Betrayal in the Boardroom: Why 'Traitors' is a Terrible Team-Building Game

It’s All Fun and Games Until Someone Loses Trust 

The reality TV hit The Celebrity Traitors has taken the UK by storm, with celebrities donning cloaks and plotting against their comrades on prime-time TV. Watching famous faces lie through their teeth for prize money for charities can be wildly entertaining. But is it a good idea to bring that same game of deception into your workplace? One office found out the hard way. 

Journalist Ed Campbell* recently spent four weeks playing a “Traitors” game at his office, and the experience was anything but the morale boost one might hope for. Initially, it seemed like harmless fun: employees were secretly assigned roles of Traitors or Faithful’s, with daily “murders” announced on Slack and colleagues voting to banish suspected double-crossers. The grand prize for the winning Traitors was a mere day of annual leave, hardly Big Brother stakes, but enough to get everyone invested. Yet as Ed recounts, living a lie at work quickly became exhausting. “Lying became second nature. I lied to colleagues as I warmed up my lunch in the microwave, I lied at work drinks, I even lied to my manager who wasn’t even playing the game,” he admitted. The lines between playful team bonding and plain dishonesty blurred beyond recognition. 

Co-workers started eyeing each other with suspicion worthy of a murder mystery novel. Every chat by the coffee machine could be a trap; every innocent question felt like an interrogation. Campbell confessed that he talked about nothing but the game for weeks, he even bored his girlfriend each morning with paranoid theories about who the Traitors might be. In the end, after a particularly absurd incident involving a “poisoned” chocolate bar offered to his boss, Ed’s nerves were frayed. “I almost lost my mind,” he wrote, after emerging from this experiment in organized deceit. A month after the game ended, he found himself needing time off work due to stress, and one can hardly blame him. 

The HR Perspective: Trust is Not a Toy 

Not everyone was surprised that a deception-based bonding exercise backfired. HR expert Kate Bennett (founder of The HR Hero) heard Ed Campbell’s story and practically shuddered on behalf of business owners and leaders everywhere. “This sounds to me like an HR nightmare,” she said bluntly on BBC Radio 4^.

Kate enjoys The Traitors show as much as anyone, but she’s clear that mimicking it at work is “the exact opposite of what we’re usually trying to build in teams.” Companies strive to create a culture of trust and openness, whereas a game like Traitors forces people to lie, conceal the truth and generally erode trust. In a workplace, colleagues aren’t reality show contestants – and treating them as such can undermine the psychological safety that is essential for teamwork. 

Think about it: you want your employees to speak up, share ideas, and admit mistakes without fear. A game that incentivises betrayal achieves the polar opposite. Kate pointed out that no one is going to feel comfortable speaking openly in an environment where deception is part of the daily routine. Even once the game ends, how easy is it to rebuild confidence that your teammate isn’t secretly out to get you?

As Evan Davis the Radio 4 host mused, perhaps you could “destroy [trust] and rebuild it” as a bizarre form of resilience training, but that’s a pretty risky experiment to run on your company’s culture. In Kate’s view, the supposed benefits (a bit of excitement, maybe some twisted notion of resilience) don’t outweigh the obvious damage: “Everybody, ultimately, is playing against everybody else,” she warned, “and it’s great fun for that reason – but it’s certainly not how you build a team.”

When Office Pranks Go Too Far: Real-Life Cautionary Tales 

You might be thinking, “Surely our workplace Traitors game won’t end with people actually upset. It’s just a bit of fun!” Unfortunately, plenty of organisations have learned the hard way that when “just a game” or “banter” crosses the line, things can get very un-funny, very fast. In fact, workplace “banter” and pranks have become a legal minefield. Last year alone, 57 UK employment tribunal cases – that’s more than one every week – were attributed to workplace jokes or antics that went sour. What starts as a lark can blur the line between having fun and harassment or bullying, especially if management turns a blind eye. 

Consider a real tribunal case involving an overzealous prankster at a rail company. This well-meaning employee thought it’d be hilarious to hide a tarantula’s shed exoskeleton in a squeamish co-worker’s desk as a surprise. When that predictably caused a scream, he even followed up with a fake snakeskin for good measure a few days later. The colleague was not amused, she was terrified and complained. The prankster was fired for gross misconduct. End of story? Not quite. A tribunal later agreed the pranks were childish and ill-judged, and even overturned the dismissal as too harsh. But by then, the damage was done: trust between those colleagues was shattered, a formal complaint had been lodged, and the company got dragged through a legal dispute. All for a laugh that wasn’t even funny. 

This example may sound extreme, but it underscores a crucial point: what might seem like team-building can quickly become team-damaging if people feel tricked, pressured or unsafe. Even “innocent” office banter can spiral. GQ Littler, an employment law firm, found many cases where initially jovial pranks snowballed into serious conflicts because no one stepped in until it was too late. In one instance, two coworkers started by jokingly calling each other ‘fat’ and ‘bald,’ only for it to escalate to deeply personal insults involving each other’s partners. Nobody wants to play referee in that kind of drama, and as an employer you certainly don’t want it playing out in front of a tribunal. 

Building Trust Without the Mind Games 

The takeaway for business owners and leaders is clear: skip the secret traitor games and focus on trust-building, not trust-breaking, activities. Your team’s time is probably better spent solving real problems (or even doing a normal pub quiz) than re-enacting a paranoia-fueled reality show in the office. It’s telling that Ed Campbell, after his four-week Traitors ordeal, needed a respite to recover from the “fun”. That’s the opposite of what a team-building exercise should achieve. 

Instead of encouraging employees to deceive one another, create opportunities where they can connect and collaborate without wearing figurative blindfolds. There are countless ways to bond teams that don’t involve sowing mistrust. The best “team game” is fostering an environment where people feel psychologically safe, where they can rely on colleagues, speak openly, and maybe even admit, “Hey, I’m not great at karaoke” without fear of repercussion. 

Bottom line: The only backstabbing you want in your company is in the plot of the latest TV thriller, not in the boardroom. As entertaining as The Traitors is on screen, in real life a high-trust culture beats a high-drama culture every time. If you’re tempted by trendy games or edgy team-bonding stunts, remember that trust, once broken, is awfully hard to mend. And unlike a TV show full of secrets and strategy, you don’t get to just roll the credits and move on; you deal with the fallout in real life, potentially in HR meetings or even in an employment tribunal. 

On that note, if you need help repairing (or preventing) the kind of mistrust these games can cause, don’t leave it to trial and error. Book a Power Hour with Kate Bennett https://www.thehrhero.co.uk/sos-call to get expert support on building a psychologically safe, high-trust workplace culture. It might not be as thrilling as a murder mystery game, but it will save you a world of trouble – and perhaps even a costly employment tribunal or two. 

Read the article here: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/04/traitors-office-workplace-bbc-show

Listen to Kate on BBC Radio 4's PM programme with Evan Davis and Gavin Campbell by clicking here.