The Bond Trade
CORPORATE TEAM-BUILDING EVENTS
ARE GROWING IN NUMBER - AND IN VARIETY
By DIANE MEHTA
August 20, 2007-- ON most afternoons, Corey McCarthy and Antonette Maysonet are hard at work in the offices of Optimedia, a SoHo media agency. Today, though, they’re stalking a Greenwich Village sidewalk with a different agenda - cornering a passerby who looks like Paris Hilton.
By the afternoon’s end, McCarthy, Maysonet and coworkers Krista Maloney and Christina Henrich need to photograph themselves with a celebrity look-alike - as well as a police officer, a street performer, a product belonging to a client and numerous other targets. So they approach the Hilton doppelganger (“Has anyone ever told you you look like Paris Hilton?” Maysonet asks) and coax her into posing for a shot.
Today it’s all part of a day’s work for some 70 Optimedia employees, who are going head-to-head in a scavenger hunt run by City Hunt. The game involves splitting up into teams and roaming the city solving clues and meeting various other challenges.
If it’s an unusual way to spend a workday afternoon, it’s becoming less so. Looking to build loyalty and improve communication among co-workers, companies are increasingly turning to team-building activities - and the range of those activities is growing, be it scavenger hunts, bungee jumping or battling at paintball. In a recent survey of marketing and advertising firms by the Creative Group, respondents reported taking part in activities from team drumming and skydiving to line dancing and improv comedy.
City Hunt’s business - largely scavenger hunts and clue-based museum adventures for finance and pharmaceutical companies - has grown about 40 percent per year in the last three years, according to CEO Ben Hoffman.
The Go Game, a high-tech competition in which teams complete “missions” that are downloaded to their Web-enabled cellphones, has doubled its business in each of the past few years, and attracted clients including Microsoft and Verizon. The Offshore Sailing School at Chelsea Piers did its first corporate event in 2001 as a side business; such events tripled from 2005 to 2006, and this year they’re expected to go 50 to 70 percent higher.
“Everyone’s looking at the bottom line,” says Suzen O’Rourke, founder of Cooking by the Book, which runs “prep-to-plate” group cooking classes for a growing number of corporate clients. Companies “want a lean and mean organization, and they’re doing more and more team-building events so the core team is more efficient.”
Talking cure
Why the rush to get office workers to put their heads together in a different setting? Event companies and experts point to a number of reasons, including a younger work force, a need to retain and energize workers in a tight labor market, and a desire to foster face-to-face interaction in the age of digital communication.
“People are more likely to e-mail someone than get up and talk,” says Angie Feehan, curriculum developer at Adventure Associates, which offers ropes courses, rock climbing and other challenges for clients like Pfizer and IBM. “Companies understand that part of the reason employees are not communicating well is because they’re not meeting face to face.”
Also, a work culture in which job-hopping is the norm creates a need to jump-start cooperation among colleagues that in the past might have developed naturally, says Diana Smith, manager of corporate sales at Offshore Sailing, whose clients include finance, insurance, law and accounting firms.
“People used to go to work for one company and stay there 30 years. Now they work for three years and move on. So everything they’ve learned - institutional memory - gets lost,” Smith says. Companies “are all looking to make sure their teams can work together, be productive, and want to stay.”
That’s where the off-site exercises come in. Whether you’re building a boat or hunting around town for hidden caches, you’re solving problems - as a team. An entry-level person may have more tech experience and be good at something that an older, more experienced worker finds challenging, so roles get turned around. Ideally, people learn to respect one another and communicate better.
“Team-building events build listening skills,” says City Hunt’s Hoffman.
That was the hope for Edwards Lifesciences, a firm that creates pioneers technologies to treat cardiovascular disease, which recently completed its first City Hunt competition. The alliances created during team-building events drive sales by fostering a sense of solidarity and cooperation among the sales staff, says Jayne Balaguer, regional sales director for the firm.
“Salespeople are out working independently, and team building helps them stay connected to the company and to each other, using each other as resources,” she says.
What she finds is that team building helps salespeople get to know each other, talk more, share experiences - and, importantly, share their sales successes. It also helps keep the team consistent and teaches new people just coming in.
“Our division is growing, so we’re adding reps all the time. You end up having two separate sales forces - guys who’ve been here for a while, and guys who went through sales training two weeks ago. You mix them up, and you start getting cross-pollination.”
Building Bridges
When Lindsey Cochran, a sales rep for Salesforce.com, met co-worker Sarah Chan, she thought Chan was the quiet type, not someone she’d be close to. Then Cochran found herself in the middle of The Go Game, brainstorming with a team of colleagues assigned to create a video. In jumps Chan, who impresses with her idea for a silent video re-creating JFK’s assassination. Chan ran the re-enactment, helping everyone get into character and act out the event. The two are now friends, and credit the team-building event for making it happen.
“It gives team members a view of people they never would see in the office - leadership characteristics or strategic thinking or other things not challenged in the work environment are revealed,” says Smith of Offshore Sailing.
Anjali Jameson, executive producer at The Go Game, likewise says the events are a process of discovery. Some firms run competitions for interns and summer associates, she reports, and make hires based on who outshines the rest.
“Every team always has that one person, whether they’re in a management role or the newest intern,” she says. “You get these people who are shy at the beginning, and they do something dramatic and become much more respected,” says Jameson.
Of course, less flattering things can be revealed as well. Jameson cites a curveball they throw teams in which a dressed-down actor with a backpack approaches, says his car has broken down and asks to borrow a cellphone. Half generally say yes, half say no. At the end of the game, when the ruse is revealed, “Some really look into themselves, wondering, ‘Why did I say no?’ ”
O’Rourke recalls a situation at Cooking by the Book involving a bossy woman whose director was considering replacing her. True to form, she ordered everyone around. Afterwards the facilitator asked one guy what he thought about her taking control. “She does it all the time,” he said.
“For her it was an epiphany. It really hit home,” says O’Rourke.
A day at the races
There’s yet another reason companies are turning to team-building events - to show their employees a good time. Hanging around outdoors on a workday isn’t a bad perk, especially if you’re jetting across wakes on the Hudson on a gusty day or poking around MoMA for a masterpiece that’s your next clue.
“I just thought it was the funnest thing!” exclaims Bridgette Verdon, an administrative assistant at the accounting firm Johnson Lambert, who recently took part in an Offshore Sailing excursion.
“It was a good bonding experience,” she says. “Everyone in my office got to work together to do something, and it was pretty interesting because you get in the moment - we’re telling our boss, ‘Go that way, do this!’ ”
Glenn Jester, business systems delivery manager for the Staubach Co., a real estate advisory firm, said the team building they arranged with The Go Game to improve relations between their IT and HR departments not only improved relationships, it also made for a memorable afternoon.
“It broke the ice and went well beyond that. It was just crazy fun,” he says. “We laughed so hard we almost got in trouble.”
CREATING A STIR: Employees from the floor-covering supplier Bentley Prince Street put their heads together to execute a recipe at Cooking by the Book in TriBeCa.
