The Power of Purposeful Team Building

Team building exercises.

When you read that phrase, I’ll bet you pictured something like trust falls, escape rooms, or cheesy icebreakers. For some of us, these are fun, harmless activities that foster temporary goodwill and presumably forge closer connections. But for other team members, these events can spike nerves or spark problems.

While I believe these activities have their time and place, there are much more intentional ways to go about team building that can make more of an impact. With purposeful team building, we can reinforce our corporate values, forge deeper connections to each other, our local communities, and connect on a more human level.

Here’s how we do it.

Insert: Purposeful Team Building

Purposeful team building means designing activities that connect our team to a cause larger than ourselves, giving us a sense of shared responsibility and achievement beyond the day-to-day grind.

With purposeful team building, we start with the end goal of fostering stronger working relationships, then work backward to create activities that genuinely connect us. A reverse engineering of sorts: starting with the end in mind.

Let me explain…

A lot of office politics come from a limited perspective. We all commit to a lot of hours every week, so it’s easy to fall into a perspective that inflates the importance of what we do at our desks each day, and minimizes the significance of the world beyond them.

If we want to eliminate the internal barriers to better working together, we need to remind ourselves that, at the end of the day, we’re all just people. What happens within the virtual walls of our office matters, but it obviously isn’t our only defining element. There is more to each of us than meets the eye.

That’s why I believe that when we rally behind a shared mission – one that transcends business goals and reconnects us to our outside-of-work humanity – something special happens.?

There’s a sense of unity that comes from working together to serve a common good. A good that exists beyond our individual or corporate goals. It creates deeper bonds that last well beyond the original experience.

Shared Purpose, Stronger Bonds

Recently, the Act! team spent an afternoon volunteering with Feed My Starving Children (FMSC), a nonprofit organization dedicated to fighting childhood malnutrition. In just a few hours, together with other volunteers, we packed over 27,000 meals for children in need. It was a well-coordinated operation where more than 50 volunteers worked within a warehouse to measure out, package and palletize thousands of pounds of food.?

Beyond the obvious beauty of giving back, we also got to work together on something that didn’t involve the daily KPIs, quarterly reports, or which department did what; it was centered around compassion, empathy, and collaboration.

This experience was a great reminder that the strongest teams aren’t just built by working together in the office—they’re created by standing together for something bigger than ourselves. That’s what teamwork is all about anyway, right?

By focusing on that end goal: collaboration and unity, we could work our way backward into a team-building effort that got us there, (instead of the more common method of wandering aimlessly through icebreakers and hoping we find the finish line along the way).

Living Company Values in Action

Of course, the real value of this exercise comes from the foundation: uniting around a common goal and bettering the community around us. The teamwork aspect is the cherry on top.

At Act!, we value service, community, and making an impact. But it’s one thing to have those words on our website or plastered on posters and another entirely to actively live them out. Volunteering gives us a chance to put those values into action. By working side-by-side to create change, we’re not just reinforcing the company’s mission—we’re deepening our commitment to each other.

The Ripple Effect of Giving Back

The bottom line is that thanks to this experience, I’ve come to realize that giving back doesn’t just benefit those who receive—it creates a ripple effect within the team as well. After our afternoon with FMSC, our team didn’t just walk away feeling accomplished. We walked away with a sense of shared empathy for both the community and each other.

It’s easy to measure team success in terms of productivity or sales, but these moments of collective impact are the ones that I think truly shape corporate culture. They remind us of the bigger picture, the “why” behind what we do every day.

A Purpose-Driven Culture

And if you need yet another business reason to consider purposeful team building, rest assured, there are more.?

We all know that employees are increasingly looking for more purpose in their work. They want to feel like their job has meaning beyond a bottom line. By incorporating giving into team-building activities, we’re helping to solidify a purpose-driven culture – practicing what we preach for our clients and the world beyond them.?

One of the things I love most about Act! - and our team - is that at our core, we’re all here to build up local communities with the work we do each day. Act! is, after all, designed to help small-to-midsize businesses thrive – and we recognize that they are the lifeblood and backbone of our local economies. So we do what we can to infuse that purpose into every decision we make. Volunteering to support our local community outside of work is just another way we can align our efforts with that purpose.?

We look forward to engaging in more activities like this and hope it inspires your next round of purposeful team building—assemble your team for something truly meaningful.