When half a team says it hates virtual team building, it is almost never saying it does not want to spend time with the other half. It is saying it does not want to be made to perform in front of them. Those are different complaints, and most events are built to answer the first one when the second one is the problem.
We run these events for a living and we would say the sceptics are usually right about the specific thing they are objecting to. What they are wrong about is the conclusion, which is that the only alternative is nothing.
What they are actually objecting to
Ask the people who dread it and the list is remarkably consistent. It is not long.
Forced sharing. Two truths and a lie. A fun fact about yourself. One word for how you are feeling today. For a lot of people, being asked to produce a piece of personal content on demand, in front of colleagues, is the single worst part of the working week, and it is positioned as the warm-up.
Performing. Charades, improv, anything where one person is on screen doing a thing while everyone watches. The extroverts volunteer and enjoy it. Everyone else calculates how long until it is over.
Not being able to leave. A meeting can be left. An event you were told to attend, run by a facilitator who can see your camera, cannot, and the hour that does not end is a different kind of hour.
Being facilitated. The energy. The "let's go, team". The feeling of being managed into enjoying yourself, by someone paid to be enthusiastic.
The camera mandate. Cameras on, so we can see everyone. For someone who already finds the format draining, this is the part that turns an hour into an ordeal.
Notice what is not on the list. Nobody objects to playing something. Nobody objects to winning. Nobody objects to their team beating another team at a thing. The objection is to the layer that was put on top of the activity to make it feel like team building.
Five rules that design the objection out
Each of these removes one item from the list above. An event that follows all five has nothing left for the sceptics to object to except the time, and the time can be short.
1. A task, not a conversation. The thing in the middle of the call is a problem to solve, not a prompt to answer. Attention goes to the problem. Talking happens because the problem needs it, which is the only kind of talking the sceptics were ever going to do voluntarily.
2. Nobody is on the spot. No turn order, no round where everyone contributes one thing, no spotlight. If the task needs three people to coordinate, three people coordinate, and the fourth person can watch for a minute without that being a failure.
3. Short, with a visible end. Ten minutes for a challenge. Seventy to ninety for a full hosted session. Never "we'll see how it goes". An activity with a clock on it is one people can agree to. An activity that ends when the facilitator feels it has ended is one people avoid.
4. No camera rule. State it in the invite. Cameras are welcome and not required. You will lose nothing, because the people who would have turned theirs on still do, and you gain the people who would otherwise have found a conflicting meeting.
5. Opt-in, and mean it. Not "optional" in the sense that your manager will notice. Optional in the sense that the first run is a link in a channel with no attendance taken. The sceptics will watch what happens to the first group. If the first group had a good time and nobody was made to share a fun fact, the second run is bigger.
How to run the first one
The order matters more than the activity.
Do not announce an event. Do not book a slot. Do not send a calendar invite with the word "fun" in it. Each of those tells the sceptics that the thing they hate is about to happen.
Instead, somebody posts a link in a channel, in the middle of an ordinary day, with one line: this takes ten minutes, needs at least two of you, and nothing to install. The link opens straight into a co-op challenge in a browser. There is no host. The level cannot be cleared by one person, so the two or three who click it have to talk to each other, about the level, not about themselves.
Then nothing. No debrief, no "how did everyone find that", no survey. Let the people who played mention it, or not.
We built that first-run version and made it free with no form in front of it, because the ten minutes make the case better than a page about them. If it lands, the hosted version with a full story and a professional host is the next step, and by then the sceptics have seen what it is and are not being asked to trust a description.
When not to do it at all
Three situations where the right answer is to not run anything.
The team is fine and someone senior wants a photo. If the actual goal is to show that an event happened, a short optional challenge will not produce the screenshot, and the people being asked to produce it will know what it is for.
The team is in the middle of something hard. A layoff, a failed launch, a reorganisation. An invitation to have fun lands as an instruction to pretend. Wait.
The people who hate it are the people who run it. A manager who dreads team building and schedules it anyway runs it like a hostage situation. The event is only as good as the mood of the person who posts the link.
What happens when it works
The sceptics do not become enthusiasts. That is not the goal and it would be a strange outcome. What happens is narrower: the next time somebody says "we should do something as a team", the people who used to sigh say "the thing with the link was fine". That is the whole win, and it is enough, because it means the next one gets booked without an argument.
Start with ten minutes and no announcement. It is free, it needs two people, and if it does not land you have lost ten minutes and learned something about your team.