My office used to do these. We watched a video with people throwing fish that was supposed to teach us to have fun at work. After that, we went out to the hotel parking lot and had a relay race with aquarium nets and plastic fish in buckets of water. At the end of the day, they showed us Jerry Maguire edited down to about 30 minutes.
It was almost universally reviled.
It should be easy enough to compare locations to find out. Plynck’s location of “Nawth of Bawstin” is in New England, while your location of “127.0.0.1” is somewhere inside my computer!!! GET OUT!!! GET OUT!!!
Welcome neighbor! (I live and work very close to this place)
We had one non-mandatory event at Whirlyball and the only negative I had about it was that there were too many people so we had to rotate folks in and out instead of being able to just sit there and play non-stop.
I think the best events are where you just go someplace and are free to do as you please once you get there. I think just about everyone hates it when you have some Michael Scott wannabe who forces everyone to do some stupid group hug bullshit. Our Dallas trip was fun because other than an hour of dumb “cross the river with the medicine” games which no one took seriously anyway, we were pretty much free to wander around to drink, swim in the pool, ride the mechanical bull, or just go to our room and nap if we were so inclined.
We were playing Ice Hockey. Not fucking tiddlywinks. I can assure you the bruises I had on my shins and the cuts I had on my arms were a pretty good indication that I wasn’t the only letting off a little steam that day. We were a pretty competitive group, even the 60 year old accounting hag who could give lessons on how to use a stick as a weapon. So don’t feel sorry for her, she held her own.
I just had about a week and a half of team-building. We have been working on a project that requires multiple different specialties to work together, and we did. Some of the folks had only been names to me before last Sunday. But we’re all part of a team. I know what they do, they know what I do, we taught each other, and we produced some good stuff.
One night, our team chief on mids brought in an ice cream freezer, and we made and shared ice cream. One moring, the morning team chief brought in juice and bagels. But mostly, we worked. Heck, just yesterday, I put in an 11 hour day. I *NEVER * do 11 hour days! But yesterday I did, and I felt very accomplished when it was done. Today was a 10 hour day. And I hung around till 2 other team members got their parts done so I could fulfill my role as the task lead and pull it all together.
That’s team building - the team works together and accomplishes that which is assigned. I like them all fine, but I have no intention of hanging with any of them outside of work.
Of course, the mucky-mucks in the corner offices seem to think that we’ll all be motivated by a promised reward of a plastic cup with a silly logo on it. They had an off-site and came up with this silly “recognition” plan. If they’d just leave us alone and let us, you know, do what we’ve been trained to do, we’d be fine.