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Sydney Morning Herald
Wednesday November 19, 2003
The end may be nigh for abseiling with the boss and other corporate team-building exercises. And it won't be a millisecond too soon for some.
Team-building exercises aren't supposed to make you vomit. As far as they go, this sounded like a good one - a day on a yacht followed by a banquet lunch. Better than a day in the office, that's for sure.
Other workmates had done it the week before and had a ball: sunny day, calm seas and a teasing little breeze.
But it all went horribly wrong for Shaheera Huggins and 20 of her colleagues from Community Corrections in Victoria.
"The idea was that we would work together sailing the boat, learn how to trust each other and be prepared to put our lives in [our colleagues'] hands," Huggins says.
"Unfortunately, the weather [in Port Phillip Bay] was really bad. It was cold, the waves were huge and we all got wet. Many people were seasick and vomiting over the side."
And you can bet the banquet lunch wasn't a big hit either. "It wasn't good, people were so sick."
Ironically, Huggins says the exercise was unintentionally useful on another level. "We had to help the people who were being sick - God bless Maria, she vomited all day - and this showed us that not everyone is invincible. We have to pretend we are at times [in our line of work] but this made us understand that we aren't."
It is a tale of mixed blessings that is repeated across corporate Australia. Long-suffering employees are coerced into team-building activities, from abseiling to kayaking, from cooking classes to weekend retreats. They are expected to embrace their work, the company ethos, even each other as they bond and build.
But sometimes it doesn't go according to plan, as 30 KFC managers discovered last year when a confidence-building exercise that involved firewalking landed them in hospital with deep burns to their feet.
So do they work? Are we inspired to work harder, longer and in greater harmony? A straw poll of team-building survivors declared them fun but largely irrelevant and sometimes even traumatic.
Tania Maiolo got more than she bargained for when fellow workers from the Sports Association of the University of NSW decided to bond while learning to surf at Bondi Beach.
"On my second wave of the day, I was knocked off my board by my boss and dumped by a wave," Maiolo says.
"I surfaced with blood streaming from my head but my uncaring colleagues forced me to sit on the beach for two hours while they finished their team bonding. They then took me to hospital where it was found I had mild concussion."
Undeterred, Maiolo later rejoined her workmates for lunch and "drinking games" and "despite a headache that was bigger than the wave that dumped me, I had a great day".
Sometimes the challenge is just too great. While working at Citibank, Karen Yen was expected to climb a ladder and fall backwards into the arms of her colleagues.
"I refused," she says. "It was supposed to be a trust-building exercise but ... well, I would trust them if I weighed 50 kilos but I don't.
"In the end I don't think everyone is working at the same level within a team. At one point there is one person who has less control than everyone else."
Yen says other group activities included making flying objects and seeing which one travelled the furthest.
"All the men built planes and got very technical," she says. "The women screwed the paper into a ball and threw it. We won."
Other people have discovered hidden talents. Two years ago Adrian Kinslor was sent by his employer, Mission Australia, on a classic team-building exercise that involved negotiating imaginary quicksand using cardboard.
"It showed that some people had leadership skills that weren't being recognised," Kinslor says. "I ended up solving and leading the quicksand exercise and a couple of other things."
Kinslor left Mission Australia soon after and took up a management position with Oxfam Community Aid Abroad.
One of the more recent arrivals on the team-building circuit is the Drum Cafe, which promises to deliver "a synchronisation of energy, a unity and a common purpose".
"Our philosophy is primarily that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts," says Maxine Segal-Radus, the director of Drum Cafe, which came to Sydney from South Africa two years ago.
"We use music to illustrate that, with a common base and a shared vision, we can work together to achieve business objectives ... and have fun."
Using djembe drums, percussion instruments and a didgeridoo, the five members of the Drum Cafe got into the groove last week in a Botany warehouse. Thirty-eight members of Housewares International took up the challenge, finally declaring it fun and "better than walking on hot coals".
This team event is probably more on the reward end of the activity scale, which Naomi Simson, the "chief of experience" for RedBalloon Days, says is where a lot of companies are heading.
"The reward can be anything from a team-cooking event to something a bit more adrenaline-pumping such as taking a rubber ducky outside Sydney Harbour," she says.
"Throwing your boss off a cliff [a variation of abseiling] is also popular."
But Phil Shorten, the managing partner of Impart Skills, says more and more companies are forgoing the adventure or personal development exercises.
"There is a move away from the 'throw people in the deep end and see how they respond' sort of approach to simulating the business decisions people might have to make and the logistics of handling difficult communication situations."
One of the common problems he cites is the "silo mentality where individual business units are busily working away but not necessarily being proactive and collaborating with other units in the same organisation".
Shorten says his company uses a series of indoor and outdoor activities to simulate the business conditions. These can include building bridges across a valley or escaping a "holocaust situation". But the critical part of the exercise is the debrief, when the learning experience is linked back to the issues in the workplace.
"This has led to the emergence of issues-based facilitation where we work through problems," Shorten says. "We use a pin-plan methodology to get people to explore the problems and work out concrete action-plan steps. People can then take their action plan away and even put it on their screensaver at work."
Dr Anne Lytle, the director of accelerated development programs at the Australian Graduate School of Management, agrees that training programs are more targeted today.
"There hasn't been a lot of evidence that ropes courses [such as abseiling] demonstrated specific performance-related improvements," she says.
"Now we are focusing on training managers to be more emotionally intelligent, to be more empathetic with their teams, to mentor, to set goals, to structure reward systems."
Sounds a bit too much like management speak. Perhaps we should stick with the abseiling and cooking classes.
© 2003 Sydney Morning Herald