Team Building Workshops- fluff or not?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I was searching for something for uni on the net, and I came across sooo many websites advertising Team Building Workshops or Diversity Management Workshops or Gender Equalising Workshops.

Apparently they are designed to raise productivity by having happy employees. Or something.

Anyway, I’m curious.

The websites don’t tell what actually happens, only how wonderful the outcomes are. :rolleyes:

Who’s been on one of these things?
Do they actually work?
Are they fun?
What do you actually do on them?
Do you do those dumb “get to the other side of the “river” without putting your feet in “the water” using only this toothpick” activities like on school camp?

Also, I was thinking there must be some doper out there with a funny story from a workshop. Don’t let me down now! :smiley:

2

Yeah:rolleyes: …they are a staple of management consulting. Team building…diversity training…core values training…new-hire camp…etc.

Basically they come in all different flavors and we generally treat them as a joke or a chance to party at the companies expense.
This one time…at “new hire orientation camp”… we had to break off into teams and learn how to make a Powerpoint slide about how great the company was. So this girl I was hooking up with and I made a slide that said:
“This is a great place to be yourself…provided you are just like the rest of us”.

Well the hard-core trainers were horrified.

Another time, we were in a 4-week training program in Hartford CT. Well that also happened to be the time when the conference center we stayed at had a group promoting “cafinated bottled water”.

Lets just say that after a few days of drinking cafinated water by the liter and then getting drunk at night, there was some…unpleasentness.

3

The flavor I participated in involved ropes. Climbing up ropes, swinging on ropes, walking across ropes. Ropes, ropes, ropes.

A coworker and I spent the whole time talking about who we would most want to strangle with the ropes. Then we went to the pub at the retreat facility and got drunk.

Team Building Workshops don’t work because they don’t deal with the problems. No amount of climbing around on ropes in the woods is going to change the fact that the boss micromanages, that the admin takes four hour lunches, or that the translator regularly insults other people and then pretends she doesn’t speak English.

BTW, nice PowerPoint slide, msmith.

4

Well, here’s what happened in the one we had last fall after a company merger:

  1. We were told everything would be fine once everyone “crossed the bridge” over to the “new” side of the river.

  2. We were told that some people would never cross the bridge.

  3. We were told that some people (the early adopters) would bound across the river WITHOUT the bridge.

  4. … well, you get the point.

All I can say is that the consultant who thought THAT one up deserves every penny he can get for scamming the company into buying his crap.

5

A former employer of mine had a team build to focus on diversity issues in the workplace, especially racial issues. The team build consisted of a cook out and watching Driving Miss Daisy. Did I mention everyone in attendance was white?

6

My father and I used to run a management consulting firm, had about 10-12 consultants. We STOPPED doing team building exercises because WE became convinced they didn’t work. And we were doing actual work type ones, not the “ropes and trees” style trust-building crap.

If the friggin’ consultants think they’re bunk, what does that tell you? Draw your own conclusions.

To be honest, I’m shocked to hear this stuff still happens. My father stopped offering all the namby-pamby stuff a long time ago because he was convinced it wasn’t worth it and that people would stop paying for it. I agreed with him; every one of our consultants thought we were crazy. As it turns out, Dad was totally correct. That kind of consulting dried up big time; all our consultants who went out on their own, all of whom were convinced they could make a bundle without us, lasted eighteen months and then went belly up, every single one of them. I’d say the late 90’s saw a huge shift in business from the artsy-fartsy, Tom Peters/Stephen Covey consulting into a business world were consultants are actually expected to do something that will either make you more money or save you more money.

We went into technical consulting, a lot of health and safety, and it paid off because we were actually doing things that saved people money rather than making them feel better about themselves with crappola like “Myers-Briggs” tests. That decision saved our company; if we’d offered “Team building” stuff we would have gone bankrupt.

You know what’s next on the hit list? ISO 9001. Give it 10 years and it’s dead meat; it’s being replaced with TOUGH technical standards like QS 9000, TS, CSMS, stuff like that. You heard it here first; the ISO 9000 consultants are either going to learn the new standards or they’re going to be selling cars by 2013.

7

I have been to two team-building workshops. Actually, the first was how to design a team workshop specific to your workplace. It gave me some tools that I have found extremely effective. My opinion is that if you design a long term set of activities for a small group of people who actually work together day-to-day that really give them a forum to address specific issues that come up in that day-to-day work, you end up with a group of people who have renewed respect for each other and who increase productivity in whatever terms by which you care to measure productivity.

That said, because a really targeted team-building process is so effective, for a while you could make money claiming you had a great team building experience, and maximize your profits by having the entire workforce join together on one day for something that resembles Freshman Week at college, enabling you to scam 5 or more companies a week. The second workshop I attended had very general feelgood stuff of extremely limited usefulness (we spent pert of it watching a Star Trek epsisode).

