Team building people actually enjoy.
Team Building That Doesn’t Suck
If you're searching for team building that isn't cheesy, awkward, boring, forced, childish, annoying, or likely to make half the room suddenly remember a dentist appointment, you're probably not looking for more team-building activities.
You're looking for a different kind of team building.
Make Believe Works creates creative, non-competitive workshops designed to help coworkers connect without awkward icebreakers, forced vulnerability, manufactured enthusiasm, or putting people on the spot.
Because most people don't actually hate connecting with their coworkers.
They hate bad team building.
So do we.
Most team building doesn’t actually build the team.
It entertains the team with something fun. It gives them a break from work by splitting them into new teams and asking them to beat each other. It brings them together so the loud people can get loud, the quiet people can get quiet, and the friends can hang out together.
None of those things are necessarily bad. Sometimes an escape room is exactly what you need.
But if you're spending the time and money to bring people together, we think the experience can do something more.
Team building shouldn’t be a temporary distraction from work. It should improve how you work together when you go back.
Your coworkers don't need to become your friends. But the quality of your relationships with them affects the quality of your work.
That means helping coworkers understand each other better.
Making it safe for people to lower their guard.
Giving quieter people ways to participate.
Creating opportunities to practice curiosity, trust, generosity, creativity, and interpersonal risk-taking.
In other words:
Actually building the team.
Some things have to be experienced to be learned.
Companies talk a lot about trust, psychological safety, resilience, creativity, collaboration, and belonging.
They put them in values statements. They discuss them in meetings. They explain them in trainings.
But knowing something matters, believing it matters, and actually behaving differently are three different things.
You don't build psychological safety by defining psychological safety.
You build it when someone offers an unfinished idea and discovers that the room is curious instead of critical.
You don't build trust by telling people to trust each other.
You build it when someone takes a small interpersonal risk and learns that the people around them have their back.
You don't build resilience by putting the word resilience on a slide.
You build it by trying something uncertain, making a mess of it, adapting, and discovering that nothing terrible happened.
That's what a good team-building activity can provide:
Practice.
A low-stakes place to experience the behaviors and relationships you want people to carry back into the work.
Because sometimes the difference between a value on the wall and a value people actually live is simply having had a chance to feel what it looks like in practice.
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What do people mean when they say they hate team building?
We've heard enough versions of this sentence to know that “I hate team building” can mean a lot of different things.
Usually, it means one or more of these.
“Please don't make it cheesy.”
Usually this doesn't mean people object to fun.
It means they don't want to be told how they're supposed to feel.
Cheesy team building tends to manufacture the emotional outcome before the experience has earned it: instant enthusiasm, instant vulnerability, instant bonding, followed by an inspirational debrief explaining what everyone supposedly learned.
We'd rather create an experience worth responding to and trust people to respond in their own way.
“My team is going to think this is lame.”
Translation: respect their intelligence.
Adults are perfectly capable of playing.
They tell stories. Make things. Solve puzzles. Draw. Improvise. Experiment. Joke around. Invent. Imagine.
Play isn't childish.
Treating adults like children is.
Good team building can be playful without being patronizing.
“Please, no awkward icebreakers.”
The problem isn't always the icebreaker.
It's being given 45 seconds to manufacture something personal, funny, revealing, or memorable about yourself while everyone else watches.
We don't think connection should be an assignment.
Give people something genuinely interesting to do together and conversation has somewhere to begin.
“My people hate forced fun.”
As they should!
You can require attendance. You can require participation.
You cannot require enthusiasm.
So we don't.
Our job is to create something interesting enough that people actually enjoy it and become curious about what happens next.
Curiosity works surprisingly well.
“Honestly, I'd rather you just give me the money.”
We've heard plenty of versions of this one too:
I'd rather have the afternoon off. I'd rather spend the money myself. I'd rather hang out with people I actually chose to be friends with.
And there's something important underneath that complaint.
Your coworkers aren't your chosen family. They don't need to become your best friends. And nobody should pretend that a two-hour workshop is more valuable than the people you love outside of work.
But you do spend an enormous amount of your life working with these people.
You depend on them. You disagree with them. You ask them for help. You give and receive feedback. You share unfinished ideas. You make mistakes in front of them. You solve problems together.
The quality of those relationships affects the quality of the work.
That's why we don't think team building should simply be a reward for working hard or a pleasant distraction from work.
If a company is going to ask people to give up a few hours of their time, the experience should earn that time.
Team building should improve how it feels to work together after the team building is over.
It should make working together a little easier. Help people understand one another better. Create conversations that wouldn't normally happen. Make it safer to ask for help, offer an unfinished idea, disagree, or make a mistake.
