A good article here from the Times. I've had to suffer through a number of team building exercises at work, and they were all complete bollocks. I couldn't stand them.
The best team building events that I attended were drinks at the pub on Friday night, and they all happened after 5pm on our own time and were paid for out of our own wallets. Attendance was voluntary, so you ended up drinking with people that wanted to be there and were interested in drinking and talking about stuff. When people got sick of drinking or talking, they left. If people wanted to go clubbing all night, they bought some pills and went and hopped around until dawn.
I have no doubt that the closest teams that I worked with were those that got drunk together and carried on. They were also "self selected" teams, in that the teams were formed by like minded people. We were not squashed together by management and forced to get along. We got along because, well, we got along.
People like each other because of shared interests or shared experience, and because their personalities and beliefs are reasonably compatible. There was one bloke I worked with who I named "fuckwit", because in the office, that's what he was. However, he was actually not too bad once in the pub and out of the work environment. He could never be my friend, and we could never be part of a well functioning team because his behaviour when sober always destroyed any hope of that.
If you want to get a team to work together, you simply select those that will work well together. I read an article today about a sandwich shop company that has a simple employment test - the newbie spends a day in the shop, and the other staff vote on whether they get to stay.
I wish all workplaces employed that rule.
However, I do agree with the thrust of the article. We get paid to work, so one should simply work when in the office. All that other crap can wait until after 5pm.
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