Fun on Friday, Forgotten by Monday: Why Most Team Building Fails
When many team-building events come to an end, the atmosphere in the room is actually pretty good: someone is still laughing about who ran the wrong way, and the organiser breathes a sigh of relief, feeling the day has gone smoothly. But come the next Monday, it is still the same person doing all the talking in the meeting. The new colleague still cannot find a way into the conversation. And anything that needs aligning across departments still has to go around in circles over email.
It is not that the activity was not fun enough. What is often missing is a look back that is taken seriously: Who spoke up first just now? When the team got stuck, who stepped in — and who stayed silent? Why did a task that looked simple suddenly send a usually smooth-working group off in different directions? If no one asks these questions out loud, participants leave with little more than “that was fun,” while the problem the organiser hoped to solve is still waiting outside the venue door.
This is the difference between experiential team building and a casual get-together. The former first draws everyone into a shared experience that has been carefully chosen, with rules and a clear goal — then an experienced facilitator leads the group in laying the process out and looking at it. Getting absorbed in the play matters, because people find it easier to try, to communicate, and even to admit “I didn’t dare speak up just now,” when they are relaxed and not carrying the real consequences of work. But the real value is turning that experience into understanding they can take back to a meeting, a classroom, or a service setting.
This is exactly what educational theorist David Kolb’s experiential learning cycle describes: learning comes from “experience → reflective observation → forming a concept → putting it into practice again.” Knowledge does not appear automatically just because something has been “done.” Without reflection, an experience is only an experience. Kayes and colleagues later also pointed out that when teams learn with intention, they are better able to reduce common pitfalls such as social loafing, groupthink, or waiting for one person to make every decision.
This also helps explain why “gamification” is often more effective than a classroom-style briefing. In the activity there are clear rules and goals, and the cost of making a mistake is relatively safe — a task may run over time, a plan may have to be torn up and started again, but no one gets marked down in a performance review for it. What Harvard Business School’s Amy Edmondson calls psychological safety is precisely that shared belief in a team that offering an idea, asking for help, or admitting a mistake will not get you put down; it is linked to learning behaviour, and also to performance. Games are not there to dress a serious subject up as something childish. They are there to open that door first.
What organisers and participants want need not be at odds. The person who signs off cares whether this time is aimed at a real problem: too little communication across departments, new members who cannot settle in, students who need to practise collaboration, or colleagues in an organisation who live with the ongoing pressure of service work. Participants care whether they are enjoying themselves in the moment, and whether they leave with some change in capability or in their relationships. The realities of companies, schools, and social service organisations are different; you cannot drop the same set of games onto every team. You have to listen carefully to who you are working with, then choose the form, guide the process, and leave time at the end for reflection.
So before the next round of planning, it is worth getting these three questions clear: What do we most want to solve this time? When participants leave, what do we hope they will remember — and take with them? In the flow of the event, is there enough time for them not just to finish playing, but to talk together about why it worked, and how they might use it back in a real situation? Get these three clear, and you are already on the path toward team building that means something.
Sources
Kolb, Experiential Learning Theory: https://learningfromexperience.com/downloads/research-library/experiential-learning-theory.pdf
Kayes et al., Experiential learning in teams: https://learningfromexperience.com/research-library/experiential-learning-in-teams/
Edmondson (1999), Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams: https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999
