Teambuilding…………..The mere mention of the word and you can hear the collective sigh around the office.

In the back corner cubicles and corner offices you can hear the whispers……..”do we have to go?”, “not another one of those…” and the dreaded “I can not believe that they actually have us do this crap….”

There is a reason that companies get this type of response to a planned teambuilding. They have forgotten the one key element that makes teambuilding successful….FUN.

Yes, it is possible to actually go on a teambuilding trip and have the dreaded “fun”. In fact, while most upper management are looking for metrics and ROI they fail to realize that by adding an element of enjoyment to an exercise, they actually increase the return on event investment by not simple percentage points, but exponentially.
 

Now, there are many ways to bring the “sexy” back to teambuilding and not actually shatter your event budget. A few things to remember.

•You were already going to have the exercise already – Spend wisely and make the event dollars count, simply throwing money at something may make it look good, but it does not make it fun and engaging.
•Adding fun to the mix simply means being creative and working harder on the front end.

Case in point, OnSite Events recently planned a teambuilding outing for a Major Bio-Tech Pharma company.

Two divisions were being integrated and members of each team only knew each other in passing, if at all. The main objective of the exercise was to get the folks to know, understand and begin the process of looking at each other as allies, rather than advisories.

OnSite provided a solution that made the program fun for the Attendees and provided a winning solution for Management. Some important factors we integrated into the program:

•Provide social time in the evenings and leave the business portion to morning meetings. This allows the attendees to recharge their brains while actually getting to know the people they will be working with, rather than their job descriptions. They will learn those soon enough.
•Do good business, this is important and key to providing the ROI necessary to justify these events. Mornings were filled with meetings in a comfortable atmosphere with the tools needed to get the job of merging divisions done.
•Sneak in some pre-teambuilding teambuilding…….our actual teambuilding was at an offsite location away from the business portion of the event so we developed an on bus game show. Looked like fun, but was actually geared to get seatmates to work together.

The teambuilding itself was an absolute smash.

Wine blending………...Seems basic enough…. but was a little more involved than the teams were led to believe (we gave them the “Oh-No” not this event pitch beforehand…….on purpose).

When they arrived, they were in for a big surprise.

Teams had to first, blend the wine and come up with the perfect wine. Now it was time to get people working together for a common goal.

In addition to simply creating an award winning Merlot, Cab – whatchamacalit, teams had to show how they would build the brand by:

•Developing the back story to the winery (in detail)
•Developing a pricing model for the wines they would produce and show why they picked this pricing model
•Create a marketing plan that would astound the judges
•Design a label that would go on the bottle
•And……… then they had to present to the group

All of this in front of panel of experts that included Corporate VP’s, a culinary expert and a “man on the street”. This panel would judge and crown winners in a variety of categories.

Yes, the teams had fun, coming up with original back stories that ranged from “they all quit the company after they got the stock price up to 100.00 a share”,  “The wine came from someone’s “long lost Spanish Heritage”, to a full winery developed to cater to NASCAR fans (Team NASCAR went all out, noting that NASCAR fans make up X amount of the population and if they were able to get x% of the NASCAR market they would be the Wine Leader).

Creative, fun and valuable……….

The exercise forced people to compromise, to listen to others ideas (not all in the NASCAR group liked NASCAR) and too truly learn to communicate with each other as a team.

And that was the goal wasn’t it.

Just a thought,

Keith