Tag: corporate team building events

In Articles on Teamwork, business team building exercises, Corporate Team Building Games, executive team building exercises, large group team building events, motivational team building exercises, team building event ideas

We can improve the impact our expenditures of large teambuilding events if we carefully consider some success factors in generating ideas for innovation and implementation. Our tendency is to repeat what we have done before, and the goal of this article is to simply provide some new anchoring ideas for doing things differently and generating more impact.

There has been a great reduction in those “All Hands” kinds of meetings over the last 10 years. Once upon a time, one had to play a year ahead to find hotel ballroom space for meetings and make site visits and tour facilities; today, it is a lot less difficult. Being online makes all the difference and makes selection and programming communications really simple.

Back then, hotels were pretty arrogant about controlling all things and having complicated one-sided contracts for everything but today, one finds them a lot more flexible and interested in obtaining your business. Times change and their business has become a lot more competitive…

Herein are some key thoughts about making your company events more effective. And here are a couple of my older posts around some of these same issues and opportunities:

Here is an article about selecting a presenter who will involve and engage your people in an event that can actually change behavior and generate momentum for improvement. There are a lot of links in that to other articles and resources about organizing resources, also.

Here are some ideas about generating engagement and momentum for implementing change following a large group event

Here is an article about improving teamwork and collaboration in a large event

A post on some of the ISSUES with outdoor training types of events and some cautionary thoughts about anchoring to learning and change

Frankly, there seem to be a lot of strange and sometimes seemingly irrelevant things done in the name of team building and organizational development. The reality says that if you hang out at a large hotel and wander about the meeting area and you will see a lot of people sitting, just sitting there inactive when the doors are opened, as if they feel relieved that they successfully avoided things.

This observation is supporting the reality of Death By Powerpoint, or at least death by non-involvement and non-engagement. (One wonders why there are not required governmental warnings about deep vein thrombosis for sitting so long at some of these sessions!)

People at Onlinemba.com came across my blog while researching Team Building and sent me a link to one of their articles called, “How the Top Companies Take On Team Building:”

Few corporate-culture business phrases are as potentially groan-inducing as “team building.” Visions of cheesy performances and “inspiring” activities like coal walking and trust falls immediately spring to mind.

Yeah, it seems that a LOT of people realize that we can choose to do things differently for our meetings. With technology, so much of that data-stuff that executives like to live-present can be handled in screenshares or webcasts. For the most part, they are not asking for ideas or suggestions but merely sharing data. Face-to-face is an expensive way to push data at people.

I’ve posted up before on some of the more ridiculous or hard to seriously consider team activities such as golf, paintball and the infamous fire walking — and I just saw a twitter post suggesting that “detoxing” could be done as a teamwork improvement activity. (Seriously!)

Maybe there are some positive individual impacts from doing those kinds of things but I just do not see the teambuilding aspects unless we get into the discussion about peer pressure forcing people to do things that they don’t really want to do. (Sorry, I meant “encouraging” and not coercion or forcing people to do things in the above…)

Even comedic writer Dave Berry weighed in on Burger King’s toasty experience grilling their own managers with their firewalking activity — see my blog post on that here.

Many different activities DO have a variety of positive organizational impacts, and many of these are not costly. Some are a bit off the wall, like hiring a comedy troupe to come in and cause people to laugh at issues and reframe improvement opportunities (if they do not offend the senior managers too much!). And there are literally dozens of different online surveys and Personality Inventories with linkages to team behaviors. These can be framed as a team building exercise if there was more to it than simply discussions. Maybe they could let the comedy troupe do the personality testing?

In my way of thinking, I will simply continue to be designing and offering games such as The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine or Innovate & Implement that are fun, controllable, inexpensive and actually link directly to workplace collaboration and performance improvement.

We know that it has a lot of long-term impacts on participants and gets everyone involved and engaged. AND, it can be used for very large groups of 200 or even more.

Team building exercise, Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine

click here to read more about the Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine

In addition to selling the exercise to trainers and consultants, we also rent the exercise to people interested in an inexpensive, yet powerful large group event. If you click on the link below, you can find a clear explanation as to the frameworks for rental as well as our prices. It is inexpensive and powerful. Click here if you would like to see a few testimonials.

If you have any questions, please feel free to chat me up. I will offer my ideas and frameworks to you,

For the FUN of It!

Dr. Scott Simmerman is a designer of team building games and organization improvement tools. Managing Partner of Performance Management Company since 1984, he is an experienced presenter and consultant.

 Connect with Scott on Google+ – you can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

Follow Scott’s posts on Pinterest: pinterest.com/scottsimmerman/
Scott’s blog on Poems and Quips on Workplace Improvement is here.

