If you were building a house, would you place a single brick and call it done? If you are only focusing on team building and not culture building, that’s exactly what you’re doing! If team building is your only focus, you’ve crafted a lovely pile of bricks that are just begging to be made into a building. Building the structure is more work, but the result is far stronger than the alternative—a team with strong culture has a better chance to succeed.

People and culture are intrinsically linked. Building culture is something we do everywhere we go, intentionally or no. The culture of your team—and your team certainly has a culture, even if you haven’t taken any steps to cultivate it yet—is a powerful resource that shouldn’t be ignored. In many ways, team building can be culture building, but good culture building goes beyond what team building looks to accomplish.

So What’s the Difference?

So, what is the difference between team and culture building? The goal of team building is right there in the name: building a team. A team exists to fulfill a specific goal. A team’s goal could be an ongoing, open-ended goal. Regardless, a team is temporary, retaining its definition only as long as it takes to fulfill their goal. Culture is a far greater proposition and a more permanent one, as cultures exist to bind people together and pass knowledge down through the generations. The bonds between people of a team last longer than whatever goal they worked to accomplish.

Often, when people talk about the challenges in team building, team building techniques, or team building approaches, they tend to be conflating team and culture. The phrase “team building” has been used for so long when what many workplaces are often seeking culture building. Team building is very insular, all about building immediate, surface-level connections between team members. Culture building is deeper and more organically developed. They’re both built around trust, but team building emphasizes the situational nature of the team, whereas culture lays a foundation of trust that exceeds the bounds of the space in which it was created.

So How Do I Build Culture?

A great place to start in building culture is seeking out culture assessment tools. Look around for ways to analyze company culture or search online for culture building tools or workplace culture training. (TourGuide has created a short quiz to assess team health as a springboard for culture building efforts. Take the quiz here.) Something to keep in mind while searching for assessment tools: instead of looking up “what is team bonding,” what types of team bonding will be best suited for your team?

No one team or company or group is ever going to be the same as any other. With culture being such an organic thing, it’s important to keep the needs of your team in the front of your mind. Watch and see how your team’s culture is currently growing, or what culture has already grown, and start to shape how it grows from here on out. For example, you may need to do some serious repair work if the foundation of trust within your team is lacking. Or if you feel confident about the culture you have in place, you can start taking intentional action to continue its growth.

Find ways to build up and encourage your team members. Work on developing transactive memory to help ensure that vital knowledge is shared and utilized efficiently. Look at the organization of your team and make sure no one person is getting overwhelmed. If you want the culture you are building to be a healthy one, ensure that the environment in which it is growing is also healthy. Find ways to celebrate your team, and not just for their achievements.

That really is the core difference: team building builds the team, culture building builds the people within the culture. If you’d like to know more, check out some of our articles on transactive memory. If you’d like to see what we can offer in terms of our shared storytelling experiences, click here! Or schedule a demo and see how TourGuide Games and our crew of highly skilled TourGuides can help out your team.