How to Plan a Corporate Event When Your Brief Has More Than One Objective

“We want it to be fun, but it also needs to improve communication, reward the team, welcome the new starters and celebrate a big year.”

It’s a completely normal brief, and it’s also where planning can go wrong. When every goal is treated as equally urgent, organisers tend to add more activities, more messages and more agenda items. Guests end up with a busy day, but not necessarily one that hangs together.

The better approach is to rank your corporate event objectives and give each one a clear place in the day. One activity can support several goals, but it can’t carry every business outcome on its own.

Why multi-goal briefs get muddled

Words like “engagement”, “connection” and “celebration” sound clear until different people interpret them differently. For one person, engagement means joining in. For another, it means understanding the strategy. “Team building” might mean helping new starters meet, improving how departments work together or just giving everyone a fun break.

So the first job isn’t choosing the entertainment, it’s agreeing the objective of corporate events in your specific situation. Ask each stakeholder to finish this sentence: “The event will have been worthwhile if people leave having…”

Answers might include meeting colleagues outside their usual team, feeling recognised after a tough period, understanding a couple of new messages, practising communicating under light pressure, welcoming new starters or creating great memories around a milestone. These are far more useful than a list of activities, because they describe a change you can actually plan for.

Choose one main goal

If everything’s a priority, nothing helps you make a decision. Pick the outcome that would make the event a success even if something else had to change, then split the rest into supporting goals (important outcomes the activity, agenda or personalisation can reinforce) and requirements (practical constraints like group size, venue, budget, accessibility and fixed sessions).

Dojo’s Creators Summit is a great example. Its main goal was helping new and remote colleagues meet in person, with celebrating the company and uniting the workforce as supporting goals, and hosting 400 people in limited time as a key requirement. The answer was a personalised Scavenger Hunt for 40 teams, with a 90-minute challenge and 24 bespoke tasks linked to Dojo’s values, followed by a five-minute highlights film that brought everyone back together.

Define what “team building” actually means

The objective of team building activities isn’t automatically “better teamwork”. Decide what teamwork should look like on the day. Do you want people sharing information, listening to unfamiliar colleagues, making quick decisions, contributing ideas or building trust through a relaxed shared experience?

The objective of a team building activity might be as simple as getting people who rarely work together chatting without pressure. Describing that behaviour, rather than just writing “teamwork”, makes it much easier to choose the right activity. A team challenge can spread roles out, a personalised quiz can draw on different kinds of knowledge and a creative task allows more than one right answer.

It also shapes how you form teams. Random groups might suit a social, mixed departments work better for breaking down silos and new starters often do best spread among supportive colleagues rather than grouped together.

Map your goals before your running order

Before planning the timings, make a simple table with four columns: goal, what you want to see, when it happens and how you’ll know it worked. For example:

• Connection: colleagues chat to people outside their team, through mixed teams in the main activity, measured with a quick feedback question about new connections.
• Recognition: achievements are noticed, through the welcome and awards, measured by inclusive thank-yous and examples.
• Company message: guests remember two priorities, through personalised challenges and a short leadership close, measured with a quick pulse check afterwards.
• Enjoyment: people join in willingly and talk about it positively, through a well-paced activity and social time, measured by attendance, observations and feedback.

This stops one long speech carrying all the messages while the social goals are left to chance. It also shows up any clashes, as an intense competition can work against relaxed networking unless the scoring, teams and hosting are carefully planned.

Give each goal its moment

There’s much more to an event than the headline activity.

Arrival: clear instructions, refreshments and a gentle start help people settle. If connection is a goal, don’t leave everyone in department huddles until the activity starts.

Briefing: set the tone and explain the rules and safety info. One sentence linking the activity to the occasion is plenty.

Main activity: choose an activity that encourages the behaviour you want. Personalised challenges can reinforce key messages, but there still needs to be room for play and different ways to contribute.

Finale: use awards, photos or highlights to bring everyone back together, recognising creativity, teamwork or a memorable moment as well as the top score.

