Ben OsborneEver been on a team building exercise? What did you think? As the One&Other Team prepare to blindfold each other and head out into the snow for our trust enhancing team building exercise, we look at a survey by Vodafone UK and YouGov that suggests most employees actually find the idea of team building awful and demotivating.
The truth is that most people just don’t enjoy spending the day with their workmates clambering over assault courses, learning circus skills with Colin from finance, or being subjected to the deep humiliation of having to climb on a colleague’s back as your line-manger sadistically forces you and your team to create a human pyramid, like a slightly less perverted but equally appalling version of the Human Centipede.
According to the survey, British workers much prefer being able to communicate with each other better at work rather than being forced to build fake rapport with their colleagues by performing and taking part in team building exercises.
The research builds on the results of the survey of more than 1,000 British employees with colleagues, which uncovered some bizarre examples of ridiculous team-building activities, such as having to endure bikini-clad ‘bed baths’, massages from colleagues, holding lingerie parties, and eating crickets as part of a ‘bush tucker trial’ style event…. the horror, the horror.
While the many of the workers surveyed (66 per cent) had been forced by employees to do some form of team-building activity, more than half (54 per cent) feel that doing more wouldn’t help them work better with their colleagues.
There is something deeply appalling to the British sensibility in having to wear a sticky label with your name scribbled messily in felt tip pen, while you are coerced into telling people you usually only speak to because you’re paid to, three ‘interesting’ facts about yourself. At a training day in Leeds I once told a colleague I had played tennis at international level as a youth, that I spoke French fluently but just chose not too, and that I had once killed a man and got away with it (in fact only two are true). Even if I hadn’t lied I’m not sure this would have built any trust between us, and perhaps we don’t tell our colleagues all our secrets for good reasons.
According to the survey, the least effective team-building activities are adrenaline fuelled activities such as speed-boat driving and bungee jumping, followed by trust exercises such as being blindfolded and made to trust your colleagues as they lead you on a merry dance around the grounds of some once grand mansion, now depressingly rented out for corporate activity days.
Peter Kelly, Enterprise Director at Vodafone UK said, “British companies are spending a huge amount of time and effort in building more effective teams. This research confirms that people place more value on open, collaborative and flexible ways of working every day than one-off team-building exercises.”
Going for a drink or a meal with work-mates is deemed as the most effective way of bonding in what comes as a relief to those of us who would rather go for a drink and some fine dining than be subjected to paint balling with people who harbor a genuine dislike for me.
Charity work and volunteering has also come out of the survey well, with 11 per cent of respondents giving positive feedback on such philanthropic activities.
The results of the survey suggest that companies should focus on providing a more supportive atmosphere at work, enabling better team communication and offering tools for flexible working as their top three priorities, rather than shipping the staff out for ‘fun’ days of toe-curling cringe worthiness.
Peter Kelly goes on to say, “Many genuine team-building activities can be valuable, but ultimately, to achieve better teamwork businesses need to get the basics right first. Employers need to focus on how their employees work day-to-day, and give staff the tools they need to be able to do their job best. Employees also want to be able to work smarter – and that means easy access to customers, colleagues and information wherever they are.”
Respondents are also clear about the negative impacts of not working effectively as a team. The most serious of these were delayed decision-making (named by 31 per cent), unhappy customers through poor response (29 per cent), missing targets because of lack of timely input from colleagues (28 per cent), and making the wrong decisions because of lack of access to the right people and information (28 per cent).
Overall, only 26 per cent of respondents feel that more team-building would help them work more effectively with their colleagues. Whether it’s down to cynicism or wisdom, age seems to engender a more jaded view of team-building exercises: only 10 per cent of people aged 55 and over say they help improve team working, compared with 42 per cent of 18–24 year-olds. People in Scotland seem to be more positive than those south of the border, with 33 per cent of respondents saying that more team-building events would encourage better team working.
With 71 per cent of workers saying they would not contribute to better teamwork, Wales is the region with the most negative view of the effectiveness of team-building events, which with our Welsh Editor doesn’t bode well for O&O’s 2012 Team Building challenge. Perhaps we’ll just go to the pub instead.
If you have had any awful (or good) team building experiences, do share, and the more embarrassing the better….
