Teambuilding is no longer shorthand for raftbuilding in the rain or going on a boozy company jolly. Chloe Rigby talks to some of the region’s leading event organisers about the different activities on offer today and finds out how companies can make teambuilding work for them.
When you are sailing a ship across the Bay of Biscay and a force 11 storm hits, you have no option but to work with your crew mates to get back to safe harbour.
That’s what happened on an exercise organised by Steve Thomas of Bristol teambuilding company Grass Routes. This event was organised for the long-term unemployed and results, he says, were striking. “We got back and within two months all 13 had jobs,” he says.
Teams face a different challenge on a regular event held as part of the company’s Synergy programme. The programme brings together managers from different companies who work together and build a team to tackle a challenge.
“We take a group of 16 to 18 managers away. They arrive on Friday and are told that on Monday morning they are going to have 35 disadvantaged kids arriving and must design a holiday for them,” says Thomas, whose clients have included Clarks, Siemens and Severn Trent.
“They won’t all know each other but their job is to come together as a team and design and deliver a week’s activity holiday for those children. That has produced amazing results.”
Whether it’s safely navigating a storm, organising a holiday, learning how to cook in a restaurant kitchen or mountain biking across Dartmoor, these are the kind of activities teambuilding companies are putting business teams through. There are many reasons a company might put a team through an exercise, says Thomas.
“Morale may be low, people may be leaving and managers might be trying to build morale again. A lot of new people in the team might need to be integrated. There may be confidence issues within a team that need to be looked at.”
The expectation is that teambuilding will help solve any issues and, in time, increase the productivity of the team. That is the experience of Paul Dickinson, learning and development manager with the Met Office’s production resources team, based in Exeter. Senior managers from the Met Office tackled problem- solving physical challenges, organised by Bath-based Breathing Space.
The aim was to bring together a group of individuals who had not worked closely. “The director wanted to speed up the process of them operating well together,” says Dickinson. “The feedback was positive and everyone felt they had gained.”
He adds: “The feedback we get from teams, particularly team managers, is that after spending a couple of days together people have a much better understanding of each other. They work better and the quality of output is improved. People generally enjoy the event and that’s good, too.”
Properly designed activities are at the heart of what teambuilding companies do, says Thomas of Grass Routes. “Events work if they are thought through,” he says. “Before the programme we visit them to let them know exactly what they are letting themselves in for.”
Richard Best of Breathing Space agrees. “We start with a comprehensive brief from the client and we also interview delegates beforehand,” he says.
Ingrid Heseltine, who runs the ONE Programme, a year-long leadership and self-development programme for senior managers in the South West, had a clear brief for the physical activity she wanted to run for her course members.
“We wanted to create a physical outdoor journey that reflected the skills we had been working on over the year and to relate to one another so the group could continue to support each other once it had finished,” she says. “So many leadership events are about inspiration, but in a week you are back where you were. We wanted to use the journey to change people give them the habits they want.
“One of the messages we wanted to get across was the benefit of being in these beautiful places and having the chance to leave the trouble and frantic pace of life behind. We did mountain biking and one guy hadn’t been on a bike for 20 years. He’s now bought himself a bike and goes out at weekends with his family.”
So are there certain types of team that are better suited to specific activities? Thomas says it’s hard to be so prescriptive. “Each group is different, whether they come from the same company or the same department. That’s a function of the different individuals within the team.”
The cliché of teambuilding is that people return inspired but soon find their good intentions do not last. So how can companies make sure the teambuilding exercise is more than a fun day out?
Best says the debrief is important. “We don’t want to say goodbye to them on Dartmoor and never see them again. We follow up and see if it has been useful.”
Thomas adds: “There’s a lot of evaluation you can do to see what effect it’s had on a team such as psychometric testing.”
He says research carried out into Grass Routes’ Synergy programme indicates skills learnt remain embedded long afterwards, adding that as many as half taking part go on to work in their community.
Companies can expect to pay upwards of £100 per person for a simple day of outdoor activities. Make it more complex and the sky’s the limit. So what are the long-term benefits?
Best points to a better understanding of work colleagues. “If you talk to other people to achieve something in a way that doesn’t offend them or rub them up the wrong way that can translate straight back to the workplace.”
For Thomas, teambuilding does what it says on the tin – it builds teams. “Teams have to go through a process, putting pressure put on them to work together. I have known teams where someone has sat next to someone else for six months and hasn’t known their name,” he says. “It happens gradually but teams have to push through that to become effective.”