Importance of Team Building – Afternoon Tea Week Survey Results 2022

For Afternoon Tea Week in August this year we carried out a survey on hard working Dublin teams and how they manage team building in their workplace. 

90% of the teams we surveyed said that team building was an extremely important part of the workplace. However, a quarter of them admitted that they only meet up every couple of months. In a post-pandemic world, 5% of people work from home full time while 43% of people have developed a hybrid working style. This means that building a strong team and creating a collaborative work environment is more important than ever before. One person said that their “team has not been all together in person since the start of Covid in March 2020.”

Building face to face relationships helps to “build trust and collegiality.” It gives people a chance to “get a sense of their coworkers” and “appreciate how hard everyone works.” In many workplaces new staff members have not even had the opportunity to meet many of their colleagues face to face and for most people “it’s impossible to build a relationship over the computer.”

In healthcare environments “developing a strong team means delivery of high quality care for patients.” One medical professional explained that “for the past few years due to covid, as frontline workers, [they] didn’t have any opportunity to have team building activities. [They] would like just to spend even an hour altogether having a chat away from work.” 60% of people said that their favourite part of working in the office was being around their coworkers and 95% of people prefer having meetings face to face.

“Human interaction is so important and can’t be replicated online. Online meetings are really convenient and have their place, but you can’t beat being in the same room for picking up on issues quickly and being there to support.”

So what kind of activities are groups looking for when planning team building events?

People said that they want “something new, different & fun” that’s not “putting anyone in awkward positions.” Many groups expressed that they have trouble finding activities that suit a team with a wide age range. That is something that we can relate to at Vintage Tea Trips. Our team consists of TY students all the way to retired Dublin Bus drivers. Finding “something to suit everyone from 18 to 65 is a difficult task.” You need an activity that is inclusive, “ideally with nice food & a few drinks.” 26% of the people said that they love to gossip with their colleagues over a cuppa in “a relaxed atmosphere where people can get to know each other without the pressures of work.”

We love having teams onboard our buses! We can run exclusive trips for you and your team with a custom route including pick up and/or drop off. You won’t even have to fight about who will make the tea – we’ll do that for you! We’ve had the likes of Meta, LinkedIn, Etsy & Google on board, as well as many others. We have 4 lovely buses in our fleet (Pauline, Kitty, Molly & Jean) so can cope with groups of any size and can provide for any allergy or dietary requirements. Team building “helps to build trust, better collaboration & creativity” and can help “foster relationships among team members and their managers.”

So hop on board with us and experience afternoon tea the Irish way. You can sit back, tap along to some fabulous 1950s jazz and share a cuppa with the team.