Gender and Corporate Team Building Activities: Does It Matter?
It’s one of the very first questions I ask during initial consultation with companies planning corporate team building activities: what’s the male-female breakdown?
I don’t request this information out of curiosity, or to help the venue with the drink selection. For our trivia team building events, it’s vitally important to make the teams as balanced as possible, and that of course means having an equal number of men and women on each team.
But beyond equality for competitive group bonding events such as ours, does gender really play a role in the ultimate effect of a corporate team building exercise? I don’t have an academically sound answer, only this: in my experience, no.
Let’s take a step back, as I often encourage those planning these staff bonding activities to do, and think about why we are thinking of running an event in the first place. In addition to blowing off steam and having a good time, the take-home goal of the team building event typically falls into one of the below categories:
- To improve employee morale, which may be low for any number of reasons
- To help integrate new teams or team members
- To encourage better teamwork, collaboration and/or communication skills among a group
- To foster employee loyalty and buy-in for new strategic initiatives
When examining the above list through the “gender lens,” does anything in particular stand out? Yes, one might argue that women are naturally better communicators than men, or that men are less interested in becoming friendly with co-workers than women. But from what I’ve seen at our NYC corporate team building events, so long as the activity or venue isn’t displaying a blatant gender bias and both male and female attendees are equally involved and engaged in the activity, then they will equally benefit from the lessons being imparted.
However, that’s just my unscholarly observation. What do you think – does attendee gender play a role in how effective a corporate team building activity will be?
Have a great weekend, everybody –will see you next week!