From activities to outcomes; how to plan your teambuilding event

From activities to outcomes: how to plan your teambuilding event

Here’s the call we get most days. “Hi, we’re planning something for our team. What activities can you offer us?”

It’s a fair question, but we always ask one of our own first: “What are you actually hoping this day will give your team?”

The activity is the vehicle; where you want to end up matters more. Start there, and the whole day makes much more sense. Your people leave feeling something, rather than just remembering they had a bit of fun.

Start with the question, not the activity

It’s easy to jump straight to booking. Someone recommends a good day out, or a friend raves about what their team did, and off you go. But the activity is only how you spend the day. The reason behind it is what makes it stick in the minds of people.

This is why our first conversation with a client is never about kit or venues. It's about what's really going on in your team. What's the business or people challenge behind the day, and where would you like to be afterwards?
When you tell us that, you stop being someone booking an activity and we stop being just someone hiring it out. It becomes a proper conversation about your people, and everything that follows works much better as a result.

What are you really trying to achieve?

Every organisation is different, of course, but the ambitions we hear tend to fall in the same areas:

•           Improving communication across a team

•           Encouraging real collaboration rather than just polite tolerance

•           Building relationships between people who don’t usually cross paths

•           Breaking down the barriers that grow between silos

•           Getting a group into problem-solving mode together

•           Bringing different departments into the same room properly, so they see and hear each other

•           Shifting a team dynamic that isn’t quite working

Once we know which of these matters most, we can point to activities designed to create exactly those interactions. The same activities but chosen for a reason.

Team building that starts with the ambition

Take John Lewis. Their two flagship stores had started to see each other as rivals, when leadership really wanted them working together. So, we started with what behaviours they wanted to change and chose our Jailbreak challenge: a task where people from both stores could only succeed by working together. By the end of the day, the two stores weren’t rivals, they were one team who’d solved something together and had a good laugh along the way.

Or take EACTS. The European Association for Cardio-Thoracic Surgery had grown from ten to thirty-three people in four years, working hybrid so colleagues rarely met in the office. Rachel Elewe, who looks after wellbeing, wanted to bring the whole team together; regulars and newer starters alike. We built days around participation: dragon boat racing at Dorney Lake, and a sports day at De Vere Beaumont with relay-style activities that kept everyone moving. It was important that these were events where nobody stood on the sidelines and everyone felt like one big team.

It worked. Rachel heard the sports day called “the best team day yet”. New starters met colleagues they’d only known through email, and people from different parts of the business had proper time to talk and laugh together. In Rachel’s words: “You feel the euphoria even after the day has finished. It definitely contributes to people feeling more positive and energised.”

Same starting question. Two very different answers.

Have the right conversation first

You don't need to arrive with a shortlist of activities. Tell us what's happening in your organisation, what you'd like the day to change, and who you're bringing along. We’ll help you shape a day that works for the mix of personalities in the room, the ones who dive straight in and the ones who’d rather warm up first, and pick from our activities accordingly.

That’s how we’ve always worked as a family business; one conversation at a time. Get in touch and let’s start with your team.

 Give us a call on 07767 250192 or email us at events@tag-events.com and let’s get a date in the diary before the good ones go.