After recently starting to work in a giant multinational corp, one of those corporate BSes that I have dreaded is coming up: A mandatory team building exercise is happening in two weeks. It will take place in some kind of a golf club too. I feel demoralized already. I get the impression that this will be more about socializing with other team members rather than suffering through some silly exercises, but it doesn’t sound like it will be any less unpleasant. I guess it’s time for me to brush up on my ass kissing skill.
To make myself feel better, I’m going to watch the corporate training day episode in the BBC version of The Office again.
Dopers, share your team building exercise horror stories.
During one several-weeks international meeting taking place in the US and involving, among others, a team from Spain, TPTB decreed that on a given day we’d have to wear clothes representing our favorite sports team.
This was bad enough and caused a lot of grumblings in that first, most foreigners found it stupid, second those people who did own sports memorabilia had it at home (which for half the people meant in a different continent).
The day chosen was March 11, 2004. Half the Spanish team had been awakened at 3am-ish by phone calls from relatives whose first sentence was “we’re all fine”. They were not in what you’d call the mood to give a shit about anybody’s baseball shirts, for some reason…
I’ve been to a couple. They were no big deal, at least not the ones I went to. Just go to the event with the proper frame of mind (hey, it’s a day away from the regular job, and they’ll provide lunch) and you’ll be fine.
There is no instance in the history of industry of any so-called ‘team building’ exercise making any sort of difference whatsoever to team spirit, morale, performance, attitude or anything else. This is an open secret.
The companies that send employees on these things know that employees only enjoy them, if they enjoy them at all, as a day when they don’t have to work but get paid anyway, and possibly have a bit of fun.
The companies that offer to arrange and organise these things, as a full-time business, know that they just have to strike a simple balance: provide just enough ostensible content for the thing to be justifiable, but make it easy, pleasant and undemanding so that the employees will give it a favourable rating.
I did one where each team member was analyzed using a psychometric questionnaire first, then the results were shared and publicised. I’m not going to get into a debate on the validity of psychometrics, but whether you believe in the results or not, they did at least provide a framework to allow people to talk honestly about their working styles versus other people’s working styles.
I discovered that one of my colleagues goes into panic mode when I call a spontaneous brainstorm, and prefers a couple of hours’ thinking time first. On the flipside she discovered that where she works slowly and methodically, I like to work in intense frenetic bursts and then chill out for a few minutes (hence posting to the SDMB) and that she shouldn’t interpret my goofing off occasionally as laziness. One of my direct reports said that despite our constant communication, he felt a little in the dark about the goals, and would appreciate a Hill Street Blues-style “this is what we’re going to do this week” briefing on a Monday morning.
All these revelations proved incredibly beneficial to our working together. Ever since this session, about two years ago, my team has been far more considerate of others’ preferences, and also more understanding about each other’s foibles. It’s made us more efficient, and it’s reduced a lot of tension and bitching.
About 10 years ago, my very large company was bought by one of the 50 largest companies worldwide. As part of R&D, we had to integrate those that remained from the two companies. So we have a big offsite team building event. A company was brought in to lead the day’s events. Did we get small teams together to introduce ourselves to our new colleagues? No, that would be too easy. We got to sing songs! Note that we are R&D, so mostly science type people who do not like cheerleading type activities. Many people were visibly pissed off.
Then before lunch, we get in teams to make raviolis for lunch. This begins at about noon, and I am already hungry and a bit pissed off. We do pasta making stuff for about 45 minutes, by which time I am starving and very pissed off. Then we wait until after 1 for lunch to be brought out. I am about to pass out due to extreme hunger.
God, I hate that shit. This year we had our regular Staff Education Day, which is a horror all its own, AND we had an extra team-building day. It was not as awful as it had to be - some of the exercises were actually fun, although at the end you had to make up some bullshit about what building a tower made out of paper cups has to do with being a better librarian - but there were still some horrible awful no-good people I had to spend a day with.
This year, they’re dragging us off-site and feeding us lunch. The only thing we like about SED is lunch, because we can go out to eat with our departments. Not this year.
It’s also absolutely infuriating because half of the day is usually personal finance advice or “building your life plan” or whatever. My money and my life plan are none of my employer’s business.
I’ve told this story before, but as long as people keep asking for team-building stories I’ll tell it again:
One year, my boss’s boss decided that our team-building exercise should be sailboat racing. The experience was miserable; the small boat was hell on my middle-aged back and butt, the ropes burned my hands, and the weather turned cold and misty and nasty.
But as bad as it was for me, it was a pleasure cruise compared to the experience of my boss’s boss, the nimrod who planned it. He got seasick.
