The Retrospector

I’ve actually had this conversation come up twice the last couple weeks without instigating it myself so I thought I’d go ahead and cover the topic. Both people were on completely different sides of the argument as to whether or not team building exercises were a benefit to the company in the end. Personally, I lean toward it being a general waste of time, but I can also understand why it is beneficial to some.

Today I’ll describe my experience with “team building days” and toss out some pros and cons on why a company would want to promote them. Is it something for your company? You’ll have to be the judge of that.

Building an “egg catcher”

One day out of nowhere at a large company I was working for right out of college, the program manager announced that we were all to meet in the cafeteria for an all-day team-building meeting. I’d never seen one, and was a little annoyed that I wasn’t going to be able to finish the stuff I was working on. However I was sort of excited for the change of pace.

When I got down there, I saw him standing next to 6 tables with a big pile of sticks and pillowcases. The day was reserved for the entire room of 50 people to split up into 6-7 teams (I can’t remember exactly, there were a lot of us) with the goal of producing an egg catcher out of popsicle sticks, a pillowcase, twine, and a bucket. The catch was, all the little sub-departments were shuffled up and sent to all different teams. Each team was made up of people from different groups that didn’t normally work together.

At the end of the day, the program manager went around and dropped an egg from 4ft off the floor to see if each device would prevent it from breaking as was supposed to end up in the bucket on the floor. I think only one egg broke that day, and we all cheered the teams on as they managed to barely keep the eggs in tact.

Well, that was fun. What did I get out of it?

Ok, I just spent an entire day away from the work that was fresh in my head this morning. It’s Friday, so I’m about to leave for another 2 days and my work isn’t nearly where I wanted it to be by Monday. So now I’ll just be a day behind and have to end up making up time next week to be done by the final deadline. So why did I participate? What benefit did the company get out of me building this egg contraption?

Here are a few points I’ve come up with on the whole team-building issue that helps explain it:

1. Doing the project with people you don’t normally work with forced you to see things as others see them when designing the deliverable.
2. You’re also forced to communicate with a new mixture of people from all different backgrounds and departments. (Mostly engineers, but mixing hardware, software, electrical, etc.)
3. Being forced into a project with unknown people can show you that the engineering process that the company crams down your throat can work for any variety of teams or projects. (We had to go through the motions, documentation mock-ups and all for the day.)
4. Odds are, you’re going to get put in a group with someone you don’t like or don’t want to work with. You still have to deal with it (a day isn’t so bad) and get the thing done by working with them regardless. Knowing you only have to put up with it for a day makes you actually use your soft skills as opposed to throwing up your hands and telling your boss you can’t handle working with them.
5. A break! After a couple months of 50-60 hour weeks, you get a FREE DAY! As much as this kinda sucks for schedules, it sure feels good sometimes when nothing is expected of you for a few hours.

That was neat. So who benefits?

Ok, so that wasn’t so bad. Why did I have to go through this entire day-long exercise to “learn” this? Personally for me, I think that it’s helpful for new-hires and people right out of college. I like that it forces the new folks into situations where they’re expected to contribute, and don’t have some huge under-advantage (from lack of experience) like perceive in the workplace. It can also open them up to people they don’t know so maybe they aren’t so shy in the big corporate world they’re now trying to get used to.

As for the people that have been here 15 years and have been designing systems their whole lives, I really don’t see the need for this type of exercise other than to get to know the new people or to be shown something in an entirely different perspective. I just don’t see how that’s going to work in a generic project and be effective. You can’t “pass down the baton of experience” when on a project you’ve never done before either.

What is the company getting out of this?

I’m still working on this one. This is a company investment that just doesn’t seem very quantifiable at all. There’s no special metric that you can apply to this that determines how much ROI the company will get out of it. Personally, I’m not a big fan of all things having to be tied to ROI. Sometimes I simply want a free day where the company simply looks the other way while I can do something fun with others in the office that builds the camaraderie in the group.

However, I can also see from a company perspective that there’s a bottom line for its existence. It needs to make money. If there’s not an ROI associated with an action, the business can’t easily justify it. This is where most opinions will split. Some are gung-ho pro-business-has-to-have-ROI-justification, and others are anti-overwork-the-employees-so-they-stop-performing-or-trying-so-hard.

My opinion? I think it depends highly on the corporate environment already established. Some companies work well by catering to the employees every need. The employees are less stressed, and very productive. Other companies throw so many restraints on what their employees are allowed to do to make sure that only productive activities are allowed. The employees perform out of fear that they may not make the cut and be forced to go elsewhere.

Conclusion

In either case, team-building really has no justification unless the company is trying to give their employees the happy-feel-good sensation. This is great, but in the end…a team can produce without having a good time along the way. Projects still get done regardless of being able to build an egg catcher.

In the long run, I personally think employees would be better off if they’re given more vacation time or bonus off-days in-between projects where they can go use their time however they want. I don’t think they should be forced to spend it with people they aren’t going to do much else with anyway. Aside from the new people in the company getting exposed to working with new personalities, I just don’t see the overall benefit. I’m certainly at my point in life where I’d rather go spend a day at the park with my kids.

So who out there has done all-day team building exercises? What type of pros and cons did you see from doing a project like this? Would you rather have a day at home under a shady tree instead of putting together some contraption using your engineering process? I’d be interested in hearing about what other types of projects there are out there aside from catching eggs.

Tags: team building, egg catcher

   

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