The case against forced fun
Why mandatory team building is the only kind that reliably fails, and what it is actually measuring.
Attendance is not participation
A mandatory activity has perfect attendance by construction, which means attendance tells you nothing. The only honest signal a team activity can give you is whether people come back when they do not have to — and making it mandatory is precisely what destroys that signal.
It asks the wrong thing of the quiet
Team building that rewards performance in front of colleagues asks introverted and junior people to pay a cost that confident, senior people do not. Then it reports the result as engagement.
What to do instead
Make it optional, make it short, and make it fine to skip without explaining. Then watch the numbers. If participation falls, the activity is wrong — which is information you could not have bought any other way.