Teambuilding Interventions: Employees’ Perspective

Some managers believe it is their job, their
duty, to organize teambuilding events for their staff. But do staff actually want to play those teambuilding
games and go on these teambuilding events? And if so, what activities do they prefer
to perform during such teambuilding events? I conducted a descriptive empirical study
investigating what employees in a four-star hotel preferred as teambuilding activities,
using the teambuilding intervention typology described in one of my previous videos. I surveyed 102 employees from a four-star
hotel in the NL and measured their preferences for 11 types of teambuilding activities. Each type of teambuilding intervention was
measured with 3 survey items; employees rated their preferences for them on a scale between
1 to 7. Let’s take a look at the main results. The preferences for the 11 types of teambuilding
activities are shown in Table 2. The teambuilding activity preference that
was rated the highest was socializing (M=5.49, SD=0.93) whereas the lowest was assessments
such as personality assessments and/or skill assessments (M=3.97, SD=1.26). Outdoor fun activities showed the highest
standard deviation (M=4.13, SD=1.51), indicating employees’ opinions and preferences
for this type of activity varied the most greatly. As this 11-type scale was created on the basis
of literature and had not been validated before, I performed exploratory factor analyses to
see whether and how this scale may be adjusted and improved. I ran the EFA using principal component extraction
with Promax rotations. The KMO indicates that the sample was adequate
and appropriate for the EFA. After removing cross-loadings and factors
with only one item, the EFA revealed a five-factor structure. Let’s try to make sense of this five-factor
structure. It would appear that work issue analysis,
role analysis, assessments, and goal setting interventions were all perceived by employees
to be of one and the same general category. This is understandable, because all these
different interventions are indeed all rather work-content-oriented. Although academic and theoretical literature
lists them out as distinct types of teambuilding interventions, employees do perceive them
as just one collective group. Furthermore, communication, trust, and cohesiveness
exercises are perceived to be of one general category. Creativity and problem solving are integrated
into creative problem solving exercise. Outdoor fun and socializing remain intact. Using the information from the EFA, I relabeled
the main types of teambuilding interventions and I also reran the descriptive analysis
on employees’ preferences. The results show that socializing, once again,
is the most preferred teambuilding activity while outdoor fun is the least preferred. So, what are the main conclusions from this
study? First, a lot of managers say “you know what? My employees tell me that they want teambuilding.
when I ask them — do you want to do some teambuilding, they say — yes, we want teambuilding”. all right, so what do they want as teambuilding?
the empirical data collected in this study show what they want is the opportunity to
socialize with colleagues. So, don’t buy into the idea that when employees
say they want teambuilding, they mean they want to do more work related stuff or go on
a dirty, exhausting, outdoor obstacle course. Maybe that’s what a manager thinks employee
want; or maybe that’s what an outdoor obstacle course is trying to sell you, but employees
actually prefer something different. Second, when it comes to work content related
teambuilding interventions, whether it is role analysis, work issue analysis, goal setting,
or assessment sessions, although by definition and according to the literature, these are
distinct interventions, employees do not view them as such. Employees simply see them as work-related
stuff; and they don’t really seem to dig it that much. so, in my view, the most important take away
from this article or this video is this — when the manager spends some money and organizes
a teambuilding day for the employees, if the intention behind that is to please the employees
or to increase employee satisfaction, then it is important to understand what employees
want and prefer as teambuilding activities, and the finding of this article suggests employees
prefer the opportunity to socialize with coworkers. but if the intention of the manager’s organizing
the team day is to improve employee work performance, then that’s a completely different story. I have another video on the effectiveness
of teambuilding interventions based on published meta analyses, so check it out. The general idea from that video is that meta
analyses do not yet support the notion that team building contributes to work performance,
especially if we talk about objective, measurable improvements in work performance. So, given the fact that most of the time teambuilding
essentially is just a soft fuzzy thing which at best contributes to cognitive and attitudinal
outcomes, it is important we do it right in order to make employees feel happy about it,
because that’s the whole point of it; otherwise, it’s just gonna be counterproductive.

Written by Raul Dinwiddie