The events
The quiz night, judged by the measure
An hour of trivia with six colleagues is a pleasant hour. Judged by whether any pair exists afterwards that did not before, it does nothing, and that is fine.
The people this page is about, and which of them have ever worked together
- 01The team's managerTwo working pairs, both from assigned work rather than from any event
- 02The second engineer
- 03The engineer who joined in MarchAttended every event of the quarter and has no pair
- 04The designer
- 05The QA engineer
five people · 10 possible pairs · 2 of them have worked on something together · 2 have only been in the same meeting · 6 have never done either
Five of the eight, chosen because all five attended every social event of the quarter.
When a team wants evidence without reducing people to a score, distributed team performance monitoring can help connect time and project patterns to a transparent discussion about workload.
For a separate perspective on teams and working practice, consult Project Management Institute.
The six people who attended every social event this team ran, and the pairs among them
- 01The team's managerThree working pairs, all of them from assigned work
- 02The second engineer
- 03The engineer who joined in MarchAttended all of them and has no pair with anybody
- 04The designer
- 05The data analyst
- 06The QA engineer
six people · 15 possible pairs · 3 of them have worked on something together · 2 have only been in the same meeting · 10 have never done either
Six of the eight people counted on this site, taken as a group because all six attended every social event of the quarter.
The team ran a quiz night. Six of the eight attended, it lasted an hour, people enjoyed it, and two of them were funny in a way that surprised everybody. By the measure used on this site it produced nothing: the same three working pairs existed on Friday as on Monday, and the engineer who joined in March, who was there, still has no pair with anybody.
This note is not an argument against quiz nights. It is an argument against expecting one thing from them and getting another.
What a social event does
It does three things, all real.
It makes people visible to each other outside their function. Six colleagues discover that one of them knows an enormous amount about birds. This is information, it is pleasant, and it very slightly lowers the cost of a future conversation.
It produces a shared reference. For a few months the team has a thing that happened to all of them, which is more than most distributed teams have.
It signals that somebody spent money and attention on the team. People read this correctly as a statement about whether they matter, and the statement is worth making.
What it does not do
- It does not transfer how anybody works. The quiz contains no work, so nothing about anybody's working habits, defaults, vocabulary or standards is exposed.
- It does not lower the cost of asking. The cost of asking a colleague a question is a function of whether you have any evidence about how they respond to being asked, and the quiz produces none.
- It does not create an obligation. After the quiz nobody owes anybody anything, and nothing arrives in anybody's work from anybody else.
- And it does not reach the person who most needs reaching. The engineer with no pairs attended, was pleasant, laughed at the right moments and went back to working alone. Social events are poorly targeted by construction: they are offered to everybody and they do most for the people already connected, who have somebody to be funny with.
The substitution problem
The harm, where there is any, is not in the hour. It is that the quiz occupies the slot marked "doing something about the team".
A budget gets spent. A calendar entry gets made. A manager who was worried about cohesion now has evidence that cohesion is being worked on. The worry is relieved, and relief is the thing that stops anybody doing the harder, duller, cheaper interventions that would have moved the grid.
Six months of monthly quizzes is six months in which the team's structural problem was continuously addressed and never touched.
How to have both
Keep the quiz. Stop filing it under team-building and file it under what it is, which is a nice thing to do with colleagues.
Then, separately, do one of the structural things in the last part of this site, and judge that one by the count. The two do not compete for budget — the structural things cost nothing — and they do not compete for time, because giving two people one task is not an event.
The only thing they compete for is the manager's sense that the problem is being handled, and that is worth protecting deliberately. A useful habit: after every social event, write down which pairs existed before and which exist after. It takes two minutes, it will say "no change" every time, and that is exactly what makes it useful.
Who it is easiest for
Worth one paragraph, because it bears on who the event reaches.
A quiz rewards fluency in one language and one culture's general knowledge. Video games reward people comfortable being watched. Drinks reward drinkers, and anything in the evening rewards whoever has no obligations at that hour.
Every format has a group it is easy for, and that group is almost always the group that chose it — people near the centre of the team, in the convenient time zone, who were comfortable enough to volunteer an opinion about what to do. The people who most need an easier first conversation are the ones for whom the format is hardest.
There is a whole note on this in the piece on compulsory fun.
The one social format that does something
There is an exception and it is narrow. An event where people show each other work they have actually done, and get questioned about it, produces something closer to a pair, because the questioning exposes how somebody thinks.
It is not a social event with work bolted on. It is closer to a seminar: one person, one real thing they made, fifteen minutes, and real questions. It is less fun than a quiz and several teams run them monthly without anybody calling it team-building.
Even that does not reliably produce a pair. What it produces is a well-founded reason for two specific people to work together next month, which is one step short and the step that is usually missing.