Pizza parties, bowling nights, and escape rooms are fun, and these kinds of recreational experiences certainly serve a purpose in the workplace.

However, the key to building long-term connections and collaboration on your team is to prioritize ongoing activities that foster more meaningful dialogue and problem-solving — especially in a time of declining employee trust and engagement.

Consider the research: The SHRM Q4 2024 Civility Index, released in December, found that 45% of U.S. workers said their ability to trust one another will get worse or much worse in 2025. Plus, in PwC’s 2024 Trust Survey, 86% of executives said they highly trust their employees, but only 67% of employees said they highly trust their employer — a 19-point gap that’s wider than in previous years.

“The state of trust in today’s workplaces is dismal,” said Jennifer Dulski, CEO of Rising Team, citing return-to-office mandates, repeated layoffs, and overwhelmed managers as a few contributing factors to these feelings. “Team dynamics need more attention than ever. Though we’re starting from a low point, it’s possible to build high-trust, high-connecting teams, even in a distributed or remote work environment. You just have to be intentional and consistent.”

That consistency is key: One-and-done activities are great in the moment, but they can also just be a bandage.

“Managers should develop a regular framework for collecting team feedback through group discussions and pulse surveys,” said Jay Jones, SHRM-CP, lead, talent and employee experience at SHRM. “They should have a regular cadence for sharing what they’ve done with that feedback and where the team’s heading in the future.”

No matter how your team is structured — in-person, remote, or hybrid — trust-building activities can help people you manage address key challenges, enhance mutual understanding, and forge stronger professional relationships with one another. Here are four possibilities:

Strategy Workshop

Enlist your team to come up with a solution for one real, complex problem facing the organization.

• Identify the problem you’ll tackle in advance: troublesome bottlenecks, diminishing sales, talent shortages, or the like. Ask your team to submit ideas and even vote.
• Set clear goals. Should the team walk away with a set of actionable solutions? A road map? A decision on a key issue?
• Gather background data, such as metrics or customer feedback, and assign pre-reading so everyone arrives prepared.
• Begin the agenda with context setting, followed by diving deep into the problem, ideation/brainstorming, and refining/prioritizing solutions — culminating in action planning and next steps.
• Employ various tools and formats — such as whiteboards, sticky notes, small breakouts, and full-group discussions — to tap into different ways of thinking on your team.
• After the session, distribute notes and action items to set accountability and schedule follow-ups to track progress.

Strengths Assessment

Guide team members to reflect on their top strengths, how they contribute to team success, where commonalities and gaps exist, and what kind of support they need. These options can provide struc-ture: CliftonStrengths for strength-ranking across several domains, DISC for communication and leadership styles, or Myers-Briggs for deep personality insights.

To put everyone’s strengths into action, brainstorm with your team about how to redistribute responsibilities based on these discoveries. Pair employees with complementary strengths on a project so they can learn from each other. Call out team members who use their strengths effectively. And whenever tensions arise, revisit strengths to reframe conflicts as differences in perspective versus personal issues.

Cross-Department Job Swap and Mentoring

To kick off a job swap, each department should create a brief overview of its key responsibilities, tools, workflows, and challenges. Participants should shadow team members to observe and ask questions before taking on small tasks. Hold a debriefing session to reflect on surprises and new ideas.

You can also pair employees from different departments for one-on-one mentoring. For example, a designer could mentor a customer care agent on creative problem-solving, while the agent shares insights about customer pain points.

Each person then shares what they learned from the other.

“User Manual”

This is one of Dulski’s favorite exercises, which she compares to asking an appliance, “How do you best operate?”

Team members answer such questions as:

• “What time of day do you work best?”
• “What are the best ways to communicate with you?”
• “How do you like to receive constructive feedback?”
• “What is your biggest work-related pet peeve?”
• “What do you need to stay productive?”

Have everyone present their answers on a slide, then bookmark the “user manual” for easy team access and revisit it regularly.

Use the deck for onboarding new employees so they can quickly get to know their colleagues better, and vice versa.

Empower Your Team — and Yourself

You may wish to seek out a professional facilitator or colleague who can act as a neutral moderator. There are also several tech platforms — from Cooleaf to FullTilt to Rising Team — that do much of the work for you. But keep this in mind: Even if you decide to run these activities yourself, you don’t need to be an expert.

“Anyone can do it with the right tools and support,” Dulski said. “You’ll be practicing the skills you want to model and showing your team, ‘I care about you and want to understand you.’ Your team will view you in a different light, and, ultimately, you’ll become a better leader.”

Member Resource: Managing Organizational Communication