Why team-building exercises won’t make your staff more productive

Aytekin Tank
The Startup
Published in
7 min readJun 12, 2018

--

Originally published on JOTFORM.COM

Common sense tells us that happy, collaborative teams are productive teams.

Research backs it up, too.

But when leaders or managers utter the words “team-building,” most people want to run for the nearest exit. Visions of cheesy bonding exercises and trust-building games can induce a collective bout of nausea.

Twelve years after launching JotForm, I’ve learned to take a different approach.

Instead of worrying about how to optimize our teams, I want to nurture them.

What do they need in order to thrive?

How can we help them to grow?

In essence, I think of our multi-functional teams as living, breathing beings.

Yes, they are a collection of diverse and talented individuals. But at their best, they also operate like a single body. And just like plants, animals and people, teams have several basic needs.

Some team-building exercises can be useful but they won’t make your team more productive unless you nurture these five basics:

1. Nourishment

Developers often joke about running on pizza and coffee, but creative teams ultimately need exciting problems to solve.

They need a reason to stretch and strive for innovation. That’s their fuel.

In a Harvard Business Review article about leading creative employees, authors Richard Florida and Jim Goodnight explain that …

“… creative people work for the love of a challenge. They crave the feeling of accomplishment that comes from cracking a riddle, be it technological, artistic, social, or logistical. They want to do good work.”

They also cite a major Information Week survey that showed “challenging work” ranks considerably higher than even “salary” and other financial rewards as people’s top source of on-the-job motivation.

Your teams are eager to flex their creative and strategic muscles. Feed them tough…

--

--

Aytekin Tank
The Startup

Founder and CEO of www.jotform.com || Bestselling author of Automate Your Busywork. Find more at https://aytekintank.com/ (contact: AytekinTank@Jotform.com)