Now more than ever, team building should be an integral part of your company’s culture, whether you are remote-first, hybrid, or in-person. While it may bring to mind ropes courses and trust falls, true team building is about more than just these kinds of activities. It’s the practice of intentionally developing relationships that leads to trust and vulnerability, two of the most important factors in achieving effective collaboration.
Team building is about building an environment where people feel empowered to take risks, push limits, and make hard decisions. So how does one go about successfully facilitating that level of trust and vulnerability?
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How Has Team Building Backfired?
While team building is vital to a strong, robust organization, it is by no means a panacea, and if anyone treating it as such is already doing it wrong. You can’t just bust out a quick trust fall exercise when you feel like the morale is low and be done with it. That’s not how great team building works.Â
 You also can’t completely divorce team building from the context of work. It’s all too common to think that team building consists purely of offsites, happy hours, or virtual cooking classes. This can lead to situations where team members are chummy at happy hour, but the feeling dissipates when they’re back at their desks. Furthermore, traditional team building activities often don’t work for everyone; what happens if you’ve got a single parent on your team who can’t stay after work because they have to pick up their child? Or a person in recovery who isn’t interested in spending time in a bar? Inclusivity matters in team-building and every aspect of your workflow.
So What Does Good Team Building Look Like?
Nothing is worse than forced team-building exercises. Everyone has been in situations like that — may be the even aforementioned trust fall-slash-ropes course type of team building — where it feels more like an obligatory human resources-designed hurdle to jump over, rather than an honest, authentic attempt at bringing people together. Good team building should center around authenticity, rather than hurdles, and should take into account the fact that each person is different and, as such, will feel secure and trusted in different ways.
As you begin examining what team building looks like for your company and your teams, take into account people’s roles and responsibilities both within their teams and within the organization at large. How do people currently work together? What does encouraging vulnerability, transparency, and trust look like at each level? Where do you see your own teamwork skills falling short, and how does that impact the team?
These aren’t necessarily easy questions to answer, but they must be addressed to gain the necessary information as you work toward team cohesion.
What Is Team Cohesion and Why Does It Matter?
Team cohesion comes about when a group of people is aligned with a common goal and choose to move toward it with a sense of unity. Along with this cohesion comes a push for each individual to focus on the group’s needs just as much as they do their own needs.
Researcher Bruce Tuckman crafted a framework for a team’s stages of developmentOpens a new window in the mid-1960s that has been in circulation ever since and can be a helpful resource in figuring out what a team needs. These four stages provide a framework for recognizing a team’s behavioral patterns and can form the basis for team-building strategy.
- Forming: Team members are excited to be part of the team and work ahead. At the same time, they may feel anxious about joining the team and worried that they might not measure up to their teammates. If your team is at this stage, build a sense of community by sharing clear structures, goals, directions, and roles so members can begin to build trust with you and one another. Most of the team’s energy in this stage is focused on defining the team, so task accomplishment may be reasonably low. Team building activities should be low stakes. Look for ways to break the ice before meetings and connect asynchronously throughout the forming stages.
- Storming: Team members realize the team can’t live up to all their early excitement and expectations as problems begin to arise, and their focus may shift from the tasks at hand to feelings of frustration or stress. During this stage, your team members attempt to understand how their colleagues will respond to differences and conflict. This is the time to bring extra clarity to a team’s goals, roles, and tasks and help team members get past their frustration and confusion by including them in the process.
- Norming: Team members begin to resolve the discrepancy they perceived between their initial expectations and the reality of the team. If you and your team are successful in setting flexible, inclusive norms and expectations, members should feel more comfortable expressing ideas and feelings. This will, in turn, lead to an increased acceptance of others on the team. When you’ve reached this stage of team cohesion, people will feel more comfortable asking for help and making difficult decisions. Work to define team processes that nurture and encourage these behaviors.
- Performing: The team is satisfied with its progress and can easily share insights into personal and group progress and performance. Everyone feels attached to the team as a whole. This is when team members can prevent or solve problems in the team’s process and progress and when you’ll see the most progress toward its goals. Measure and celebrate accomplishments during this time — they’re the result of a lot of emotional labor and intelligence.
What Role Does Technology Have in Team Building?
Getting your team to that final stage, where everyone is working in sync, and people feel safe to be vulnerable and real with one another, can feel impossible. But by consistently investing time and energy in cultivating that environment, it doesn’t have to be. Feeling that sense of belonging and trust degrades over time, so it’s important to look for opportunities to renew it, especially in a remote or hybrid team setting, as there are fewer chances for organic interactions to build trust and foster vulnerability.
Winston Churchill famously said, “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.†So it is with the software and tools we deploy on our teams. Choosing tools that are delightful and inject an element of fun into work processes can have a meaningful difference on your team.
For instance, Slack famously normalized emoji reactions and gifs in the workplace. This can take the edge of text-only communication, which can otherwise feel abrupt and impersonal.
Multiple products, including Range, can and should be used for daily async check-ins. This keeps teams feeling connected and in the know about what people are working on and how they are doing, even if they don’t meet face to face for several days.
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FigJam is another excellent tool for virtual brainstorming and collaboration. The cycle recap is one of the people’s favorites, with shared screenshots of new features, customer feedback, new customer logos, and other wins. Then teams can celebrate items one by one, giving kudos with stickers and other decorations.
Work doesn’t have to be so much work. In the new digital age, it’s easier than ever to make work processes a bit of fun, which helps remind everyone just how human we are.
Team building is really about the little things. Over time, those small moments of vulnerability will encourage team members to open up more, share their feelings and thoughts with others, and create the kind of emotionally intelligent, bonded workplace that is not only productive and prosperous but also safe and inviting for all.
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