If an afternoon together doesn't make that even a little more likely, then honestly, maybe you should have given everyone the afternoon off.
“I don't want people embarrassed or put on the spot.”
Neither do we.
Nobody should be forced to sing, perform a skit, make a speech, reveal something deeply personal, or suddenly become the center of attention for the activity to work.
Yes, connection does involve interpersonal risk. But there's a difference between choosing to take a small risk because the environment feels safe enough and having one dropped on you by a facilitator holding a microphone.
We design for the first.
“I don't want something boring.”
That’s the trick. Purposeful does not have to mean serious.
Good team building should have surprise in it. Curiosity. Movement. Discovery. Humor. Moments people couldn't have predicted before they walked into the room.
The goal isn't to disguise a lecture as an activity.
The activity itself should be worth doing.
“We've already done every team-building activity.”
That’s why we design entirely original activities. No scavenger hunts, no trivia games.
But more importantly, the activity itself isn't really the point.
The question is what the design allows people to experience with one another.
An escape room, cooking class, ropes course, or happy hour can all be enjoyable.
What matters to us is whether the experience changes something about the way people see, understand, or interact with the people around them. That’s what we design for.
“They're senior executives. I cannot make them do anything ridiculous.”
We hear this one a lot.
The stakes may be higher, but the design challenge is basically the same: give intelligent adults something unusual and worthwhile to do together, explain just enough for them to understand why they're doing it, and don't waste their time.
Playful and purposeful are not opposites.
Neither are sophisticated and fun.
“Half the group are introverts.”
That’s why we don't design the experience entirely around extroverted behavior.
Good participation shouldn't depend on talking first, loudest, or longest, thinking fastest, or enjoying the spotlight.
We structure our activities to make participation easier for all types of personalities by giving everyone a role, something to think about, and a reason to contribute on their own terms.
How do you choose team building people won't hate?
Before you book something, try our Anti-Cringe Test:
1. Does it respect adults' intelligence?
Can participants understand why they're being asked to do what they're doing?
2. Can people participate without pretend enthusiasm?
Nobody should have to act excited for the activity to succeed.
3. Does it work for quieter people as well as louder people?
If success depends on commanding the room, you're only designing for part of the room.
4. Does anyone have to embarrass themselves?
Surprise is good.
Humiliation isn't.
5. Is somebody required to lose?
Competition can be fun, but if connection is the objective, ask whether winners and losers actually help.
6. Is there a purpose behind the activity?
Not a metaphor invented afterward.
An actual design reason for what people are doing. Will this feel worth their time when they look back on it?
7. Will people discover something new about one another?
If the experience would be just as meaningful with 30 strangers, how much team building is actually happening?
8. Would the experience still be worthwhile if nobody called it “team building”?
A good activity should be interesting, enjoyable, or meaningful on its own. “Team building” shouldn’t be an excuse for an experience nobody would otherwise want. The label shouldn’t be doing the work. The experience should earn people’s time on its own.
What does Make Believe Works do differently?
We design experiences around a few simple principles.
We make team building non-competitive.
Competition is great at creating energy.
It's less reliable at creating connection.
Our activities don't have winners, losers, rankings, scoreboards, or prizes for being fastest, smartest, funniest, loudest, or most talented.
Instead of trying to outperform one another, people are given reasons to pay attention to one another, support one another, and build something together.
The goal isn't to prove who's best.
It's to prove that better connection is within reach.
We remove the pressure to be perfect.
Our workshops use creativity, but you don't need to be artistic, funny, theatrical, clever, athletic, or extroverted to be great at them.
In fact, we often build constraints into an activity specifically to make conventional talent less useful. This is about empathy, not artistry.
Nobody is there to make a masterpiece.
They're there to have an experience together.
We create small interpersonal risks.
Trust isn't built by announcing that everyone should trust one another.
It's built through experience.
We call this Safe Danger: small, structured interpersonal risks inside conditions designed to feel safe enough to try.
So our activities create small, structured opportunities to reveal something, make something, offer something, interpret something, or try something without knowing exactly how it will be received.
Those little moments matter.
When people take a small risk and discover that the people around them respond with curiosity, kindness, or generosity, they become a little more willing to take the next one.
What does team building that actually builds the team look like?
It can look deceptively simple or delightfully strange.
People might make deliberately imperfect portraits of one another while exchanging stories.
They might anonymously turn another person's hope for the coming year into an object.
They might create symbols, stories, strange inventions, visual metaphors, tiny artifacts, unexpected gifts, or things that are hard to explain without ruining them.
Different activities work differently.
