How to organise a team building

First question: training or reward?

It’s the choice everything else depends on, and it gets confused constantly. They’re two different events, and they can even be two distinct moments of the same day, as long as you know which one you’re running.

If the objective is to train, to bring new people in, to change the way the group works together and to get past some resistance, you’re designing a training, and the day has to be built around the debrief.

If the objective is to reward, to create a memory and to strengthen the sense of belonging, you’re designing an incentive, and the day has to be built around the experience. That’s the case with a party, a Family Day or hosting guests from abroad.

When, who, why

Three groups of questions to answer before looking at any catalogue of activities.

When

What occasion the event falls on, whether inside a difficult moment or inside a celebration of results: the tone depends on that. Which season, because that decides between an outdoor format and an indoor one, and in the Gulf it decides a good deal more than elsewhere. What time of day and how long you have, because that decides the length of the briefing and the pace of everything else.

Who

People from the same team or from different teams. Employees only, or clients as well. The same level or mixed levels. The same age bracket or several generations together. The same background and the same company culture, or not. Every one of those answers rules something out.

Why

Growth that came too fast, a difficult market, a meeting between different task forces. Or a merger or an acquisition, which is the most delicate case: people with different company cultures find themselves collaborating, and managers who were senior in the old structure find themselves level with people who used to report to them. These situations generate silence between people, and they’re worth tackling before they settle.

Choosing the activity

There are more than a hundred kinds, and the choice starts from the purpose rather than from how appealing the activity looks.

1. Training, to train people and bring new ones into the group.
2. Action and adventure, to get people moving again inside a conference and to put collaboration and problem solving to the test.
3. Music, to work on communication and on listening to each other.
4. Creative, to make vision, mission and values explicit and to get people imagining the future of the company.
5. Cooking, for the division of labour, with the advantage that you get dinner at the end.
6. Urban Game, to let a group from out of town discover where they are.
7. Social, to build team spirit by doing something that’s useful to somebody else.

The venue

The place sets the tone before anything begins, and every choice brings a drawback worth budgeting for.

An exclusive venue impresses important clients, and charm doesn’t always come with convenience: a desert camp has the setting and rarely the technical services people take for granted. A resort on the coast encourages informality and works well outdoors, and it adds travel time at both ends. A hotel in the city or near the airport gets chosen for the convenience of people arriving from far away. A villa or a private space gives you control over everything and asks you to bring in the rest yourself.

The most frequent mistake is choosing on price alone and ending up with a service below what the participants were expecting.

Designing the day

You need a detailed plan, a structured running order that stays flexible, the materials sourced in advance, the coaches booked and the suppliers chosen.

On suppliers there’s a recurring distortion: all the attention goes on the catering and the rest gets neglected. Audio, video, direction, service staff, gadgets and the materials for the activity weigh on the outcome as much as lunch does.

To work out whether a supplier is reliable, the things to check are few and concrete. That they aren’t a middleman. That they have photographs and videos of events they’ve already run, because if they haven’t got any they’ve never run any. Who they’ve worked with before. Whether the service is built to measure or comes pre-packaged. How they behave during the briefing, meaning whether they listen to your particular requirements or recite their script.

The Van Halen method

There’s an elegant way of finding out whether somebody has read the contract all the way through, and it was invented by musicians.

In their tour contracts Van Halen included a clause: backstage there had to be a bowl of M&M’s with no brown ones in it, on pain of immediate termination. It sounds like a rock star’s whim, and it wasn’t.

The contract also contained pages of technical requirements about the load-bearing capacity of the stages and about the rigging. If the brown sweets were in the bowl, it meant the promoter hadn’t read everything, and it was worth going back to check the things safety depended on. The bowl was a warning light, and it cost nothing to look at.

You don’t need to ask a supplier for anything that strange. You need a way of checking, before the event, whether they’ve genuinely read what you sent them.

On the day

A checklist of things to do and materials to check. Roles and responsibilities assigned so that nobody has to ask. Someone posted at every part of the event. Coordination between catering, direction, audio and lights. Constant attention to how the participants are doing.

And a running order that gets respected, which isn’t frantic and above all has no dead time in it. The gaps are where a group scatters, and getting it back afterwards costs more than you’d think.