I think there is a tendency to overthink team building. Sometimes you just want to get people out of the office, give them something different to do and let them enjoy themselves.
That’s a perfectly good reason to book a team-building event and, in fact, it’s one of the reasons EML exists. People don’t always get enough time together outside of the day-to-day, so putting them in a room with a challenge to solve can be enough to get them talking to someone they wouldn’t normally work with, laughing about something that’s gone wrong and seeing a different side of a colleague.
You don’t necessarily need to turn that into a learning intervention; sometimes having a good time together is enough.
There are also occasions, though, when a client knows there are things within the team that need a bit of attention. Perhaps communication could be better, people aren’t as connected as they’d like, there’s been a lot of change, or there are things that simply haven’t had the opportunity to be talked about. That’s where I see Team Unity fitting into the EML offer.
I’m the Learning and Development lead at EML and my background is in people and organisational development, so I’m naturally interested in what happens when people are put into situations where they have to work together.
I’m also fairly direct in how I work; if something isn’t working, I’ll ask why, and if I think we’re avoiding an issue, I’ll probably say so.
Team Unity brings that approach into a proper EML team building experience.
We use discussion alongside practical activities such as Agile Ball Flow and Triangulate, not because the activities themselves are the answer, but because they give us something real to work with. Watching a team try to get a ball through a series of channels when nobody quite agrees on the best approach tells you considerably more about communication than asking everyone to rate themselves on a five-point scale.
The same applies when we introduce a change into an activity and suddenly the plan they’ve just spent ten minutes agreeing needs to be reconsidered. You get a reaction, you get a conversation and, quite often, you get people recognising something that happens in their working environment too.
That is really the flow of the workshop. We do something, we talk about what happened, we challenge some of the assumptions that come out of it and then we move on. It isn’t a day of sitting around discussing teamwork, but equally it isn’t a succession of activities with no time to think about what they’ve shown us. The balance between the two is important, because it keeps people involved while giving them space to talk about the things that matter to them.
That’s particularly true when we get to Wind in the Sails and Anchors. We ask the team to look at what’s helping them move forward and what’s holding them back, and because everyone gets the opportunity to contribute, it can uncover some very useful things. Sometimes it’s something simple that can be addressed quite quickly; sometimes it’s a bigger issue that the organisation needs to think about. Either way, I take the findings away and produce a report for the client, bringing together the themes that have come out of the exercise.
It means the conversation doesn’t simply disappear when everyone leaves the room and gives the organisation something useful to take forward.
For me, that’s where Team Unity adds something to the EML offer. It still feels like EML – people are up and about, they’re involved, they’re working together and they’re enjoying themselves – but there’s another layer running through the day. We’re giving people an opportunity to have their say, challenge some of the ways they work together and perhaps identify a few things that could make life easier or the team stronger.
And that’s really all Team Unity is trying to do. It isn’t about suggesting that ordinary team building isn’t valuable because it absolutely is. It’s about recognising that sometimes you’ve got everyone together, you’ve created the right environment and people are willing to get involved, so why not use that opportunity to explore a little more?
That’s the space Team Unity occupies within EML.
With over two decades in corporate team building, I’m Co-founder and Lead Facilitator at EML Team Building. We help organisations strengthen collaboration through innovative, engaging, and outcome-driven experiences.
Since 2000, I’ve worked with 6,000+ teams from globally recognised organisations—including American Express, Deloitte, and Danone—designing and delivering tailored events that build trust, improve communication, and elevate performance.
I believe in collaboration that works—sessions designed to be business-relevant, energising, and immediately useful back at the desk.