If you are a staff training administrator, and someone claims to have a team building experience that will use your entire workforce and produce results within a day, for much less money than the guy who offers a comprehensive longer term program, you can bet you will have an experience that my coworker, who attended the second workshop, summed up perfectly by saying, “I want my 5 and a half hours BACK!”

8

We had a full day of some kind of touchy-feely-diversity-kumbya-we’re-all-the-same-we’re-great training some years back. They actually sent hundreds of us at a time to the base theater for videos, skits, and a motivational speech by our head attorney who was a preacher wanna-be. (He overused “Can I get an AMEN?”) It was insulting to the intelligence and obviously aimed at the lowest common denominator. I swear, we had to all stand up and proclaim together “I am somebody!” and some other crap.

Naturally, those who planned and executed this fiasco got awards, including cash bonuses. The rest of us lost a day of productivity, and some people really got their feeling hurt. More than a few complained about the attorney’s approach - but he’s still working here and he’s still an ass. The stupid “training” was held 8 or 9 years ago, and I still shudder to think about it.

My opinion - you want to motivate people? Set realistic goals and reward with cash. THAT will build teamwork.

9

I have had a lot of contact with team building in various forms, always with very successful results. Of course, on none of the occasions were there people in the group who just wanted to blow it off and get jarred. My finding has been that you get out what you put in. A one day team-building course is better spent in the pub to be honest though, utter waste of time.

Part of the way that team building works is a combination of practical training and brainwashing. It also needs regular “topping up” in order for everyone to stay brain washed and keep working together in the ways that they have either been trained in or worked out together during training.

If I ever start a company I will definatly team build with my co-workers. As regards workplace oriented teambuilding, perhaps it works better here in Sweden where the workplace is very much “non-heirarchical” and quite open.

10

I’ve been to a “partnering” session.

The partenering session was at the start of a military construction project. It involved people from the Owners, the Owner’s Construction Managers, the Engineers, the General Contractors and the major Sub-Contractors. It was mainly a series of discussion groups about identifying potential problems and setting up channels of communication. It was facilitated by a retired military officer with a strong background in construction. Although the subsequent construction project was certainly not without its rocks in the road, it did seem to help the process work more smoothly.

11

At a former place of employment, about 100 employees were frantically working to meet a deadline. Suddenly, management announces that we’re all required to attend a 3-day team building workshop. At the workshop, we got to give ourselves cutesy nicknames and play silly games. When we got back to work, management announced that we were behind schedule and everyone had to start working a mandatory 54 hours a week.

One of the games at the workshop involved trying to make shapes with pieces of rope while blindfolded. Several week later, I walked into a coworker’s office where she was under her desk in the dark trying to replace some faulty cables. Her comment: “And I thought that team building exercise was worthless”.

12

Team-building exercises are terrific if the bosses like them and you want to keep your job. You really have to work your ass off to impress your boss at work, but give up a Saturday so you can stand in a circle and throw a tennis ball back and forth? Job security gold.

We did a team-building thing at one company I worked for; the first half of the day was full of things like the aforementioned tennis-ball thing. We also did the fall-backwards-and-let-your-teammate-catch you thing. We also got blindfolded, grabbed this rope and figured out how to make a square without seeing what we were doing. There was also a spiderweb with holes in it we had to all get through, one at a time, without touching the web or using a hole more than once.

In the afternoon, we did this detailed analysis of the culture of our company. First open, honest discussion among all the different groups about how people felt about their jobs, the company, their co-workers, etc. The results:

  1. Lots of people hated their jobs.

  2. Lots of people felt the company was very poorly run.

  3. People were living from paycheck to paycheck, practically starving, while the bosses were going to Mazatlan and the Bahamas. There was some resentment over this.

  4. Some parts of the company had incentive bonus programs. These people liked their jobs. Other people not only had no such incentives, but were expected to work twice as many hours for even less pay. These people hated their jobs.

  5. Most people felt the company sucked and was going to go under, and it wasn’t worth their time or effort to do anything to make the company succeed, and they were just there to draw a paycheck until the company went bust.

We didn’t have any other team-building exercises, and the bosses never mentioned the Corporate Culture again. Go figure.

13

I’ve worked for two companies that conducted these kind of programs; one was run by a man so in love with team building and workplace communication that he’s now writing his own book on the subject! :rolleyes: We had to “volunteer” to undergo this kind of training to get hired. Then we had to go to weekly and monthly meetings about how much we loved ourselves and our company, and what kind of activities we could engage in to foster a better team environment (the weekly meetings focused on slightly different things than the monthly meetings). To get promotions to certain levels also required volunteering for some of these activities. And there was, for upper management (of which I was, thankfully, not a part), a reading list.