At the end of the lesson his face was bright minty green, and he staggered off the boat and collapsed in a fetal position for an hour. Then he got up, staggered to the edge of the pier, and hurled violently and repeatedly into the lake.
I don’t think these team building exercises actually help much, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be fun. I used to get “miffed” about the time out from my job to go to these, but then I realized, if you enjoy them for what they are, they CAN BE FUN. Focus on the fun and don’t worry about learning.
Also this is VERY important for anyone in middle management or above, these activities are seriously gonna make or break you when it comes for promotion. The upper managers LOOK for people that like this kind of thing and actively participate. So if you’re positon is middle mgmt or not necessarily a manager but equivilent in the company hierachy, then you need to really be gung ho for things like these, or at promotion time it’ll count against you.
But that said, forget about learning anything, just focus on fun and social skills.
And remember you could be out of work so be glad you got a job to complain about
Good lord I hate teambuilding shit. One of the very few benefits of the current recession is my company has sharply cut expenses, so I haven’t had to endure any of this in a few years.
We do occasionally have a picnic in a local park and play cricket, but I like that just fine; it’s not officially sanctioned and there’s no one there forcing us to waste our time and our employer’s money.
Our training coordinator planned a massive exercise for all of the engineers and techs in my group. It was something like one full day a month for six months. I was pissed off. As soon as I saw the email I went into my boss’s office and before I could get two sentences out he said, “Don’t worry, Haj, you don’t have to go.” It pays to be a well known curmudgeon. I actually would have gone if my non-attendance would have made the boss look bad but he assured me that that wasn’t the case.
At the last one a colleague texted me that he hated me because he had to be there and I didn’t.
I’m a civilian in a military organization, and every time we get a new Commanding Officer, some sort of rah-rah-go-team thing happens. This past year, some bright child decided we’d divide the 500-member command into 6 teams and we’d have all kinds of activities to forge team spirit blah blah blah. The events included Human Foosball, Paper Airplane Flying, Chili Cook-off, Jeopardy/Trivia, a 5K race, and I don’t know what else. Points were even awarded just for team members showing up to support the rest.
I thought the whole thing was juvenile and I had nothing to do with it. I think maybe 40 or 50 people regularly participated, and most of them are on the recreation committee. They did an awards pot-luck at the end and I don’t think 100 people went to that. But you can bet the senior person who thought it up and ran it is going to get some kind of monetary award.
And now that October is approaching, we’ve got the Halloween door-decorating contest! yay! Because employees of the Department of Defense whose main job is supposedly “supporting the warfighter” have plenty of time to gussy up the office doors like a bunch of elementary school students. Then we get to do it again for Christmas. :rolleyes:
I worked the night shift (11 PM - 10 AM) with a group of SW testers in my first job after leaving the Army. After about 6 months we had a team building exercise which consisted of showing up at a strip club at 11 AM and drinking until 6 PM, it was pretty good.
I just went though a team building exercise this week. Unfortunately for the OP it was a lot of fun … and I’m the farthest thing from a kiss-ass.
Most of the two-day event was semi-business related: reconnecting with “team members” from another state, touring a new call center, and some fairly innocuous meetings. But the real meat of the thing was the Adventure Camp where we learned how to fly cast, shoot bows from arrows (I got a bull’s ear, catnip) and skeet shooting with shot-guns … which I’d never fired before.
You got to make of it what you want, you know? Unless it’s that goofy … now I’m going to fall backward and you have to catch me shit. If it’s that … you have my sympathies.
The one I remember with the most hatred happened maybe ten years ago.
At the beginning of the all-day session, the 30 (or so) of us were arranged in rows. We were not told why. Then, the music started. We had to dance the God-damned Macarena for around ten minutes.
I feel that often, these “team building” exercises are an attempt at a quick fix for bigger issues within the company. So, morale is down, people are leaving – hey, let’s go do some paintball! That’ll fix it!
The place I work was a “dot-com” that was taken over by a huge corporation. So, out with the fussball tables, fun and games, light-hearted work atmosphere. In with the layoffs, training people in India to do your job, heavyweight Process, endless paperwork and meetings rather than actually getting anything done. Oh, and two more rounds of layoffs.
In a recent management meeting my boss says that a person who had resigned last week had given one of the reasons as “not fun to work here any more”. Upper management’s reaction: team building/day out. We’re going to make it fun to work here, damn it, or there’ll be more layoffs!
Yep, that’ll make everyone forget everything else.
Never mind addressing the real issues: that the constant specter of layoffs makes people keep their heads down and hang on for dear life, and forcing highly intelligent engineers to sit in meetings all day is not good for their morale. Nope, mandatory team building exercise it is.
