Team building days- do you hate them?

[Stressedgiraffe]

Inspire by a thread.
Why is there so much hate about team building days?
I've attended loads and organised some.
Usually they are ok, even fun sometimes but I've been lucky and generally like the people I work with. Some when I don't really like the team have been horrible.
I've got a team building event next week and will be doing everything that everyone seems to hate : travelling on the bank holiday to get there. 6 hours travel time. Staying in a hotel for 2 nights. 2 day team building . Travel 6 hours back.
But I'm looking forward to it. Hopefully it'll be fun.
So I guess my aibu
Aibu- team building is ok even fun!
Ainbu- team building is the spawn of the devil and all should be banned!

I don't know. But ours was just in the office organised by internal staff and seen as a bit of fun on a work day when we also went out for lunch.

My husband had Mary Lou McDonald of Sinn Féin fame as a facilitor once for one these god awful days. He was not impressed.

I on the other hand would never WFH and if I had a job which required me to do so I would be looking for another job ASAP.

I fear for the future of the world tbh, everyone wants to stick to their own kind and have nothing to do with anyone else. Well, on MN anyway - fortunately it isn't something I encounter much in Real Life. Fortunately the people I know are far more pleasant than the average MNer.

I just wouldn't go, and would find any excuse not to. I'm not at all sociable and hate meeting and making small talk with new people.

If I need have to go (as in it was directly necessary for the job I do) then absolutely everything would have to be paid for, and any time outside of my working hours would need to be paid or TOIL

Can you tell I hate them and think they're utterly pointless 🤣

Nope, try again.

I've always made good friends wherever I've worked. In my current role, many of my 'team' - ie the ones I actually work with on a daily basis - are people I genuinely like, respect and would happily spend time with away from the office. This means we work well together and are effective / productive.

But this 'team-building' has occurred naturally, because we're grown-ups who understand the importance of good communication, respect, flexibility etc, and we have a shared purpose already because of the job we do. Not because we've spent 2 days building fucking towers out of marshmallows in a Premier Inn just outside Stockport.

If you need to force people to dress up / build rafts / do samba dancing / reveal personal details in order to 'build a team', you're doing your business wrong.

Not necessarily. People are not wrong for only wanting to hangout and interact with the people they choose. Work takes up so much of our time, it should not be inflicted outside of those hours and when not being paid - and there is nothing wrong with wanting to spend your time with your own family or friends you choose.

If people gel enough in work, then those colleagues will probably migrate to actual friends, but, that should be peoples own choice.

Right, so what you're saying is that you've made friends at work. Was this because you hung from a zipwire with them or did, perhaps, those friendships naturally evolve in the normal course of your work?

It’s a load of wanky ,patronising bollocks 🤢
Edited to add that at least 50% of my closest friends ,who I see regularly,I met at work over 40 years! We are friends because we genuinely have the same humour and values ,not because we were forced to have ‘fun’ on our day off !!

I love my team, I love spending time with my team outside of work, I am friends with many of them personally. We're event managers, we love doing fun things. We've arranged to meet up ourselves and do team building events like go to the Crystal Maze experience or an escape room. But universally we hate the forced fun of 'team building days' or events which are during work time, which you then have to work twice as hard to make up the missed time, and you rarely actually learn anything of merit about yourself or others. I've been to a few company away days where they have a brief mixer designed to help you meet people from elsewhere in the business, those are tolerable. The rest can go straight in the bin.

Not a thing where I work altho I think I went on one during my training. More for private sector or 9-5 johnnies.

Yeh, nope. Never going to do any team building in my own time, and certainly won't be staying away for it and i don't even have children so no childcare to think about.

Not a chance would i be travelling to anywhere 6 hours away unless I'm getting paid travel time, and double pay on a Bank Hol!

If we had a team building day/2 days, that's lost hours work we need to catch up on, we run a massive weekly payroll, i can't just take my whole team out for a day.

Any company that expected me to be away from home is not one I could work for. One that expected me to give up my time and stay at a hotel for corporate wank could go screw itself. I have two cats. Both need daily medication as well as their prescription food. I wouldn't be trusting them to a petsitter, or paying the sort of prices petsitters charge, or trying to find a cattery, just to waste my time (and petrol money) for the sake of corporate idiocy I'd hate.

a bit of both for me. There were a few people i worked with who i barely know - but a day of canoeing (and a bit of competitive bits in that) and i discovered that one of the guys from another team really likes the same music as me and after that we often spent breaks/lunchtimes talking about that. It was a really good chance to speak to people i would usually only talk about work stuff to.