Informal time: don’t schedule every minute. Lunch, drinks and transitions give people the chance to carry on conversations that started during the activity.

Match the activity to the goal, not the trend

When comparing team building activities and their objectives, focus on what people will actually be doing. An outdoor Scavenger Hunt mixes movement, navigation, problem-solving and creative photo and video tasks. A Personalised Quiz brings shared knowledge and conversation into one room. Crazy Golf creates light, rotating competition, while the Giant Jenga Challenge and other hosted games offer short bursts of team interaction. You can see them in action on The Big Smoke Events’ YouTube channel.

Don’t pick an activity just because it’s familiar. For an induction, personalised content might matter more than spectacle. For a reward, fun and celebration might matter more than a workshop-style debrief.

Use personalisation with a purpose

Personalisation works best when it supports the brief rather than just decorating it. These case studies show different approaches:

Capgemini: celebrate and reflect. For the finale of its Leadership Development Programme, Capgemini’s Scavenger Hunt combined cryptic clues and company puzzles with challenges linked to participants’ programme journey, while creative tasks produced footage for the final presentations. It was meaningful and fun without feeling like a classroom. Read the Capgemini case study.

Beefeater Gin: welcome and immerse. Beefeater Gin wanted new graduates to meet each other, connect with colleagues and learn about the brand. A bespoke Southbank Scavenger Hunt built around its brand values and knowledge did both at once.

Airtable: reward and transform the office. To celebrate hitting its annual targets, Airtable’s sales team took on a bespoke nine-hole Crazy Golf Challenge Show around its London office, with 30 colleagues competing in pairs and trivia at each hole drawing on company history and global team facts.

AHMM: celebrate and showcase. For 120 people from across the UK, Race Across AHMM was a four-hour city-wide challenge showcasing the architecture practice’s London buildings, with bespoke clues, custom scoring, five bonus challenges and a release video sent beforehand. Teams regrouped for a highlights screening at Tower Hamlets Town Hall.

You can find more on The Big Smoke Events’ case studies page. None of these suggest every multi-goal event needs a scavenger hunt or golf course. They show how the format, content and finish can each carry a different part of the brief.

Set realistic team away day objectives

Team away day objectives often snowball because the event is rare and everyone wants to make the most of every hour. Protect the agenda from turning into a backlog of meetings by giving each part of the day one job. A morning presentation sets the context, a workshop gathers ideas, lunch lets people mix, a hosted activity lifts the energy and a short finale recognises everyone’s efforts and ties things back to the purpose.

Build in buffers for arrivals, room changes and conversations, plan for weather and accessibility if there’s travel or outdoor activity, and share enough information in advance so people feel prepared. The Big Smoke Events’ away days show how activities can fit around a wider agenda.

Team building session objectives vs workshop objectives

Team building session objectives usually focus on the experience in the moment: taking part, communicating, solving, laughing and connecting. Team building workshop objectives might involve reflecting, practising a method or creating something to use after the day.

Be clear which one you’re planning. If people are expected to create an action plan, give it proper workshop time and facilitation. If the event is a reward, don’t spring a surprise work task on everyone at the end. A playful activity can reinforce a theme, but it’s not a substitute for proper organisational development if that’s what the business really needs.

Measure what matters

Keep evidence light and proportionate. Attendance won’t tell you whether new connections formed, and a high score doesn’t prove everyone contributed. Combine participation data, host observations, a short post-event question linked to your main goal, one question about inclusion, examples of cross-team follow-ups and organiser feedback.

And be realistic. One great afternoon won’t permanently transform communication or culture, but it can kick-start or reinforce it, especially with the right follow-up.

Bring your corporate event objectives back to one sentence

An event with several goals doesn’t have to feel complicated. Rank your corporate event objectives, turn them into behaviours and give each part of the day a clear role. Then use personalisation selectively, protect informal time and measure the outcome you actually prioritised.

If your brief has several goals and you’re not sure which format can bring them together, share your group size, location, timings and priorities through the enquiry page, and The Big Smoke Events team can help design a bespoke, hosted event around your people and purpose.