By Sylwia Paterson, Business Manager
There is a moment in almost every team-building conversation when someone smirks. You can feel it in the room, a collective, unspoken groan at the prospect of another icebreaker, another forced walk through a ropes course, another afternoon “experiencing” something that has absolutely nothing to do with the actual work. Team building has a reputation problem. And in many cases, it is not hard to see why.
But here is the thing: the instinct to dismiss it entirely is just as wrong as the instinct to phone it in.
We recently took a day out of work with our whole team, and it reminded me why getting this right matters enormously, especially now.
The engagement crisis?
The latest data regarding employees’ engagement at work are quite alarming.
Only 10% of UK employees are actively engaged at work. According to the Telegraph: 90% of Brits are either uninterested or actively disengaged. Globally, Gallup’s research tells us that just 23% of employees worldwide feel genuinely interested by their work, a figure that has been declining since its brief pandemic-era peak. Meanwhile, the average annual staff turnover rate in the UK currently sits at around 35%, with Gallup suggesting a healthy rate would be closer to 10%.
The financial case for caring about this is not subtle. Replacing an employee earning £30,000 can cost a business as much as £60,000 once you factor in lost productivity, recruitment costs, and the time it takes someone new to reach full effectiveness. For senior roles, that figure can climb to 150–200% of annual salary. And according to research compiled across the industry, disengaged employees are 2.6 times more likely to leave for a better culture.
Culture, not salary, is increasingly the deciding factor in whether someone stays.
An O.C. Tanner Institute report found that 34% of UK employees do not consider their workplace a community, while 65% say they want to feel a strong sense of belonging at work. That gap, between what people have and what they need is precisely where thoughtful team building can do its most important work.
So why does team building have such a bad name?
I guess the answer is, because so much of it is bad.
The hallmark of ineffective team building is that it exists in isolation, a one-off afternoon that has no connection to the organisation’s values, challenges, or actual working relationships. It is performative. It is something done to employees rather than with them. It ticks a box without asking what box needed ticking in the first place.
When team building is generic, it feels generic. When it is imposed without buy-in, it breeds resentment. When it is purely social with no strategic thread, it is enjoyable for a few hours and forgotten by Monday morning.
The good news is that none of that is inherent to team building itself. It is a symptom of doing it poorly.
What we do differently and why it works?
Our approach starts with a principle that sounds simple but changes everything: no idea is a bad idea, and the team decides together.
When it comes to planning our team days, we open it up. Everyone contributes suggestions for activities, for themes, for what we want to get out of the day and then we vote. This means that by the time the day arrives, people are not just attending something that was organised for them. They helped build it. That shift in ownership transforms the energy in the room before the day has even begun.
The same philosophy carries through into how we structure the day itself. For workshops and challenges, we deliberately mix teams so that people are placed outside their usual roles and everyday working relationships. A colleague you rarely collaborate with becomes someone you are solving a problem alongside. Someone who is quieter in their day-to-day setting finds their voice in a different context. We are intentional about this: every opinion counts, every perspective is worth hearing, and the mix of people in the room is never accidental.
The research backs this up. High-performing organisations that conduct regular team building see up to 36% higher retention compared to those that don’t. Companies with highly engaged teams report a 23% increase in profitability. These are not soft benefits, they are measurable outcomes that trace back, in part, to something as straightforward as making people feel that their voice genuinely matters.
Our recent Team Day
Our most recent day was a good example of this in practice.
We started with the whole team together, every person, every role in workshops exploring and redefining our values. Not a slide deck, not a leadership presentation. A real conversation about where we are, where we want to be, and what we collectively stand for. When people help shape the values rather than have them handed down, something shifts. The values stop being wallpaper and start being a compass. Hearing your own words and ideas reflected back in the language of the organisation is a different experience from being told what the organisation believes.
From there, we moved into smaller, deliberately mixed teams for problem-solving exercises, including an AI challenge that was both timely and revealing. Working on problems outside our normal day-to-day rhythm surfaces skills and perspectives that often go unseen. People who would rarely interact in the course of a normal working week found themselves relying on each other, listening differently, discovering that a colleague they barely knew had exactly the insight they needed. That is not a small thing.
Then came what some might dismiss as “just the fun bit”: bowling, curling, and karaoke. But by the time we got to the karaoke, people were not performing for their colleagues. They were genuinely with each other. The workshops had opened something up, and the social activities let it breathe. That is how real connection forms, not in a single moment, but through a sequence of shared experience that builds as the day unfolds.
The energy we brought back to work the following week was real. The conversations were different. People referenced the day. They mentioned things they had learned about colleagues. The culture moved, not dramatically, but perceptibly, in the right direction.
Employees are your most valuable asset
We are operating in an environment of sustained pressure. The cost of living crisis has not gone away. Economic uncertainty continues to reshape priorities for businesses and for individuals. Political instability, from both sides of the Atlantic and closer to home, creates background noise that affects morale, focus, and confidence in the future.
In this context, the question is not whether you can afford to invest in your people. It is whether you can afford not to.
The Mind UK Workplace Wellbeing Index found that 57% of UK employees have experienced poor mental health while working for their current employer. Research by Primeast notes that employees are four times less likely to quit when psychological safety is high. When people feel that they belong somewhere that their colleagues know them, that their employer has invested in bringing them together, that the culture is worth staying for the calculus changes.
A team day is not a substitute for pay, or fairness, or good management. But it is a signal. It says: we see you as people, not just as resources. In times of uncertainty, that signal matters more than ever.
The 84% of employees who say learning adds purpose to their work are not asking for elaborate programmes. They are asking to feel like the organisation they give their time to gives something meaningful back. A well-designed team day, one that stretches thinking, surfaces values, creates connection, and ends with everyone singing slightly off-key, is exactly that kind of investment.
