Team building in business, stop or still?

Bowling evenings, cooking classes, survival training: team building is supposed to promote team spirit among employees. But it can produce the opposite of the desired effect.

Ah, team building sessions, these fun and entertaining days or evenings, organized around an activity, whose ultimate objective is to strengthen team cohesion. Since their creation in the 1980s in the United States, no one has ever really managed to scientifically measure their effectiveness. Their legitimacy is called into question today.

franceinfo: Companies continue to love these team buildings, is this reasonable?

Sarah Lemoine: Not really, if we are to believe the study published by two teacher-researchers, Xavier Philippe and Thomas Simon. They interviewed 35 young people who had experienced team building. They are between 25 and 30 years old, all graduates from major schools, because they are very targeted for this type of exercise. Companies think they’re looking for fun at work, and they’re bound to be enthusiastic.

The problem is that fun cannot be decreed!

Many young people are skeptical. They express discomfort in the face of moments deemed absurd, ridiculous, or superficial. Sticking stickers on a poster, throwing balls of yarn at each other, or having to get drunk with your boss.

“The more orchestrated the fun, the more suspicious it seems, the more the participants feel manipulated”, explains Xavier Philippe. It’s complicated to say that we don’t find it funny, at the risk of appearing sinister or unmotivated, summarize the authors. And then the paradox is that once the session is over, the team must be united. But the links are not created because management asked them to.

Any avenues for improvement?

All the young people interviewed do not condemn team building sessions outright. They can be useful for meeting distant colleagues or breaking the routine. But they don’t want to be infantilized. They would like something “more spontaneous, autonomous, which comes from employees, and on a voluntary basis”. A space for reflection to think about work. And if it’s naturally fun, then so much the better.

The two teacher-researchers do not rule out carrying out a similar study with other categories of employees, to be able to compare the results.