Is teambuilding efficient or not?

Teambuilding as a punctual organizational activity may seem outdated as a way to strengthen a team, especially in the pandemic period, when face-to-face interactions are so limited and the reality of relationships goes to the virtual environment most of the time.

However, teambuilding remains the best investment in work teams as long as it meets certain standards. One of these standards refers to the chosen teambuilding activities. They must be thought of and constructed in such a way as to create stories. What builds or strengthens a team are the common stories of team members. A teambuilding activity that does not create a story of team members really remains an outdated or impossible activity in the virtual environment. All the stories created in effective teambuilding are about the participants, revealing certain features of them useful in the further relationship within a project or a team activity at work.

We often hear about group cohesion, and this group cohesion is the ultimate goal of teambuilding. A group is cohesive as long as the members of the group feel that they are part of the group, want to stay in the group and consider the group to be important to them. Group cohesion measures the importance or attachment of members to the group - the degree to which group members connect with each other and want to stay together. Teambuilding activities aim to create group cohesion and the attraction of the group members that determines them to stay together and work together, regardless of the complexity of the task or the perceived hostility of the environment. Group cohesion is created by the coherence of the group's story: who they are, what role they have, what limits the group members have, what is the plot of their story, and especially, what is the projected end of their story - the purpose of the team. They must be articulated in business reality and must not be ignored.

Teambuildings that take into account all these aspects in the design phase become efficient and will represent investments, not financial consumption. It is not necessary for the teambuilding activity to be complex, complicated or cumbersome, but it must consider the creation of a common story, which the team members can turn to whenever they need. Creating the story, the team building activity is pleasant, personal, personalized, ingenious and boring.