Shared experiences range from playing golf with your fellow bankers, or drinking in a pub, to hazing rituals in sports teams. However, hazing is not good for teamwork since it involves a great deal of stress but has no meaning. In other words, hazing activities only harm motivation and make your team less productive.
Ultimately, it is a question of meaning: with correct framing, something that might otherwise be considered a hazing activity could actually be a formative one. It is all about balancing stress with a clear sense of purpose, according to an article on the strategy-business.com website.
Examples of beneficial shared experiences
Social activities: This may be a team dinner, where there is no real deeper meaning and the stress is also very low. Use dinners to allow your colleagues to learn more about one another. Such events are good for increasing emotional intelligence among your team.
Hobby activities: Here there is a high degree of meaning. People do such activities because they enjoy them but they also want to be good at them. These activities can have a competitive nature. They include golf, bowling or cooking.
Formative activities: These are very stressful but also highly meaningful. An obvious example would be a military boot camp. Creating similar experiences outside the military world is not easy but you can always organise an obstacle course race or work together on an important business objective.
For example, PwC hosted an on-boarding, timed bike-building event. People worked with people they didn’t know and had to build as many bikes as they could. The task was new for them so there was some stress involved. The bikes were then to be given to children in need, so meaning was provided as well.
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