Debriefing and Facilitating for Organizational Improvement – Games versus Exercises

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On March 7, 2013

In Articles on Teamwork, business team building exercises, Corporate Team Building Games, employee engagement, Engagement, executive team building exercises, experiential learning, Facilitation, large group team building events, Leadership Development Game, Metaphors for business improvement, motivational team building exercises, team building exercises, team building exercises for the workplace, team motivation

Fun versus Value. Activity versus Learning. Age old mysteries…

Maybe I have been at this consulting and training stuff too long, but in a conversation with a prospect the other day, it really got me thinking about the reality of team building and organizational improvement and the VALUE of what we do. I have posted up before many of my thoughts on issues of impact and cost and time, from discussions about why I do not like icebreakers all that much in this article and in this one.

I have also shared a lot of ideas about outdoor training kinds of events, a few of which I like but many of which I view as problematic, such as a paintball game with a group of people who may have some physical impairments. One, on fun and learning can be found here. Another discussion is found here.

There have been a string of article focused on how to improve the impacts of training, such as this one focused on Motivation and Processes or this one talking about how training cannot improve work processes and thus performance.

And there have been LOTS of articles on engagement and dis-un-engagement and the process of involving people for intrinsic motivation and performance improvement purposes. If you search “engagement” on the blog, you will find more than 20 articles playing all around the theme, with statistics and ideas and frameworks.

My favorite post is on extrinsic motivation — in it, I link to an article that is called “I Quit! Nevermind. Whatever.” This focuses on the ignored part of the workforce, the quasi-motivated reasonably good performers who show up and put in time but do not perform to their capability — the 50% in the middle. You can download this article on engagimentation and motivation by clicking on the image:

What stimulated this post was a discussion with a prospect who has great experience facilitating teambuilding for organizations. His view was that a lot of companies do NOT want a fun learning event but would rather choose to simply do something fun. They do not want the session to relate to organization performance or work-improvement issues but simply want to throw some money out to a vendor to show their people that they care! The are looking for no ROI.

It is kinda like what I see when I look at the “Team Building Offerings” of a place like Dave and Buster’s. They actually frame this dinner plus play on the machines as Team Building. Apparently, they think that they can meaningfully relate that arcade games like slotball and shooting hoops and coupons somehow relates to workplace improvement and claimed that teambuilding is one of the specialties of our staff and corporate event planners. I mean, really?

Most of these activities are framed as competitions — and I will write soon about my thinking on the difficulties of turning competition into collaboration in any meaningful or substantial way. A client had me look into this for them and I saw it as fun, but not of much real value for the investment of time and money. Why posture and call it a team building? And what if someone falls down while running to exchange their coupons for “great gifts and prizes” before the clock wound down…

For me, I feel that if a company makes the investment of money, people and time into some event, there should be some impact. An internal HR person in Jacksonville summed it up nicely in a testimonial he sent to me:

Best “Learning Game” I have ever used… We purchased Dutchman for an offsite meeting to discuss Resource allocation and Collaboration. It was a breeze to facilitate. The participants loved it and more importantly, walked away with lessons that they were immediately able to apply back at the office. The slides and materials allow you to guide the group in almost any direction imaginable. I am still getting comments weeks after the session about the impact it made on the business and the improved performance. A small investment that generates huge results.

I mean, the fact that it links to the workplace issues and that it apparently motivated his people to choose to do something differently is why I designed the game in the first place! And why I think it is a much better tool that so many of the other activities out there. (See a comparison of my Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine game to one of the most well-known games in the team building marketplace by clicking here)

But there is another reality that I wanted to mention, and that is the post-game debriefing activity that should connect the play to the real world of organizational improvement. Yeah, fun is good and all that, but how do we help people make the connections and help them to make better choices in the future.

I have always talked about my exercises like Dutchman and Collaboration Journey as “excuses to debrief.” I want the game design and embedded metaphors to directly link to clean themes for improvement. Turbochargers become a metaphor for Best Practices, for example, and, “The goal is to mine as much gold as we can,” is really focused on the WE and optimizing overall success, rather than focusing on competing to win. Where there are winners, there are many more losers!

So, I absolutely LOVE it when people say things like this:

The feedback from the participants was fabulous.
I led the Dutchman’s Gold Mine game for our Store Manager development as part of their annual conference.
During the game, there were a few “aha” moments but what really brought the point home was The Debriefing. There was a lot of great debriefing material to use and I focused on how the game paralleled our business and how much better the results could be if we collaborated better as an organization.
Scott was extremely supportive and was always available to answer my questions or give me suggestions. I recommend this game to anyone that wants to build collaboration among and between teams. It is fun and effective!
After renting the game to initially test it with two large groups, we bought the Professional Edition to run this company-wide.

