My friends at the Corporate Team Building Blog wrote a great post about The Steps in Planning a Team Building Retreat
Below are some of the ideas:
Clarify your objectives.
Sometimes the terms “team recreation” and “team building” are used interchangeably. They are not the same thing.
TEAM RECREATION
Team recreation is intended to get your team involved in an activity or experience just for the fun of it. There are no business objectives or outcomes.
TEAM BUILDING
Team building seeks to enhance team cohesiveness and performance to improve business results. Often team building does involve some recreation but recreation is a means to an end, not the end. Team building can be delivered on-site, off-site as a day session or at a hotel or resort involving overnight stays, locally or at a foreign destination
The phases of needed for effective team building are:
- executive briefing to identify key business issues, communicate your support, and clarify how team building is relevant the key business issues (1 hour)
- context setting and team briefing by facilitator ( 1 1/2 – 2 hours)
- recreation (flexible & optional)
- simulation (3 – 8 hours)
- debriefing (1 hour)
- business application exercises (1 – 1 /2 hours for prep., 5 to 15 minutes per group for presentations)
- business agenda items (flexible)
To read entire post…
The great part of the post is the breakdown of effective Team Development programs. Anne Thornly-Brown and I have discussed debated and agreed over the discrepancies of these terms many times.
The most important part of any team building program is the facilitator. For successful programs to take place the majority of the investment should not be the location, the food, and the company give aways (those are all recreation programs).
For effective team building programs the focus must be on the facilitators and the program development.
As a consumer of Team Building an organization must take their time and ensure that the facilitator and the team are in-line and together on the outcomes.
-Michael Cardus is Create-Learning
I enjoyed your post and think you brought up a really great point. Team building and team recreation ARE confused all the time. By and large, bowling and laser tag are not “team building”. Do recreation events have a purpose? Absolutely. People always need to release stress and get to know folks outside of the office, in an informal setting. But the “business outcomes” are likely to be limited in such an activity. Although…I wonder if a really skilled facilitator could take a bowling night and debrief it for business learning! I bet it’s possible.
David,
I agree the confusion is tough.
and yes a skilled facilitator can develop teams in most situations. The concern I have is that Bowling Alleys offer bowling as team building and no facilitation is done. This makes it more challenging for people like us to lead corporate team building because people get it confused with recreation.