Team building or team bonding?

“Incentive” events or programs are primarily motivational events for employees and other stakeholders of companies or organizations whose main purpose is to raise morale, affiliation or motivation to work or participate. As such, they have found themselves in the throes of business tourism and education. These programs share another important element – the experience. The key to them what participants will do or experience.

Team building programs require active participation

Therefore, the term incentive program is often mixed or even equated with the term team building program, which is not always the case. Team building programs are about actively working to build stronger bonds between participants – team members. The team building program is targeted and is led by (preferably an external) moderator or educational trainer. In some cases, this can also be a leader or team member if he/she has the appropriate knowledge and experience. The event can be a workshop, active program, a sports or adrenaline event. Its only point is that it is goal-driven and always ends with an evaluation of team work, finding improvements, and drawing up an action plan.

Some divide team buildings into professional and fun. At this point, we should emphasize that team buildings should be fundamentally fun, as the key task of the moderator is to provide a relaxed and collaborative atmosphere. To succeed, every professional team building must be fun, but not every fun program is a team building. Therefore, the division into fun and professional is not completely correct.

Team building is not team bonding

Notwithstanding the misconception of the public (and unfortunately by most quasi-professionals), team building is not an afternoon bowling; a trip to an adrenaline park at the end of a project or a New Year’s Eve dinner with your team. But there are too many agencies on the market that do just that – every fun/sports/adrenaline event is often marketed as team building, which is misleading and far from the essence of such programs. That is why the professional public has introduced a new term for such programs in practice: team bonding programs.

Team bonding programs can also strengthen the bonds of the team – the only difference is that this happens spontaneously and mostly to no purpose. However, a predefined goal helps to evaluate the success of the program, so evaluating the (un)success of team bonding programs is difficult. The term team bonding therefore defines mostly fun events where employees hang out outside the work environment and do things they would normally not do at work (eg, a dinner, rafting, cycling or sailing).