The Death Of Team Building In The Workplace

There’s still room for improvement

Building effective working relationships is a key consideration for all HR professionals, who recognise the benefits it brings to problem-solving, teamwork, employee happiness and, above all, efficiency and productivity.

 

That said, can all businesses hand on heart say that they are successfully building these relationships and making sure that all employees are communicating together in a positive way?

With the use of psychometric insights and the latest technology, organisations can introduce a positive employee mentality and build internal relationships across the board, simply and efficiently.
 
Ask most senior leaders to describe ‘team building’ and you can bet that the majority will talk about activities – anything from employees closing their eyes and falling back into the arms of a colleague to build trust, to completing a common activity together to encourage a mutual sense of achievement, such as building a bridge out of barrels to cross a stream.
 
While I don’t doubt that tasks of this sort help the team to get to know each other better outside the work environment, are they effective in building bonds inside the workplace that will increase productivity and, ultimately, influence the bottom line?
 
One of the main downsides of the traditional approach to team building is the emphasis on having fun together, rather than using activities and tasks that mirror everyday work situations. Learning new skills that will help a team improve how they operate and communicate to improve relationships is secondary. In most cases, having spent the best part of five days a week together, teams will know each other – so is investing in a whole day out of the office for employees to ‘get to know each other better’ really a great strategy – and how do businesses start to measure a return on this investment?
 
The second consideration is whether this approach provides an environment where each member of the team can show off their skills. In a traditional task environment, the louder, more confident members of the team are likely to take over – leaving the quieter members behind.

The latest thinking around the subject suggests that providing employees with a better understanding of themselves – their strengths, limitations, communication styles, what motivates them, their basic fears and how they behave under pressure – is a much more effective way of empowering the workforce and building a cohesive team.
 
According to Lencioni,¹ the five biggest causes for dysfunction within a team are absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability and inattention to results. Sharing team behavioural insights with employees and giving everyone a better understanding of what makes each other ‘tick’ eliminates most situations where these dysfunctions occur. What’s more, the insights can be used to inform how best to communicate with everyone in the team for a harmonious and productive workforce.

So, what is the most efficient way to gain these insights?
 
We help thousands of businesses, from SMEs to large multinationals, to gain a better understanding of employees and reach their full potential through Personal Profile Analysis (PPA). This psychometric assessment takes just eight minutes for employees to complete and offers a wealth of knowledge to senior business leaders.
 
We offer a service that uses PPA to ensure that teams are performing to the best of their ability. This works by analysing the profiles of a team of people and providing a comprehensive summary of the team's strengths and limitations. The report is easy to read, interpret and understand, giving leaders the tools to inspire their teams to achieve more, pinpoint training needs and identifying skills gaps that can be filled through recruitment.

Unlike team building activities, these link to real business scenarios. For example, whether someone will feel comfortable having the authority to make important decisions or be able to cope with changing environments.
 
Teams are critical to driving effective performance, but the majority of teams are significantly underperforming and the cost to organisations is huge. The culture of the workplace has changed significantly since the days when ‘team building away days’ were a buzzword in business management. Today, by applying science, psychology and technology to the concept, organisations have a much smarter, more efficient solution to building effective working relationships within a team.
 
Notes
¹Patrick Lencioni, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (2002), Jossey-Bass