This feedback was from Kyla, a trainer with a large retailing organization, who is rolling out the exercise through her whole company. That is really cool! For $8000, their cost of delivery is about $1 a person…)

So, I like HARD questions that focus on the organization’s future. I like discussions that relate to choices people make in the game and then in the workplace. When I ask about what energizes, I relate it to what the managers could do differently. When I focus on Gold, I focus on choices to make improvements in results. The game was about maximizing ROI — that comes from optimizing communications, sharing resources, and working together.

I would love to hear responses to this, both on the question of fun versus fun learning, as well as on the issue of debriefing activities. I often find so many of the latter so lightweight, so devoid of connection that all comments will be forgotten as soon as the next activity starts. I know that the facilitators think they are doing a great job because there are often smiles all around, but it also seems like nothing gets done after such sessions. One client long ago did one of those firewalking events — a couple of years before the Burger King fiasco * — and people DID talk about doing it. But it was always focused on doing the firewalking and never on anything that happened as a result of that BIG expense to the company…

*Firewalking done by Burger King back in 2001, with 100 marketing employees participating in a “team building and personal growth” session with 12 getting burned and Burger King generating a great deal of publicity — yes, even Dave Barry poked fun at them in an article of his. (you can read more here. (Dave Barry’s really funny article is here!)

Games are fun and I like games. I like fun. I like to kayak and play pool and all that. But I think that a corporate learning event should be just that, a learning event. I like Dave and Buster’s food — I am just not sure of their impact on organizational improvement. Frankly, I think the teambuilding programs where you actually cook a dinner would be more impactful than simply playing, but the home page of D&B’s says that they have conducted thousands of these events.

For the FUN of It!

Dr. Scott Simmerman is a designer of team building games and organization improvement tools. Managing Partner of Performance Management Company since 1984, he is an experienced presenter and consultant.  Connect with Scott on Google+ – you can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

Follow Scott’s posts on Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/scottsimmerman/

Big Company Team Building Events

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On October 31, 2012

In collaboration, Corporate Team Building Games, executive team building exercises, Leadership Development Game, motivational team building exercises, team building event ideas, team building exercises, team building exercises for the workplace

This blog post is about what Big Companies do for team building events and the kinds of programs for team building and organizational development that exist. It is also about Big Events for companies, I guess, and focused on some key thoughts about making events more effective. Frankly, there seem to be a lot of strange and sometimes seemingly irrelevant things done in the name of team building and organizational development.

Hang out at a large hotel and wander about the meeting area and you will see a lot of people sitting, just sitting there inactive when the doors are opened. It gives rise the notion of Death By Powerpoint, or at least death by non-involvement. One wonders why there are not warnings about deep vein thrombosis for some of these sessions!

People at Onlinemba.com came across my blog while researching Team Building and sent me a link to one of their articles. The title was, “How the Top Companies Take On Team Building” and I liked the way it started, since I pretty much agree with this:

I’ve posted up before on some of the more ridiculous or hard to seriously consider team activities such as golf, paintball or fire walking — maybe there are some positive individual impacts from that but I just do not see the team aspects unless we get into the discussion about peer pressure forcing people to do things that they don’t really want to do. (Sorry, I meant “encouragement” instead of coercion or force in the above…)

Heck, even Dave Berry weighed in on Burger King’s toasty experience with that firewalking kind of activity — see my blog post on that here.

But the OnlineMBA article mentioned above is a pretty good one. It talks about some different activities that DO have positive organizational impacts, many of which are not costly. Some are a bit off the wall, like hiring a comedy troupe to come in and cause people to laugh. I have actually seen that backfire but that is a whole ‘nother conversation. And they talk about doing Personality Tests as a team building exercise — I guess that could work but it does not sound like a lot of laughs. Maybe they could let the comedy troupe do the testing?

Me, I will just stick with offering games such as The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine or Innovate & Implement that are fun, controllable, inexpensive and actually link directly to workplace collaboration and performance improvement. We know that it has a lot of long-term impacts on participants and gets everyone involved and engaged. AND, it can be used for very large groups of 200 or even more.

You can find user review survey about Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine impacts here. The feedback about the effectiveness of the exercise is pretty amazing,

For the FUN of It!

You can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com
Connect with Scott on Google+

Learn more about Scott at his LinkedIn site.

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Ideas on People and Performance, Team Building, Motivation and Innovation

Tag: corporate team building events

Team Building Events with Large Groups – organizational improvement ideas

Debriefing and Facilitating for Organizational Improvement – Games versus Exercises

Big Company Team Building Events