But each is designed to create conditions where people become more curious about one another, share things that don't normally come up at work, and interact outside their usual workplace patterns.
The activity isn't the outcome.
It's the mechanism.
Does any of this actually work?
We care about whether people enjoy our workshops and whether the experience contributes to the kind of team people actually want to work on. So we ask.
After our sessions we send out anonymous surveys to get honest feedback.
Here’s what we hear from participants about Make Believe Works workshops:
98% of participants say the experience contributed to the company culture they want to work in.
98% say it was time well spent and they're glad they participated.
99% say they would recommend the experience to a friend or colleague.
One Spotify participant put it more simply:
“Finally! Team building that doesn't suck!”
That's a pretty good summary of what we're going for.
Ready for team building that actually builds the team?
Make Believe with us today.
Frequently asked questions about team building that doesn’t suck
What are good team-building activities for people who hate team building?
Look for experiences that don't depend on forced enthusiasm, public performance, competition, or putting individuals on the spot.
Good activities for skeptical groups give people something genuinely interesting to do together, provide enough structure that participation feels easy, and create natural opportunities for coworkers to talk and learn about one another.
The goal isn't to persuade people to like team building.
It's to give them an experience worth liking.
How do you make team building not feel cheesy?
Don't try to manufacture emotion.
Avoid telling participants how meaningful, inspirational, hilarious, or transformative something is supposed to be before they've experienced it.
Design a worthwhile activity, explain why people are doing it, facilitate it well, and let the participants decide what it means to them.
Authenticity usually feels less cheesy because it doesn't require pretending.
What are alternatives to awkward icebreakers?
Instead of asking people to immediately say something interesting or personal about themselves, give them a task, object, question, creative constraint, or shared experience that creates a natural reason to talk.
Conversation is usually easier when it has somewhere to start.
Can team building be fun without being competitive?
Absolutely.
Competition is only one way to create energy.
Curiosity, creativity, surprise, humor, discovery, storytelling, and making something together can all create energy without dividing people into winners and losers.
For groups focused on trust and connection, that distinction can matter.
What team building works for introverts?
Look for activities with structure, thinking time, small-group interaction, and multiple ways to contribute.
Avoid formats where participation is dominated by whoever talks first, thinks fastest, or is most comfortable performing in front of the room.
Good team building doesn't require introverts to temporarily become extroverts.
What makes team building feel childish?
Usually not play itself.
Team building feels childish when it is patronizing, overly simplistic, excessively performative, or disconnected from the intelligence and experience of the people participating.
Adults can play seriously.
The key is giving them something worth engaging with.
What if employees are skeptical about team building?
Let them be skeptical.
We don't need everyone to walk in convinced.
In fact, some of our favorite participants begin the session with folded arms.
The goal isn't to talk people into enthusiasm.
It's to create an experience good enough to earn their participation.
Is team building worth the time and money?
It depends on what the experience actually accomplishes.
If team building is simply entertainment, employees may reasonably prefer the money, the time off, or another perk.
But a well-designed experience can improve the relationships through which work happens: how comfortable people feel asking for help, sharing ideas, disagreeing, taking risks, making mistakes, and working through challenges together.
Team building earns its place when something about working together is better afterward.
Team building should make the team better.
It can be fun.
It can be weird.
It can be a welcome break from work.
But when everyone goes back to their desks, meetings, Slack channels, deadlines, and difficult conversations, something should be different.
Maybe people understand each other a little better.
Maybe someone feels safer offering an unfinished idea.
Maybe two coworkers who rarely talk have practiced being curious about one another instead of merely working beside one another.
That's team building.
The rest is just an activity.
Make Believe Works creates creative, non-competitive team-building workshops people actually enjoy.
For teams who want stronger relationships without awkward bonding exercises, meaningful connection without forced fun, and an experience their people won't spend the week dreading.
Contact Us
We’d love to help your team connect and thrive. Tell us about your event or goals and let’s make a plan.
Reach us at: hello@makebelieveworks.com
What Participants Are Saying:
Make Believe Works reinvents connection and development with its unique, fun, engaging and highly impactful workshops. Most recently, their ‘Super-Secret’ activation facilitated what our team called ‘the most meaningful & fun’ virtual get-to-know you’s they’ve ever participated in. We can’t wait to work with them again!
— Naomi G., Director, Business Planning & Strategy, American Express
"I usually dread team building activities, but this was different. The facilitation was magical and made all the difference. I sincerely enjoyed the process and learning so many new things about my colleagues. Thanks for pushing me out of my comfort zone. Absolutely want more of these."
— Amy O., Design Manager, Spotify