Team Building Exercise

They give you psychological tests and share the results with all your co-workers? That’s not a team building exercise, that’s the Spanish Inquisition. If my job did that I would absolutely refuse to participate. And I would make a hell of a lot of noise about it.

And something very much like that happened to me, except it wasn’t called “team building”. My boss was getting several staff certified as “life coaches”, and the rest of us were designated as practice dummies for them to coach. This meant we were supposed to talk about troublesome details of our personal lives, and work out some strategy to deal with them. I flat out refused, and my job was in fact threatened. But the trainer jumped in and said that the whole thing wouldn’t work if people were coerced into it. So I kept my job.

Until I was laid off. But so was my whole department, probably for doing wasteful shit like life coaching. :wink:

This has been my experience too. Any of these I’ve had to go to have been a lot of fun–nice resorts, wonderful food, simple (if silly) exercises. But they were a good chance to get to know people in a different way than at the workplace. Not that it was all roses and sunshine–I’ve experienced a few clunks in terms of team building retreats too. But for the most part, they have been opportunities to get to know and understand co-workers a little better, which (IME) made it easier to work with them.

Though I will admit that watching the evil marketing manager sinking with her cardboard boat in an Ontario lake, was rather satisfying in a schadenfreude sort of way. :smiley:

I was once forced into a similar ‘team dancing’ event, with happy salesman type trying to lead a bunch of nerdy computer programmers. But it ended suddenly.

As the leader was cajoling us to get up and dance, one guy in the front said loudly “No, I refuse. This is insulting and discriminatory to my friend Bob, who’s there in his wheelchair and CAN’T dance. So I won’t either.” Another person said “That’s right – Bob’s a friend of mine, too.” and sat back down. Within 60 seconds all of us were sitting down, defiantly refusing to dance. So the annoying music was turned off, and he apologized, and rather grumpily went on to his next ‘exercise’.

That one started with him asking someone to name their favorite color. After a short silence, Susan, our blind programmer, said “Black. It has to be black, because that’s the only color I ever see.” At which point the leader looked at her for a bit, disconcerted, and then stumbled into some lame statement about how we all have our own personal favorite colors, unique to each of us, just like we each have our own sets of abilities" – meanwhile his assistant was mournfully packing away a box of brightly colored cards. (We never did learn what those colored cards were for.)

Looking back on that, I think we computer nerds were having a fun time at this – and we were actually 'teaming up" – to make the peppy, effervescent leader uncomfortable!

Our last “team-building” thingy gave us three choices: golf*, massage at a spa**, or day at the St. Louis Zoo. Now, St. Louis has an awesome zoo… but it was 99°+ this summer, and absolutely miserable humitity too.

Anyway, spurred on by my kvetching, my boss connived to get “zoo day” switched to “Science Center day.” Since, ya know, we’re all scientists. So we went to an Imax show***.

Alas, someone from one of our other offices didn’t get with the program, and so asked why we weren’t going to the zoo? So we (foolishly) schlepped over to the zoo… directly to the Penguin House, and only the Penguin House. And then back to the (air-conditioned) Science Center.

All of the rest of them went on to an “exciting” night of hot dog smorgasboard and Minor League Baseball game. I went home.

I guess our teambuilding session did manage to divide our department up into three divisive groups who ridiculed the others’ choices for entertainment. We did some quality mockery about golfers and spa days while sweating and complaining on our way to the (blissfully cool) Penguin House.

  • Ugh.
    ** Yes, just the sort of thing a bunch of engineers love – strange people touching them! idiots
    *** I fell asleep. I had no idea they could make the Hubble space telescope be so boring.

At the last one I attended, the trainer used that thing where you have a paragraph of text and you’re asked to count the number of times the letter “f” appears, and what happens is most people don’t count it when it appears in the word “of”. (There was supposed to be some kind of message about how what we think we’re doing is different from what our brain actually does, or something inane like that.)

Only, we were a bunch of computer programmers, and, it turns out, programmer-types don’t fall for that sort of thing. At least, we didn’t. The trainer seemed rather disconcerted by the result when 90% of the people there came up with the correct answer.

Ah yes, the joy of “team building” exercises commissioned by HR (who are predominantly people people) for IT staff (who predominantly aren’t). :slight_smile:

We knew it was going to be bad from the moment the sporty and attractive young “coaches” ran into the room whooping and pumping their fists in the air, and the entire IT complement of the software company took a reflexive step backwards and put their backs to the walls.

It generally went downhill from there… until the IT people began to get ornery and began exploiting the missing requirements and restrictions in the exercises… leading to increasingly harried looking coaches running around trying to get their exercises back on track.

