The problem with team-building activities

Many corporate-led team-building activities are, to put it mildly, cringeworthy and embarrassing.

To see why, imagine you’re an employee frustrated because your manager’s poor organization forces you to work frequent overtime. HR notices your dissatisfaction and responds with a team-building offsite full of fun, social activities that don’t address the real issue: inept management. Wouldn’t you feel even more frustrated at your organization’s failure to understand your problems? Wouldn’t your takeaway be that, since it refuses to address the root cause, nothing will ever change?

The problem with most team-building activities is that they focus on nice-to-haves while ignoring bigger problems. Employees see this misprioritization as proof that leadership is detached from reality and that nothing will improve, ever.

If disengagement stems from low pay, boosting morale without showing a path to higher pay only invites eye rolls: it signals pay won’t change. And if disengagement stems from cumbersome procedures, trying to “improve engagement” without streamlining work does the same: it signals work won’t change. The same applies to any source of frustration: activities that target anything other than the biggest pain point only reinforce the belief that what matters won’t change.

The bottom line is as follows. If you run team-building events, build them around fixing employees’ main frustrations. Or skip them and improve teamwork by fixing everyday interactions (e.g., project meetings or how managers give feedback). But don’t run cringe team-building events that sweep structural problems under the rug.