Teambuilding Excercises: Sign of Company Death Spiral

The company I work for has scheduled an all day "Team building" event for a Saturday in the near future. I RSVP'ed with a No and haven't heard back from management but others who haven't responded are being threatened...I mean encouraged to RSVP with a Yes. I do have legit reasons for not going (beyond the fruitlessness of these events on personal times) like a couple of family activities already scheduled and it is my wedding anniversary.

I have seen companies as they pass out of their fat and happy days and attempt to struggle their way back attempt to do so with teambuilding outings. I guess management is not in need of fixxing so we better fix the team.

The last place I saw this go own was at a large manufacturer. They went to the ropes courses and hired various trainers. The end result was they shut down their million square foot facility near the beach in southern California and moved 40 miles inland to a rented facility in an industrial area east of Los Angeles and cut the team from well over 1000 to around 400. Go team!

Those that sell these events and the management that buys them will tell great stories but what is your big company experience? Did things turn around with the new found teamwork or did things continue to spiral downward?

 

They're making employees do it on their own time. Forget that crap. I mean those things are stupid anyway.

The only fun I ever had on one of those was during that trust drill where they have someone get in a cirlce, close their eyes and fall back. You're suppossed to catch the person and gently push them back to the other side. Well I was "accidently" not paying attention and let this annoying fat woman fall on her jellybelly jiggly butt. Don't trust me if you're annoying. Lesson learned.

I think a lot of my fellow employees really enjoyed watching her bounce off the ground. It brought us closer. A good time was had by all.

 

Lol. I suppose Jellybelly Jiggly Butt laughed her ass off? So now she's a skinny fox and she's got you to thank for it.

I hate those things. But then I hate meetings too. Two sodding hours of glazed boredom trying desperately not to fall asleep while I have a deadline ticking away upstairs that is going to go up like an atom bomb if I don't get it done.

Meetings and jolly get togethers are the reason I work at home for myself.

 

Oh yeah I just got to thinking about this some more.

The only thing these activities were good for were yelling at each other building. I mean there are always a couple idiots in each group that insist on doing stuff in the most asinine way.

 

Just send the managers to order some stuff from despair.com it is a lot cheaper than the stupid teamwork seminars.

 

Have been to several some during the work day and some not. They ones during the work day kick ass. lol

Once I flew in for a conference and the first day they got out all these spreads sheets and a projector then asked us to open our folders they gave us. We opened them to find maps, entertainment calendar and CASH. They said they were just messing around with the spread sheets and stuff and that the first day was a fun day..... as long as we spent it with fellow employees.

Anyway.... I never had a company do that again.

BTW..... if you don't go it does look the greatest. MY2C

 

I worked for a dotcom consultancy from about '98-'01. They did team building in the early days. Then suddenly their market cap was $9 billion. Then they went bankrupt. My that was exciting. Wonder if the problem was the team building.

 

It looks great to my co-workers that can figure out how to get out of jury duty but can't get out of teamy stuff, right? Management might try to threaten me, that's always fun. Thanks to side revenue, money isn't a threat, promotions don't exist in the organization (rather than promote from within we hired managers from the companies we were destroying while we were growing, now we're not growing ), they're already violating labor laws with the extra hours we're required to work, and we are having trouble replacing the last developer that left.

Some of my original issues with this stuff is when I heard a VP stating that they had a "plan" for those that were having trouble (like single moms not wanting to have their 8 year old baby sitting the 5 year old for the weekend) and that they would "make them go". These were manufacturing workers that could not find the same compensation anywhere else. The group went and they no longer backstabbed with butter knives. They hugged for another day or two and then started backstabbing with machetes. I guess it wasn't a good idea to breakdown and cry in front of your co-workers.

It's funny how some people think this stuff will works and what they will lengths they'll go to to force employess to grow and enjoy each other. It sure beats competance and sound business principles.

Thanks for mentioning http://www.despair.com, go there if you haven't already.

 

The company spend money to let you have fun. at least, enjoy it.

 

Our team (with a few exceptions) actually look forward to our team-building events.

Everyone pitches in to plan them together and they are a good opportunity for us to see old friends that we do not get to see very often.

A few of our team members skip events, usually because of problems in their home lives. For those folks, it is more difficult to connect them in our normal business activities, because they don't have that very important comfort level with their fellow team members.

In our organization, we rely on each other to succeed. Each of us is an SME (Subject Matter Expert) in a few areas, but we need our fellow team-members to support us in a wide variety of other areas. That requires trust, and that level of trust requires a relationship with your fellow team members that just can't be built in a cubicle.

The one thing we did have to change was the nature of our team-building exercises. Our staff planned white water rafting once and snowmobiling another time. On the white water rafting trip, I almost drowned. On the snowmobiling trip, it dropped to -40 and several of our team members got frostbite. The next event -- the old guys on the team pressed for the team building event to be dinner at the golf course. That beat out the competing idea of skydiving.

