Why Most Team Bonding Activities are a Waste of Time — Online and Off
What kinds of team bonding activities should we run to help our people connect more while working from home?”
I was asked this at a recent productivity and remote work webinar I hosted.
Yes, there are things you can do.
Here’s another 57 ideas that are sure to make you cringe.
The truth is that team-bonding activities ultimately take people away from important work, family, friends, and personal interests.
As such, people should be able to choose whether or not they participate in token initiatives without fear of obvious or subtle recourse.
Here’s a wild idea.
If your organisation has a genuinely worthwhile mission, and the people on the bus are both capable and aligned with said mission — and not turning up just for the paycheck — then you don’t need team bonding activities, especially not the kind that sees people secretly rolling their eyes when a facilitator isn’t watching.
Whether it’s business, sports or military combat, when you share a meaningful and challenging journey with other people, one that’s characterised by short feedback loops and some indication of forward progress, you inevitably will bond.
And you’ll bond a whole lot more than you would with a ‘trust fall’ exercise.
No doubt the Chicago Bulls team glorified in The Last Dance documentary share a unique and enduring bond thanks to their six-time championship-winning efforts on the court in the 90s.
No doubt the early employees of Netflix bonded over their trying to figure out a business model that would work, as they went from VHS to DVD to online downloads in the space of several years, rejecting an acquisition offer from Amazon before later being rejected themselves by Blockbuster.
They didn’t bond over in-house yoga classes — in fact, their makeshift office featured mismatched chairs, some of which came from co-founder Marc Randolph’s house! They bonded over their mission — to entertain the world.
Incidentally, Netflix is today heralded as having one of the strongest and empowering company cultures of any organisation, best encapsulated in its famous Culture Deck.
Ultimately, the company is sparse on debilitating process and policy which appeals to A-players, who as a result can truly make their mark on the company rather than spend their time in meetings seeking consensus for every decision. This has had a compound effect on decision-making and execution over time, and the rest, as they say, is history.
At the time of writing, Amazon was worth US$1.44T, and they too started out in the most inauspicious surroundings (below). But when you have capable people who believe in the mission, what your office looks like is not a key consideration.
As Richard Branson says, he’s successful because he hires people smarter than him, empowers them with a worthwhile mission, gives them the resources they need to succeed, and gets the hell out of the way.
Jeff Bezos, 1999
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The WorkFlow podcast is hosted by Steve Glaveski with a mission to help you unlock your potential to do more great work in far less time, whether you're working as part of a team or flying solo, and to set you up for a richer life.
To help you avoid stepping into these all too common pitfalls, we’ve reflected on our five years as an organization working on corporate innovation programs across the globe, and have prepared 100 DOs and DON’Ts.
