A recent article in Human Resources Online offered some views on the role of teambuilding in employee development. 

The regional head of L&D for global jewelry brand Pandora, who sits in Hong Kong, discussed the company’s concept of teambuilding events. They tend to avoid having specific events labeled as “teambuilding” and instead try to add things that can support teamwork into the regular working environment. They mentioned, for example, creating video interviews and other digital products that describe different functions of the company. With these, people can know what jobs others do, and can use that understanding to build useful relationships and make use of each other’s skills.

We generally have the same philosophy as Pandora: the best way to help people work as a team is to have them WORK as a team. Few one-off events are really helpful for building teamwork skills or improving collaboration. Most activities billed as “teambuilding” are really just designed to be fun and social. Even if the organizers want to encourage skills development, they rarely put the effort into making that happen. That’s not to say they don’t work hard — organizing an off-site is never easy — but their efforts usually focus on making the event enjoyable without also making sure it’s a great learning opportunity.

That being said, you can still create development opportunities to help people work better as a team, but it takes a different effort to make that happen. Teambuilding events can be a useful way to identify skills in a group or help people practice concepts (just like a lab session supports a biology lecture), but they need some structure, like 

• having objectives
• planning to apply lessons learned back in the workplace
• following up to see how behaviors have changed
• including some measurable metrics.

If all you want to do is take everyone out and have fun, then take everyone out and have fun, but if you really want to do teambuilding, put some thought into it.