After that, we went boating. The next event was at Dave & Busters. Our next event is at a micro-brewery. After that, our COO is pressing for a Vegas trip.

If you don't enjoy team building activities at your company, you may be in the wrong job. Work should be fun. If its not fun, you're not doing it right.

 

The last two posts missed what type of team building this is. This is not a treat. We had those in the good old days: a little info sharing from execs, a fun activity, dinner cruise, more info sharing, and a Major League Baseball game (with a load of spending money). All of this in a beautiful city, in a beautiful hotel, with spouses included. Those were fun but in the end they were more of a treat than a "team building" activity. In the end it bought some goodwill.

The type I am refering to is the canned team building that includes some events that are borrowed from youth camps and have some "sharing" activity that are designed to elicit hugging and crying.

Will's comment about work being fun is a bit myopic. Are office politics fun? Is it fun dealing with management that thinks they or the consultants they hire are SME's on things they no nothing about? I had a consult that was suppose to help us implement a web project ask me "so a web site is like a servlet, right?". Is dealing with threats and forced attendance to off hour events fun? If your experience in these areas is limited to treats like canoe trips, I'd suggest reading the team building chapter from the Dilbert Priniciple.

 

Yeah tbarr60 is right there is a huge difference between fun events and the stupid activities that trainers ask you to “pretend there is lava everywhere except on that log which is a bridge. Now let’s talk about how you can get everyone over there. Go! Go Go. Yea Team!!!!”

One time a company that I worked with had a big section of land out in the middle of nowhere that they would have events. Well after a day of games gayer then the volleyball scene in Top Gun, that also contained more high fives, they said that anyone with family commitments could leave and everyone else could stay if they wanted to and there would be other activities.

These activities started when they pulled out a ton of ice chests with ice-cold beer and started passing them out. The things that they had planned for us were night shooting skeet. Yes they gave drunk people shotguns, at night. There was, also, a lot of ATVs. They loaded a lot of the drunks up jeeps and 4wheelers and let them tear through the countryside.

I’m not sure how much teambuilding went on as employees stumbled around hugging everyone in drunken stupors. One thing that did happen was my boss, who was this woman about 10 years older then me, did some dirty things to me. At the time I was 22 and I thought wow this is great. Let me tell you awkward does not even begin to describe the feeling in the office that following Monday and continuing for a very long time.

 

HU'd

I never know which of your stories is true or not (or if even 1 is)

 

Now that's comedy. You just can't pay for comedy that good.

My team would absolutely love that.

I think that we have only non-gun owner at the company, and one of our regular subcontractors does not drink.

But... that's an event that's obviously not for every company.

That team building right there -- building connections on a deep personal level.

 

Team building is generally a spurious management practice to justify their own failings. The only team building approach that works is a manager who demonstrates a genuine interest in the collective wellbeing of his/her staff.

 

But that's not team building. That's building the relationship between the manager and the individual contributor.

Team building is building the independent relationships between each team member. It's a matrix, not a hub-and-spoke architecture.

Let's say that I am the manager and that I have a consultant named Steve and a consultant named Kris. What I need is for Steve to be comfortable enough with Kris to call Kris directly when he needs assistance -- and to be able to trust that Kris will help him. I also need Kris to have an emotional relationship with Steve that will motivate him to assist Steve.

I need these people to be able to work-together. Yes, the both have good relationships with me and they could send every request through me, but that's not efficient for them, for me, or for our customers. We need to be able to respond quickly. We need to be able to work together as a dynamic team.

That's what team building is all about.

 

When I first read your comment I thought how can he not know. All of the ones are true except for the truly outlandsish ones where it's obvious I'm joking. Then i thought damn I'm kind of a magnet for weird.

Yeah that's all true. Most of the stuff I post is true. If it's in story form then it's true. If it's just some random weird comment then it's my imagination. Like the midget cowboy.

 

I do like this comment. What I've observed is that there are management failings that are then attributed to the greater population of the organization so large groups are sent to be trained. Since the management shortcomings weren't addressed the training is for naught and the downward spriral continues or accelerates.

Most of the expected behaviors from team building activities are behaviors I've seen on a poster listing all the things you need to know in life were taught to you in kindergarten (first year of school in US at age 5). It's also funny how I see trust falls, passing the group over stumps, rock climbing, ropes courses, passing members through a string spider web, etc at father-daugher camps with my 8 year old. Again, these are kindergarten activities and kindergarten lessons.

A final note: The sort of team building I am addressing is the kind bought by multi-billion dollar companies with multi-thousand employees not a fun little start up with a handful of people going to the go cart track or the opening day of a new Star Geek movie.