How to Tell If It Worked

Team building is unusually hard to evaluate, so most organisations use the one measure they can collect easily, which is whether people said they enjoyed it. Enjoyment is not nothing. It is also the measure least connected to whether anything changed.

A post-event survey mostly captures the last twenty minutes and the quality of the food. People are agreeable in surveys, particularly about something a colleague organised. A room full of fours out of five tells you almost nothing about whether the team works differently on Monday.

Better signals show up later and look less like data.

People refer back to it unprompted. A week after something worked, it gets mentioned. Someone brings up what they learned about a colleague, in a meeting, with no prompting from whoever organised it. If nobody mentions it after three days, it did not land, whatever the survey said.

New pairs of people start talking. The clearest sign is two colleagues who previously had no reason to interact now interacting directly. This is worth actually watching for, because it is the mechanism by which any of this pays off.

Somebody new speaks in a meeting. If a person who had been quiet contributes in the following weeks, something shifted. It will not be attributable with certainty and it is still the outcome you wanted.

The follow-up question rate goes up. Teams that know each other ask each other more basic questions, because asking one is less risky. A rise in people saying they do not understand something is a good sign, even though it feels like the opposite.

None of these are metrics in the sense finance means. You cannot put them on a slide with a percentage. That is a genuine problem when budget season arrives, and there is no honest way around it. What you can do is stop offering a number that means nothing in place of observations that mean something. "Three people who had never spoken are now working together directly" is a weaker claim statistically and a stronger one in reality.

There is one more test, and it is the most useful of the lot. Would the team be annoyed if it stopped? Anything that started as an imposition and has quietly become something people expect has crossed over into being part of how the team works. That is the whole goal, and it is visible without a survey.