3 things THAT 25 years of teambuilding taught us
By Yves Vekemans, co-founder, Herculean Alliance
Another Belgian Hercules Trophy season just wrapped up. 450+ corporate teams. A 9.2 average score. All during a heatwave.
Now we’re back in the UAE, where autumn planning is quietly starting. Every year the Belgian season teaches us new lessons, and every year I’m reminded how many of them still catch companies here off guard.
Three of them matter most. And they matter as much for teams in Abu Dhabi and Dubai as they do back in Belgium.
1. The power has flipped.
25 years ago, teambuilding used to be a perk. It started started with the employees. They were the ones who came to management with the idea. Colleagues who wanted to spend a day together outside the office, do something meaningful with their team, break out of the routine. There was a glimmer in their eye when they made the ask. And often, they had to work hard to convince a leadership team that saw it as a nice-to-have. Something soft. Something fluffy. Something a marketing budget could fund but strategy could not.
Back then, the standard answer was often a shortcut. A go-karting afternoon. A pizza dinner. A “one-size-fits-all” package that ticked a box and moved on. It rarely produced anything lasting, but the intention behind it was genuine. The employees wanted the moment. The bosses agreed to fund one.
Today, the picture has reversed.
The C-suite understands what teambuilding is now. Two decades of research, our own included, has made the business case impossible to ignore. Engaged teams outperform disengaged ones on every measure that shows up in a P&L: productivity, innovation, retention, employer brand, and how customers experience the company. Leaders no longer question the why. They question the how. They ask us to design something that actually works, that respects diversity and a tight calendar, and that gives the CFO something defensible to look at afterwards.
But here is where the story has quietly become harder.
The employees, the group that once carried the enthusiasm, are now the ones we need to bring back into the room. Hybrid work has diluted the daily contact that used to build team spirit organically. Younger colleagues are asking harder questions about why they should give a Saturday to an employer. Older colleagues have seen enough poorly executed team days to be skeptical of another one. Everyone is carrying more than they show. The company wants to invest, but the workforce has become harder to invite.
Add to that the NextGen effect. Younger employees increasingly decide which employer they stay with and which they leave. What a company chooses to invest in, and what it makes of the moments where the team gathers, is one of the signals they read closely.
That is the shift we work with every week. 25 years ago, our job was to convince the leadership that this mattered. Today, our job is to design something that the workforce will actually show up for. Something that respects their time, feels different from what they have already sat through, and delivers a result they carry back to Monday morning.
2. The day is not the product. The 6 weeks before the event are.
This is the one companies get wrong most often, and it’s the most expensive mistake. They call us 3 weeks before the event. They want a good day. We can give them a good day, fast. But a good teambuilding that starts in the morning and ends a few hours later is just a box, ticked.
How do you go from “good” to “great”? What actually moves a team is the build-up. In the weeks before people ever set foot on the field, our own engagement platform is already working. Teams form and choose a name. They take on missions. They compete for small stakes. They get curious about each other and about the day.
We built this platform ourselves over 25 years, and it’s what turns a corporate event into an engagement journey. By the time the day arrives, teams don’t show up cold. They show up invested. The anticipation is half the work. The data we gather along the way is the other half — it tells companies which teams are engaged, which are struggling, and where leadership needs to lean in.
That’s the difference between an event and a journey. An event is 4 hours, a day, an evening. A journey is weeks before and months after. If you only plan the half day, you’ve bought the least valuable part.
3. Budgets are tighter, and every INVESTMENT is watched
Nobody signs off on “a nice day out” as easily as they used to. Costs are up, regulations are up, opinions are multiplied, markets are under pressure, and finance asks harder questions. That’s not a reason to do less. It’s a reason to do it properly, not two weeks before.
Because this is exactly where the one-trick-pony formats fall apart. The executive assistant gets pushed to book a venue fast, add some food and drink, bolt an activity on as an afterthought, and you get 3 hours of energy and nothing the Monday after. It disappears fast. It can even backfire, confirming that “teambuilding doesn’t work.” When the budget conversation gets hard, that’s the first thing cut. And it deserves to be.
A real engagement journey survives that conversation, because it keeps paying back. Not for an evening. For months. And when we sit down with a CFO who wants the numbers, we bring them. The engagement data our platform generates during the build-up is exactly the kind of ROI evidence that gets budgets approved.
Why you get more from working with us than from a consulting firm
My co-founder Inge and I, together with our team, have been building Herculean Alliance for more than 25 years from Belgium, across 10 countries, for every culture, age and background you can possibly put in a room. Through Hercules Trophy, Pink Ladies Games and Bravos, we learned how to engage people. We started operating in the UAE in 2009 through a partner, and moved to the region ourselves in 2011. Living here, building here, adapting to the market, not flying in for the day and flying out again. Even during the conflict in the region. Along the way Inge wrote 2 books on employee engagement, because we kept being asked why this works, and the answer deserved more than a slide.
People sometimes assume that makes us an expensive consulting firm, and that working with us requires much more effort than booking a venue and an activity. It doesn’t. We’re a boutique, on purpose, with a trusted circle of specialists we can bring into a client’s solution when the brief calls for it. When you work with us, you work directly with both of us. Not an account manager with a sales target, not a junior three layers down. That’s not a luxury detail. It’s where the return comes from. The companies who’ve done it will tell you the same thing: the ROI comes from the attention.
And it scales in every direction. A one-hour leadership workshop for 10 executives in the desert. A teambuilding for 100 people at The Sevens Stadium. A family day for 1,000 employees and their kids in a corporate compound. From an Abu Dhabi villa to a Dubai stadium. Everyone plays, no one sidelined, all generations engaged. That inclusivity isn’t an add-on. It’s the whole point.
Microsoft, Daman, ENOC, ACWA Power, Mazrui, Deloitte, Novartis, ING, and a long list more, have played with us. You can see what we actually built for each of them, at herculeanalliance.com.
The autumn window is opening. Here’s the honest advice
The best autumn teambuildings we deliver started with a conversation in July. Not because we can’t move fast. We can. But because the build-up is where the return lives, and six weeks is what makes it work.
If you’re planning something for September, October, or November, now is the time.
Yves
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