Team building is a process where members become cohesive and work towards a common goal. This happens in teams within organizations (departments or divisions) in their daily operations with norms (through rules, policies, schedules) being established over time: consciously or unconsciously. There are times that team goals are not achieved for many reasons. And looking at the situations carefully, the reason normally points at members being “different,” failure to communicate properly, doing things their own way without consideration of policies, protocols, member-expectations, or as basic as energy-deficit due to various personal reasons, etc. So team building becomes a conscious activity. Organizations invest in it.
The Forms of Team Building
The ADhoc Teams. Members engage in conversations. Prior to engaging in projects, leaders initiate team-building activities through intimate dinners or social drinks. They do these to examine strengths and weaknesses and to deal with differences that may affect the completion of the project despite confidence in individual capabilities of each member and expertise of the team as whole. Members discover their roles and express their expectations.
The Excursion Teams. Members bond in picnics. The popular team building where employees are so excited about comes in a special “form” as a conscious organizational effort, a special activity being allotted a corresponding budget. It’s been observed, however, that this “team building” as an organizational event has been taken superficially. In fact, it can be more appropriately labeled as “excursion,” “picnic,” “outing.”
Such event is planned as a get-together, off-from-work activity where employees just pass the time feasting on foods and drinks with team games in between. The games being a way of “building” of momentary cohesion as opposing teams enjoyably play hard to win a prize. The desired effect may be achieved— happy employees, momentary emotional attachment, superficial self-revelation, fun “selfies” and “groufies,” and fun memories to talk about—but whether it extends back at work or has long term-positive effect is a matter left on fate. Employees get to know the SELF and the OTHERS more.
The Survivors Teams. Members survive tough fun. This is an0ther much serious team-building effort where organizers engage external facilitators to handle the event. Being well-planned, it is packed with a variety of engaging and challenging activities, well-thought of to suit the mood, the environment. So the fun goes, one game after the other with rests in between. Participants experience adrenalin rush, some hesitations, mixed emotions, but more so by laughter, sometimes, arguments. Nevertheless, each fun game ends well, while “game masters” prepare for the next one. Employees discover the SELF and the OTHERS further.
The Work Teams. Members process their experience. Finally, there is this team building, making use of tasks so real or surreal but meant to trigger thought processes to establish relevant norms. Activities are well-structured and processed at the end purposely to extract expected positive insights that translate to work and social behaviors necessary to achieve long-term personal or organizational goals.
Planning the Team Building
In order to make a planned team-building activity truly benefitting both the employee and the organization, it needs to be an organizational initiative triggered by some concerns that need to be validated and resolved. Planning should identify the short and long-term goals as a springboard to identifying objectives of the “activities”.
Further, there needs to be a game plan on how these activities should be handled with emphasis on what “insights” and behaviours are expected upon return to the workplace. The team-building event should not be treated as simply a series of nonstop fun games and let alone participants realize their take-aways. In the planning process, the company representative (presumed to have conducted a situation analysis), should have a serious collaboration with the external facilitator, making sure that they explore the form, the structure, and the substance of the team building.
