you got to train them; you’ve lost all the time on that person that’s left. Like there’s a huge opportunity cost when people leave an organization before they- before their time.

Then the last one, and just from a personal perspective this one just makes me happy to know, there’s a study done where they actually put recorders on people and track their conversations; and they coded their conversations and after- I’m recording 20,000 audio recordings from conversations, they found that people who tend uh- had more sub some- I can never say this word but it’s more substantive, I think that’s it. Substantive. Some- subs? Substantive. Substantive. Subs uh conversations of subsistence let’s say, um people have come more conversations of subsistence um- also tend to be significantly happier. Really great team building, for me, create conversations  that matter. It skips past some of the fluff, it allows people get to the heart of the matter much  more quickly than they would on their own. It’s a very powerful element to team building is you can actually if you do it right, and you don’t do trust falls in the woods in 1985. You can actually increase people’s job satisfaction and happiness by increasing the amount of conversations that actually matter that they have at work with each other.