And discovered, just from listening and watching, about one or two other things that were going on in people's private lives that meant i slightly adjusted expectations at times etc. The kind of info you don't get when you're just saying "but WHY are all my containers still in the Suez canal?"

I hate it for four reasons. Since you asked...

They are pointless and don't change group dynamics. I love my team and colleagues, and socialise with them regularly, but I've also had teams I didn't like. In neither case does doing little games at work isn't going to make our bond stronger.

I hate enforced fun and pretend tasks. I especially hate the power dynamics of these days: the way that you have to fake enjoying yourself and select a work friendly version of yourself to maintain the whole time. These days are designed to break down your work persona, and to an extent succeed, in the sense that it's hard to pretend for 48 hours straight. The whole thing feels intrusive: I give my employer my work life, all of it. Why do they also demand my soul? Why do you want to force me into a weird test of seeing whether I can keep being this employee even on my downtime?

They make me feel infantalised. I'm not a child and I resent being treated like one. I don't want to do activities that someone else has decided are fun, I don't want to do activities that someone else has decided will improve my communication or whatever the fuck the focus is on that week.

They're exclusionary. I would hate you for taking me away from family on bank holiday. I do it and understand it's necessary to get actual work done , e.g. meeting clients abroad, conferences, and so on. I resent the hell out of having to do it for no good reason. Think of anyone who has caring responsibilities, elderly parents, a disability, anything.

The only exception is once when I worked for a company where everyone was WFH or in different centres across the country, then it was quite nice twice a year to meet and see everyone in real life. If you see colleagues every week then absolutely no way.

My company actually use to do ok days out , sports car driving , spa etc but I always desliked it as honestly I prefer to spend time with my friend . Since covid each team was given the choice to do a team day or use the budget as they wish to help their team members feel they are appreciated so I choose to give mine individual gifts instead as hampers .

God that sounds awful OP. I worked in the public sector so we had “awaydays” which were just in a different part of the building and they were bad enough. I’ retired now so whoopee.

I’m in the office today so asked my team their opinion of team building days - the communal eye rolling told me all I needed to know.

Thankfully we’re all on same page. A few times a year we have a team meal after work but that’s as much as any of us want.

It's awful, we have to meet up 2-3 times a year and I resent having to travel/dinner drinks out in my own time, it takes at least 4 hours to drive there and back each way, then a pointless day in 'meeting' to be told how we can improve and do quizzes. Just do it on a teams meeting, everyone hates it and costs the company so much money to put us all up in a hotel and pay for food.
There have been threats of go karting, which is probably fun for 30 year old Ben but not a middle aged woman, not me anyway

The best I’ve been on were run by 3rd party companies who specialised in them.
Notably there was no senior staff there and no company values training.
They were in the style of troubleshooting and problem solving, one outdoorsy, one in a hotel.
Can’t be sure but I think feedback was given to the company by the 3rd parties on how people did.

The worst were in-house, where a senior manager had likely googled ‘team building’ and cobbled together activities, the spaghetti tower being on, the briggs-Meyer personality test being another.

Generally, it’s the one-size fits all, the mandatory nature and the ‘it’ll be fun’ mantra that annoys.

Hate them. The one my last job had, where I (chronic illness) was allowed to sit in the reception of the laser quest place whilst the rest of them played laser quest was a particular highlight. (I stayed at work!)

Yes. I hate them. I like my team and am happy to go out for the occasional after work drink. But that should be down to me and my schedule. I hate the enforced fun aspect of the whole thing.

I probably didn’t mind them as much when I was younger and starting out but I am older now, have my own friends and family who I’d rather spend my downtime with, and just want to get on with my work during work days. The latter is important because the work still needs to be done. Taking a whole day out for team building just means working in the evenings/on the weekend in order to get the work done.

@LadyHavelockVetinari that's a perfect summary.

The best "team bonding" I can think of was never intended as such - it was the workers mocking the blithering idiots in management.

@TheSandHurtsMyFeelings thank you for voicing my feelings more or less. I was happy when such events were stopped by my employer.

If they have a defined purpose and actually have some kind of beneficial outcome then great. in my personal experience they are often a designed by a small number of people to what they want and don’t incorporate accessibility needs… as someone with ADHD they are often torturous.

Hated being pulled away from what I needed to get done, have to make up all the lost time somehow.

There was always one person who was hyper competitive and killed any possibility of ironic fun. If you like team building days, you're probably that person.

Tedious activities in general, just super awkward.

Badly planned, worked for a company that took everyone to Germany for a trip. Flights were a mess, some people didn't have a return flight at all, some apparently left as a Mr and came back as a Mrs.