So what activities are we talking about? Going to the woods and playing with ropes and ladders. Blindfolding your accountant or shipping manager and leading him or her through an obstacle course. Playing games with objectives that can only be met using creative team work. Reading books. Doing workbooks. Coming up with personal mission statements (that better damn well mesh with the company’s mission statement). Learning how to “think outside the box.” Learning to value diversity. Learning to be motivated. Learning all about the company’s core values and principles. Going to lectures where we learned that the company was really more concerned about us than things like productivity–again: :rolleyes: Lots of lectures.

The worst of it, for me, was the word games. It was especially difficult to watch people trying to explain various workplace problems without using any words that could have a negative connotation. There was, for example, no such thing as failure, though we did sometimes have “learning experiences” and “opportunities to do better in the future.” Which is always a comfort as fifty people get permenantly laid off for Christmas, or when the ambulance pulls away from the shop with its emergency flashers on. “Well [boss], he failed to use the safety lock–” “No, Mephisto, he learned about the safety lock on his machine, and now we have an opportunity to improve the workplace”–as if it actually is all good. Really. For the last time in this post: :rolleyes: It was like a cross between 1984 and the Oprah Winfrey Show, with, of course, a splash of Dilbert.

What did all this accomplish? A few converts who deconverted after a couple days. A few lost weekends. The loss of the word manager in most of the managers’ job titles. A work environment where people used a specialized vocabulary during verbal duels. Lots of rationalization for failure. Some books by Steven R. Covey and access to a library of self-help, motivational, and team building literature that mostly went unread. Some tapes about success that I sold in a garage sale.

Obviously, I’m not a big fan of all the personal development/team development type activities. Still, there are some good things. I found a couple kernals of wisdom in all the I had to work my way through. They gave me a couple nifty doorprizes at the touchy-feely seminar thingeys I attended. The food was also usually pretty good when we went away somewhere. Also, I must admit, some of the “wargames” out in the woods could be pretty damn fun, especially with the right partner. However, one must be careful not to get carried away–it’s never a good idea to pretend to fall off a cliff and die around the company president.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must go sharpen my saw. I’ve got a big night of synergizing with my teachers and classmates at school tonight.

14

I’ve been involved with “team building” in two capacities:

In my old job, I was the “training administrator.” I worked for the training manager, who was the one who set up these sorts of things. Fortunately, she tended to focus more on concrete skill-building workshops, like technical writing workshops, than foo foo team-building stuff. Some of the stuff she did was pretty useless, though. And of course we got tons and tons of mail promoting silly team-building stuff. My biggest frustration with my boss was that she seemed to have no concept of the fact that the training department was so far outside the profit center of the business and that a lot of the training activities could not be linked in any way to increased profits. I quickly decided that corporate training was not the field for me.

I’ve also worked as a whitewater raft guide, so I’ve had many corporate groups on my trips. I can’t say that I’ve ever seen any “team building” going on. I mostly see a lot of people who are out of their element, and basically annoyed at having to go rafting. And I see a lot of supervisors trying to act “cool.” It’s pretty pointless.

15

Exactly! The company president may make a speech about how he’s just one of the guys today, but are you really going to sneak up behind him and dump a bucket of cold river water on his head?

16

Not that I think any of you needed help figuring that out. Still, I wanted to be on the safe side, just in case, what with me being the proactive guy I am and everything.

17

Don’t tempt me.

18

What a fun thread. I’ve been subjected to several of these adventures. In all cases there were merely excuses for the lousy managers to feel that much better about themselves. The also helped to kill any lingering hope that things might change for the better…

It’s like playing ring-around-the-rosy in the closed circle of deceit.

19

I’ve attended several team-building exercises. All stupid. All a waste of time. As part of my team-building, I said they were a waste of time, and on several occasions bluntly told the team-builder that I thought he/she was a phony.

I was more senior than my boss, there was nothing he could do about it. What fun! I LIKE team building!

20

Yeah good luck with all that:rolleyes:

Team building does not work unless you work with people who are completely devoted anyway. One of the consulting firms I worked at basically lived (and died) by that team-building core-values 7 Habits of Highly Effective Assholes bullshit. That company went from $80 a share to less than $1.

While it might be funny to see a bunch of fat middle-aged dorks stubling around the woods or put on skits, circle-jerks are not going to make people like each other, work cooperatively or do anything but learn how to pretend to do something they hate.

My favorite is diversity training. “Oh that homeless-looking guy in the picture is really a Phd! Wow!! I am so enlighted!! I never new that black people didn’t all eat KFC and listen to rap!”