By Jorgelina Bross-Puglisi
February 5, 2026
It started with a local high school Action Day. The goal was noble: street clean-ups, pottery, and sports to strengthen team building. But a striking fact emerged: in many classes, half the students simply didn’t attend.
This is the participation paradox: the people who most need to learn how to row together are often the least willing to get in the boat.
In the corporate world, this manifests as quiet quitting of company retreats. When employees attend only because it is mandatory, the experience rarely achieves its purpose.
To bridge the gap between an event’s objective and participants’ attitudes, we need to confront the data. Research suggests that while 80% of leaders believe team-building improves morale, only 31% of employees actually enjoy these activities. That disconnect is hard to ignore.
The Team Building Mismatch
Despite good intentions, many team-building initiatives miss the mark because they are designed around assumptions that do not reflect how people work or connect. Two common examples illustrate this gap.
First, there is the extrovert bias. Most activities favor high energy and constant interaction, which can feel like an exhausting performance for the 40-50% of your team who are introverts,
Second, there is work recovery debt. When teams are already overwhelmed by deadlines, a day spent building marshmallow towers feels more like a punishment. The work does not disappear; it simply waits until 5:00 PM.
A powerful counterpoint comes from Google’s Project Aristotle. After years of studying high-performing teams, Google found that success wasn’t driven by personality types or shared activities, it was psychological safety.
Team building fails when it tries to force bonding. Real development happens when an event creates a safe space for people to be vulnerable. If employees fear judgment or exclusion, opting out becomes a rational survival strategy.
Navigating the Multicultural Maze
In a globalized workforce, neutral doesn’t mean boring. It means removing cultural barriers.
Some cultures focus on shared meals and informal time to build trust, while others build trust through clear objectives and efficiency.
The neutral solution will be to use universal levelers like culinary challenges or design sprints. These rely on non-verbal collaboration and technical skill rather than linguistic idioms or culture-specific humor.
The Budget Question: Do You Need Deep Pockets?
The short (and only) answer is: No. Throwing money at a disconnected team often makes things worse, not better. Effectiveness is tied to intent, not the price of the wine. And this is good news.
There are a few options that work well, such as:
- Failure swap: Leaders admitting mistakes builds instant psychological safety.
- Office hackathon: Solving a non-work problem fosters shared ownership.
- Volunteer day: Provides shared significance and acts as a cultural leveler.
- The offsite: Signals the company values the team’s rest and future.
Harvard research shows that engineered proximity, like overlapping coffee breaks, is a better predictor of success than expensive retreats. You need to create organic opportunities for people to connect.
One effective way to turn this insight into action is to give teams a shared purpose that requires real collaboration By tasking a team with solving a tangible, high-stakes problem for a third party (e.g., building a community tech hub), you tap into the “IKEA Effect”: a cognitive bias where people value what they helped create. Collaborative labor on a legacy project creates shared significance that a bowling night never could.
Do’s and Don’t’s of Team Development
To make team development meaningful, leaders need to be intentional about how activities are designed and delivered. The following do’s and don’t’s offer practical guidance for creating experiences that build trust instead of resistance.
- DO give agency. Let the team vote on the activity. Participation increases when people have skin in the game.
- DON’T force vulnerability. Avoid trust falls with people who don’t yet trust each other.
- DO schedule during work hours. If it’s for work, it should happen on work time. Don’t steal their weekends.
- DON’T ignore the aftermath. Don’t go back to a toxic office on Monday and act like the pottery class fixed the culture.
Conclusion
Stop aiming for fun and start aiming for shared significance. Whether it’s a zero-budget storytelling circle or a global legacy project, the goal is the same: creating a space where every team member – introvert, extrovert, local, or international – feels it is safer to be in the boat than on the shore.
Note from the author: my husband and I met at a work team building event 22 years ago. Team building, after all, could really have a long lasting effect.
Trainer & Consultant
International Institute for Learning (IIL)
Jorgelina is an accomplished industrial engineer, project manager, and consultant with solid international experience in various industries. She has conducted numerous projects in more than 15 countries in Latin and North America, Europe, and Asia. She is a results-oriented leader, with excellent communication and facilitation skills.
