Team Building Can Do More Than Make People Have Fun
Three recent examples of how the theme did the teaching, turning team building from an activity into part of the experience’s wider purpose.
We wrote recently about why the best offsites are built as one experience, not a checklist, and why a theme, done properly, is the mechanism that makes that possible.
It is easier to understand once you have seen it in practice.
Here are three times we built a team-building programme where the theme wasn’t decoration. It was doing the actual work.
When the team-building experience had a business objective beyond team building
HeadBox brought us a very specific challenge: 220 people from an international real estate company, in Lisbon, with the company expanding into Iberia.
A standard city treasure hunt would have been easy to deliver.
It also would have missed the point.
So we built a completely bespoke city challenge app around the group and the objective. Teams moved through Lisbon, completing customised challenges, creating photos and pitch videos, solving problems and competing against each other in real time.
The city was the setting, but the experience was built around the people in it and what they were there to achieve.
That distinction matters.
A city challenge can simply give people something fun to do together. A bespoke one can use the same streets, the same two hours and the same basic mechanics to create something that supports a much more specific purpose.
The theme wasn’t “Lisbon.”
The theme was the challenge itself, built around a sales team entering a new market while discovering the city they were in.
That’s the difference between choosing an activity and designing an experience.
When the theme had to carry a new company story
Nutrient, formerly PSPDFKit, presented a completely different problem.
This wasn’t a sales team exploring a new market. It was a company going through a major transition: multiple companies coming together, a new brand, a new product launch and a new CEO narrative.
The solution needed to do much more than get 130 people working together.
We used media and film.
Teams created their own commercials around the new brand, turning participants into part of the launch rather than simply an audience for it. The experience gave people something tangible to create together while making the new company story something they had to understand, interpret and communicate themselves.
We could have given the group a generic team-building activity and then put the new logo on it.
Instead, the objective shaped the format.
The theme wasn’t decoration around the product launch. The product launch became the reason for the team-building experience to exist.
When the story became the team-building
Siemens Energy gave us another version of the same problem.
For its annual meeting in Lisbon, we created a bespoke mystery challenge combining theatrical role play, dance and interactive storytelling for 80 participants.
The format could easily have been treated as entertainment: actors, a mystery, a historic venue, a good dinner.
But the participants weren’t there simply to watch a show. They had to interact, interpret information, collaborate and make decisions inside the story.
The narrative created the reason to communicate.
The uncertainty created the reason to listen.
The characters created the reason to engage with people they might otherwise never have spoken to.
The theme didn’t sit on top of the team building. It was the room the team building happened in.
The part that doesn’t change
These three events had very different objectives.
One supported a real estate company’s expansion into Iberia.
One helped people experience and communicate a new company and product following a merger.
One used an immersive narrative to bring collaboration and engagement into an annual meeting.
And that is exactly the point.
There is no single “best” team-building activity. The more useful question is what the particular group needs the experience to do.
What changed in each case was not simply the theme. It was the question we asked before designing it.
Not: “What activity fits in this time slot?”
But: “What does this specific group need to walk away having experienced?”
The format follows the answer.
The theme is the thread that keeps the story, the challenge, the setting and the people pointed in the same direction.
That is when team building stops being something people do between the serious parts of an offsite.
It becomes one of the serious parts.
Go Discover Portugal designs corporate offsites, incentive trips and team-building programmes across Portugal, built around what each business actually needs to achieve.