Offices can be more relaxed in summer thanks to human resources teams organizing activities such as staff barbecues, baseball games and social events on Friday afternoons.
Those events help employees in different departments get to know each other – something that builds morale and has intangible benefits.
Effective team-building, however, often requires that employees not only socialize but also complete a task.
That task could be a volunteer project or an activity such as dragon boating where rowers soon realize that the boat glides across the water much more quickly when everyone paddles in unison.
“[Team-building initiatives] allow people to play different roles than they would regularly play in the workplace,” said Telus Corp. senior community investment manager Katie Gove.
“Someone who might be more in an administrative role can take on a management role in a volunteer setting.”
Effectively showing those skills can build trust and may even prompt a manager to promote an employee or give him or her different tasks.
Gove’s company designates a day each spring that it calls the Telus Day of Giving, when employees are encouraged to use work time to volunteer together and complete tasks such as building a playground.
These kinds of events may particularly help employees who normally work independently, doing something such as installing Internet wiring. In the volunteer activity, they are forced to rely on Telus co-workers to hold up a beam or to hammer nails.
They learn to trust other employees while the lesson is enforced that a task can be completed much faster when more people pitch in.
“Team-building events are a physical way to get a team focused on a single outcome,” said Big Fish Interactive Inc. owner Andrew Reid.
Reid founded his executive coaching and team-building venture 16 years ago in Toronto. Now Vancouver-based, the company generates about one-third of its nearly $1 million in annual revenue from team-building events.
About one-third of the 12-employee company’s revenue comes from executive coaching, and the remainder comes from customized leadership or management events.
Reid’s team-building events are sometimes all-day sessions that involve some classroom work as well. Many of his clients are national companies.
“We find that a lot of national corporations give more attention to their Ontario staff versus western staff, simply because that’s where the bigger teams are,” he said.
“Now that Big Fish is here [in Vancouver], it’s easy for us to extend the work we do with national head offices to the Vancouver local offices.”
One effective team-building activity, Reid said, can be scavenger hunts.
Sewell’s Marina’s calls its version of a corporate scavenger hunt Sea Quest. It created Sea Quest 15 years ago as a way to train its own employees to be more familiar with Howe Sound.
Employees are broken into groups and given a list of either questions to answer or things to find. For example, one question might be to identify the flag flying on a pole next to a blue house. Groups might also be asked to bring back a pine cone or a birch leaf.
Last year, about 50 groups booked scavenger hunts, and general manager Eric Sewell said a similar number of trips are already booked this year. Fortis Inc., Whistler Blackcomb Ski Resort and Telus are some of the companies through the years that have booked these excursions.
Often, however, corporate executives do not want it known when they take their staff on a day of scavenger hunting or dragon boating.
Reid said one of his clients had endured severe layoffs recently and “heads would roll” if it were reported in the media that they had gone dragon boating.
Sewell agreed that executives at struggling companies may not want it known when they spend money on something that many would consider a pat on the back for a job well done.
“When you bring your company out and do a boating adventure and usually a dining experience afterward, I think it’s a reward for your team members,” he said.