That sounds ridiculously inane. Honestly…
You haven’t heard the incredibly idiotic things they make us do at my high school…
FALL- Beach walk: a 6 mile walk along a road (not actually on the beach, but rather next to it, but no touching the sand!) with someone yelling “CAR” every 2 seconds. Once you get to the pavilion, it’s hot dogs, kool-aid, bees, and dancing outside to cliche “dance songs” with a pervy DJ who says, “Girls, get really low!” (Not kidding.)
Chicken Toss: All I can say is that it involves launching rubber chickens across the stadium with giant slingshots. Whoever flings their fowl the farthest wins a jersey sweatshirt. They couldn’t even spring for the hooide. I mean come on, the jersey’s been out since like 1990.
WINTER- Iditarod. One team member sits on a toboggan while the other three haul your fat ass around the stadium. It’s a race. If you’re not in the contest, you get to freeze your ass off and get it wet, too, because the teachers/janitors/student senate don’t care enough to brush off the bleachers.
So, did this build your team, improve your core competencies, or otherwise increase your coworkers overall compliance with the popular buzzwords of the day?
That’s what the lectures and little activities were for. We learned all about the new buzzwords and communication and blah blah blah. Having “real” conversations and all that crap. I doubt anyone remembers much from that trip except the massive amounts of liquor and the great food.
I work with a bunch of guys (A-type personalities, well off salemen) who love this crap. They speak phrases like “grow the company” and " units sold". I (and the other office workers) speak phrases like “give me my bonus pay” and “let me finish my work”.
The “team building” exercise was paintball, outdoors, in southern Maryland, in 95 degree heat and high humidity, about an hour’s drive from our office. They got the entire day off for it. We got half the time to do a full day’s work so we could participate.
:smack:
It was my first and will be my last, until they decide that bowling and beer will work just as well.
I never really understood “Dilbert” cartoons until I worked with this crew.
From Connie Willis’ Bellwether, in which the main character is forced to endure “team building” and “potentializing” exercises. Whenever you’re asked to write a list, put:
Optimize potential.
Facilitate empowerment.
Implement visioning.
Strategize priorities.
Augment core structures.
I swear, I need to put a copy of this list in my purse for the next time I run into one of those god awful meetings (schools are just as bad, if not worse, than businesses), but so far, my current school has no interest in “team building”. They just want to teach the kids.
The last time our HR people tried to organise one of these things everyone simply responded with “I’m not available”. That stopped it in its tracks immediately. I think HR then got the message that we all thought such activities an utter waste of time. There haven’t been any further attempts to foist one on us.
I especially liked when I went into work and punched my time card before I drove to the required event, and punched out when done. It wasn’t a team building exercise, just a extra required event for work. They called me in the next week and commented on how nice it was that I punched in and out for the 12 hour event when I had had been giving the privilege of attending. They want to pay 8 hours written in on the card. They paid the 12 hours, and luckily I never had to go again.
A few years back my employer put on an elaborate weekend team building “Retreat” at a resort near Niagara Falls. They went out of their way to point out that they had spent a fairly large amount of money to feed and house us all weekend, and let it slip that it was over a quarter of a million bucks.
Later that year our bonuses were reduced because we didn’t meet our margin target. Had they not spent the $250,000 on the retreat, we might have made it.
In my job (Quality auditor) I go into a lot of companies. I bet I’ll visit 125 different companies in the next 12 months, talk to their employees and their managers in detail, read their strategic and operational plans, see how they fix problems. It’s very, very easy in my job to get a feel for how happy the employees are and how well they get along with management. I have never, ever seen any correlation between team building exercises/buzzwords/inspirational posters and employee happiness or productivity.
For that matter, I have never seen the slightest bit of evidence that newfangled Generation Y methods, like providing the employees with pinball machines and ping pong tables, works either. A friend of mine works at a place like that; they’re really outwardly nice to the employees. Free beer is offered. Games are played. There’s no dress code, and discipline isn’t harsh or mean. Parties are frequently held with open bars at fun places. It’s everything people in stuffy companies dream of, right? But none of that has anything to do with their jobs. They have also failed to write job descriptions for half of the company, hire people who’re hopelessly unsuited for their role just because they’re good looking, let stuff slide for months because nobody wants to be mean, and are so lax on expecting anything from anyone that now three quarters of the company works an hour a day at best and spent all their time bitching about the company’s owners who created this lax environment, and the quarter with a work ethic wants to quit, and they’re losing money because they can’t control costs.
If people have clearly defined roles and goals, are treated respectfully, have their health, safety and comfort looked after, and have adequate pay and time off, and you hire people who are actually good at their job and give them lots of work to do, they will be happy.
As an instructor, I had to participate in a team building exercise wherein one of the supervisors showed up in her high school cheerleader’s outfit and did some cartwheels down the hall.
I swear to God.
Then she came back and made some sort of disjointed rah-rah speech to the rest of us.
Discomfort and Embarrassment were live, physical presences. I slowly edged my way around the corner and went and hid back in my classroom.
I don’t think they had any more of those exercises.
Hey, shut up!; last April I went four days to one of those things with all the people in the studio. Yeah, some of the activities where a little annoying, but the place wasn´t bad at all!
Now if your attitude propagates and I don´t get a free holiday on a tropical island next year I´ll hunt you down and beat you silly with a frozen trout, okey?
Japanese companies have “employee travel” together, which means going to a hotel with hot springs, drinking too much while people sing karaoke and waking up with a hangover. It’s not bad if you like the people you work with, and at least you can get drunk by yourself if you don’t.
How about change consultants? Our center hired two of these clowns, and all the managers got to spend lots of time in meetings with them, visualizing change and ten years from now, and all that crap. Passing the marker around so everyone got a chance to speak.
The first round went fine, but in the second the change consultants got so sure of themselves that they recommended a change our VP didn’t want - and they were flying out the door.
On NPR one day I heard a story about change consultants going to villages in Western Africa to bolster women’s rights - including passing around the baton. I immediately wrote a column, which the editor called Clan of the Cave Consultants about a prehistoric consultant and the one sane caveman. My friend the headhunter sent it to Tom Peters - the consultant in the story was an anagram of Peters’ name, so I’m not sure how well it went over.
The only time I ever enjoyed a team build was the time they took us out for competitive sailing. The sailing itself blew dead animals–I got tired and sore and had rope burns all over my hands. But my boss’s boss, who approved the boondoggle, got violently seasick. He ended up turning green and dry heaving into the harbor, over and over again. It was mammoth fun to watch, because he was getting exactly what he deserved.
I think a great team building exercise at my office would be if we got to nail my boss with a whiffle ball bat every time he says ‘leverage’, ‘utilize’ or ‘reach out to’.
He’d be dead in half a day, but think of the bonding for the rest of us!
