I have NEVER seen a team-building exercise that translates to how one handles work-related issues. I’m guessing that the team-building you’ve participated in was not through work.
What planet are you from? It’s never an OPTION and it’s frequently on the employees’ day off or after work.
I did one, as a manager, so I had to be gung-ho. I thought it was fun, but then I amuse easy. But it was still a waste of time and money. People who are not working together aren’t going to work together any better by being caught falling backwards. People who are working together will have a good time. If there is a problem, diagnose it and do something about it. Don’t throw money and consultants at it and expect anything to change.
You want to build a team?
1.Get together people who consider themselves professionals, and have shown they are by past accomplishments.
2.Give them clear goals and the resources to accomplish same.
3. profit
I’m an Earthling. The “team-building” exercises I did were during training.
I’ve found that going to work the next day after a team building exerise isn’t exactly like going to work the day before. After the team building exercise morale is down because people hate each other more and hate the company even more than that.
Hee.
Endure them, then complain about them on the internet for some relief in knowing you are not the only person who thinks that team building exercises are, in practice, usually pointless at best and counterproductive and demoralising at worst. It’s called “playing the game” without going completely insane and murdering your colleagues or running off to live in a cabin in the woods. I am referring to the OP in which** etv78** is bitching about people complaining about doing things that are pointless and annoying.
In my experience “team building” is a useless exercise perpetrated by incompentent managers who fail to understand that the problems their company is experiencing are due to incompetent management. They see all the problems occurring in an area that they’re in charge of - and they figure that the problem must be everyone else. So they send everyone else off to do something silly like building a bridge.
Nailed it Nemo! “team building” is usually a panacea for incompetance in management.
What a stupid thing to say. “We pay you, so we have the right to annoy the shit out of you with useless exercises.” I bet people love you where you work.
4 could be ‘share profit with team’. Like dividing the total cost of the over-priced consultant program and giving your team the equivolent bonus and letting them use the day off (that they would have had to ‘donate’) to spend it as they please.
That way, the people counting the money & smiling are Your people; not the elbow-locked forearm-flapping grifters taking your car service to the airport for their next [del]con[/del] presentation.
OP, I liked it a lot better when you ddin’t post here very much. You’re an asshole, and you have nothing of interest to say. Kindly sell your computer, crawl back under your rock, and never come here again.
Since I didn’t actually pay for it, quite the profit margin! 
Right… 'cos that would be a proportional response… quit a company where I’d been for 5 or more years and had a good position and salary because they force a day of crappy team building nonsense on us. :rolleyes:
Now a reasonable response would be to screw with the coaches a bit, make some snarky comments to my fellow curmudgeonly IT people, and perhaps bitch a bit about it to some folks on the 'Dope… and then get on with the job I enjoyed and that they were paying me to do.
Other team days that same company did were actually pretty good. The one involving orienteering, and wall climbing and stuff on one of the islands in the habour was great… I even have fond memories of the aqua-sports day… despite ending it hospitalized with a fractured skull. :eek:
But the particular example from the MPSIMS thread was just an example of all that is worst with the concept of team-building.
By your own admission, they had GOOD “team building” outings. So I doubt it’d kill you to find the silver lining in a bad one. BTW, do you have so little respect for authority that you’re confrontational with the leaders of these activities?
The one time I have been involved in one team building exercise that worked. Well maybe two. In both cases we had been contractually scheduled to be in meetings all afternoon, so it wasn’t our day off. The first time the bosses took us all out to Olive Garden the other time we all went bowling and they bought the pizza. You were allowed to bow out if you had to, but it was strongly discouraged because it was on their time. A lot better than paying some stupid consultant.
The basic problem with team building exercises is that they try to force everyone into the same mold. Now, if the company is built around the idea that all the workers are interchangeable cogs, with precisely the same skill set and abilities, then it’s useful to find out if someone’s diabetic, or can’t dance, or is allergic to shellfish, or is an acrophobe.
However, since there are very few jobs that actually REQUIRE someone to go without food, or dance, or eat shellfish, or climb walls, these differences generally don’t have any effect on how well a person can perform his/her job. Expecting workers to do this shit on their time off is totally counterproductive, and can be downright dangerous to someone’s health. For instance, if a diabetic is not permitted to eat when s/he needs to, s/he can go into a coma. And yet, we see that some idiot was not allowing a diabetic to eat, despite being informed that the diabetic needed to eat. Some people are shy about speaking up about their specific requirements. And sometimes even if they ARE willing to speak up, they can’t get anything done about the problem.
Even something as simple as a barbecue at the boss’s house can be problematic, if someone suffers from social anxiety, or perhaps doesn’t have access to reliable transportation.
For the most part, all of these exercises and boosters are not as effective as simply giving people raises and bonuses. However, raises and bonuses cost more money, and management loves to point to the exercises to proclaim that their team is a HAPPY team.
While he might have enjoyed those outings, I couldn’t have participated in them as my health is currently. One size does NOT fit all. One activity is not suitable for everyone. What one person thinks of as fun, another person considers to be excruciatingly boring, or even repulsive.