I imagine it looked a debacle from HR’s perspective – and it was the last big team building day of that sort – but the IT people had a good time (in the end) and felt they’d improved their team spirit in the face of a common enemy.

After that team days became more social outings and less something inspired by Dogbert’s Management Handbook.

Work ISN’T supposed to be fun! It’s SUPPOSED to be work! Now, it’d be nice if you enjoyed coming to work, and not become a homicidal maniac. The idea is to make money and put a roof over your head, and food on the table!

Either I missed that one, or I blanked it out of my memory. :slight_smile: But I remember the evil marketing manager.

I was the team leader of one of two groups that was given a box of stuff and had to build something ( a tower? a helicopter? I truely forget).

The presenter took me aside and ordered me to be a nasty boss, disparaging all my peoples ideas, and to do the work myself. You see, the other leader didn’t get those instructions and we were supposed to be supprised when my team did poorly.

Screw them, I just stood mute, despite the glares from the presenter.

He wanted you to that to illustrate how workers deal with an a-hole boss vs. a effective boss. In defying him, your were an even bigger a-hole.

I’ve had the “take a psychological test and share with cow-orkers” actually be pretty good.

The key thing on team building is to get unstructured interaction with cow-orkers that you maybe never see or once a year from around the globe but someday need their help. This is useful. Loads of free food and booze helps.

Most of the team building is so contrived as to be asine. And one person’s sports (singing, magic, whatever the fuck) skill is anothers’ humiliating Achiele’s heel. Somehow this never gets understood by the fucking organizers.

And for all of you fucking organizers reading this: you can’t go wrong with free food, free booze and forgeting the rest of the shit.

in response to China Guy: ITA about the food & booze. But organizers would be better served finding out what kind of activities employees would find meaning in.

Yeah, I believe in being an a-hole to a-holes, and being nice to nice people, but thats just me. The trainer was a jerk.
Do you really think I could have put on an act, been completely out of character with the people I work with every day, and they would have been fooled?
You think they would derive the lesson you suggest?

Could I get an Oscar?

Could you’ve channelled your anger with the guy running the activity into being an asshole boss?

I had one of those bullshit fall backwards/trust building exercises. Also some sort of build something out of random shit to do some assinine goal crap.

I log off of a 10 hour shift on the phones, dog ass tired and all I want to do is go home and sleep. I get shoved on a bus with a bunch of strangers that I don’t know and hauled off out into the fucking woods somewhere. No breakfast is offered, because everybody else was day shift and they got to eat breakfast right after they woke up and before they had to show up at work. SO here we are, I am starving [and diabetic] and seriously grumpy after building some stupid rube goldberg crap and told to stand on a box and fall backwards. I ask if there is going to be something to eat any time soon, and I am not going to do anything until I can have something to eat. The assanine bitch from the company that organizes this crap starts insisting that I wont get any type of food until I do their dumbass crap, so I call over the only person I recognize at all, who is in HR and I announce to her loudly that I am diabetic, my blood glucose has tanked, I had already been up all night working the night shift, and this asshole wants me to risk my previously broken back by falling and hoping that a bunch of strangers can catch me, and prevent any further damage to my body … and what was the company disability package like or should I just sue the company they hired to put my life in danger … oddly enough I got fed and excused from any further activity … so I went off and ate, and found a nice corner and curled up and napped until it was time to go back.

Ever since then I refuse to do any company sponsored crap unless I drive my own vehicle there. I am never getting caught where I can not leave, or have access to my various meds and snacks. All I actually want from a job is to be properly trained, then left the fuck alone to actually do my damned job. I do not need any warm fuzzies, just actual monetary bonuses now and again.

If I was better at game playing, yes.
It just seemed so useless and false.
I let them down.

That’s BS! Making a guy on the graveyard turn around and keep working? Did they know you’re diabetic?

Yep, a classic case of “I love to dance, and dance the current crappy craze dance, so EVERYONE must love what I love!” which is not limited to organizers. And that’s the whole problem with these exercises. The organizers are generally people who love to be around other people, but some of the best workers can work alone, and prefer to be left alone by most other people.

This is what happens to the people who work graveyard all the time. My husband has worked graves, and I’ve worked swing shift, and yet the people who organize events will invariably schedule these things for a time which is convenient for the day shift workers, but which is the middle of a sleep period for the other workers. And I would venture to say that aruvqan DID let the event organizers know that she’s diabetic, but she was waved off until she made a big fuss to the HR person. A lot of people think that diabetics can just suck it up, and don’t REALLY need to eat when they say they do.

As I always tell my kids, when they complain about their jobs, *“There’s a reason they call it ‘work’ and have to pay you to do it.”
*

Ours have all been outside of work hours, and very much mandatory (as in, demerit at review time if you skip). :frowning: