Full-Day Team Building — Financial Services

The challenge

The client had run team-building days for three consecutive years using the same format: a rented venue, a facilitated morning activity, lunch, and an afternoon speaker. Employee feedback had plateaued. Participation was high because it was mandatory, but engagement scores from their internal surveys had flattened. They wanted a genuinely different format without going so far outside their culture that people felt uncomfortable.

Our approach

• We ran two discovery conversations before writing a single proposal — one with the HR director, one with a panel of four employees representing different departments and tenure levels. The employee panel told us two things directly: the previous formats felt passive, and the teams formed for activities were always the same people who already worked together.
• The format we designed ran four parallel 90-minute activity tracks in the morning — culinary, trivia, problem-solving, and a charitable build — with teams cross-assigned across departments and seniority levels. Every employee did two tracks before lunch, with a different team for each.
• The afternoon was a combined plenary: team representatives from each morning track presented a two-minute summary of what their group built or accomplished. This was low-stakes enough that it worked without rehearsal, and high-engagement enough that it held the room.
• The charitable build track produced 42 assembled care kits for a local community organization. The handoff to that organization was incorporated into the afternoon session.

Outcome

• —Post-event engagement survey scores for the team-building program increased 31 percentage points compared to the prior year.
• —The cross-departmental mixing was specifically cited in 68 percent of survey responses as the element they most wanted to repeat.
• —The charitable component generated internal social media activity that the company had not seen from a team-building event before.
• —The format has since been adapted and run for two of the firm's regional offices in Calgary and Red Deer.

"The difference between this and what we had done before was that people were actually doing something — not watching a speaker or filling out a worksheet. That sounds obvious but it takes real design work to pull off at 140 people."

HR Director — Financial services firm, Edmonton

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