AIBU or are team building events really f*cking awful...

[rOsie80]

Especially the variety that ask you for an "interesting" fact about yourself so you all sit around and reel them off in an awkward, stilted fashion for an hour.... does anybody really enjoy this stuff ?!!

I used to work for a high street retailer and we had an awful summer themed sports day in a conference room of a hotel complete with manager in Hawaiian shirt and inspirational song we all needed to sing. Horrendous. Think we got paid to be there though.

My worst one was that godforsaken team drumming.

It was just toe-curlingly awful. First off, the people that run it are always so OTT exuberant and COME ON YOU GUYS! about it, then you all have to drum your bit and the big reveal (not) is that WOW IT ALL SOUNDS AMAZING WHEN WE WORK AS A TEAM.

No it sounds like a load of cynical managers hitting shitty faux-ethnic drums in a dreary Holiday Inn conference room, with just enough enthusiasm to pass. JUST. FUCK. OFF.

This sort of shit (just finding this clip is enough to make me shudder):

I did do one that involved a day of quad biking, archery and clay pigeon shooting. That was pretty good even though my manager at the time was an absolute cunt.

I thought it was just me! Had to do an interesting fact thing the other day on a course. The course was with people we work with everyday so we really didn't need an ice breaker.

Where I previously worked team building events always seemed to involve raft building. Obviously didn't work as I still can't build a raft!

Went on one which was meant to be thank you for our hard work in the year, I ended up crying as part of it involved a climbing wall and I got stuck half way up as hate heights and just froze. The instructor just shouted at me to get down. I felt awful. If they wanted to thank me a bottle of wine would have gone down much better. Another time we had one of those spider web rope things you have to get through as many holes you can without touching the rope. For some reason we only had 4 people in our team compared to 6 or more that all the other teams had, and one team member was in a wheelchair. Needless to say we didn't do very well as couldn't access the higher holes. Feedback given was that we failed and had just given up, although we had done as much as we could physically do.

You can probably tell I hate these things

We are supposed to have monthly “team meetings” where we are meant to go in depth and discuss any issues people are having, that kind of crap. As the person who is supposed to run them, they end up either being a meal at the local pub where we talk about anything but work, or sitting in a meeting room with a box of cakes and again talking about anything but work. A lovely email of issues discussed is sent afterwards, which may or may not have been hashed together from various emails I get everyone to send me and my email responses to them. Done.

OMG Shots. Tha't made me feel quite queasy. The baseball caps for a start. They must have put something in their tea.

We do them perhaps once / twice a year.

I do sometimes sit there thinking about my emails piling up but then again we are in a very busy department so need time away to re focus. Better it be in work time than taking a day off.

We organise them ourselves so no need for a company to come in.

I chose one interesting fact about myself 6 years ago, and have used the same one for every team building event since.

Ah, you don't get things like this when you work in a convenience store. There's barely enough staff to keep the place open at the best of times, and we're open from sparrowfart to ridiculous o clock, 364 days a year. I think suggesting a team building exercise on Christmas day might not go down too well...

Last place I worked we all went pony trekking for a day. For those of us who rode regularly, it was brilliant!

A Chicken - that's awful. You poor thing.
But doesn't that just emphasise the - patronising small-mindedness of people who organise this sort of shite? Everyone must live their lives within a small bandwidth of Western social values. We must be going on holiday, and that holiday (read: brief orgy of consumption before a return to the mind-numbing dullness of work) must be the true expression of the Real You. If you put the photos on Facebook later then people'll know that you aren't just Jo from Accounts, but a wild'n'crazy "individual" who loves to drink Pina Colada at the pool-side disco.
I once went on a team-building event which I liked. We went for a walk.
The others have all filled me with such incandescent rage that I've got myself into trouble.

I'd quite enjoy Clown School.

I also reckon I'd be quite good at building a raft.

They are utter shite.

My hatred of them started when I was about 8 years old, and had to sit at the back of the school hall in which my Mum taught while all the staff had a team building day. At one point, I remember watching my Mum have to run diagonally across the hall and meet one of her colleagues in the middle and have to shout out a fact about themselves, before running to the place where the other ran from. It was ridiculous.

And then came the ‘pass the balloon without touching it’ activity. I was almost as mortified as the staff looked! What a load of bollocks.

Let me think. Three legged race with Janet from admin, sack relay with the tech team, fun facts about our workplace at the pub quiz.. Yes, they are fucking awful and no teams were built.

When you all sit round in a semi circle and they go round from person to person and you have to say your name, where you work and maybe some other fact. By the time they get to me I am so nervous and stressed I can't even remember my name or where i work.

I was on a course that was one day a week for 8 weeks.We were from various departments so only a couple of people knew each other. On our first morning we had to give a compliment to the person to our right and then write down what we said and to who we said it to. We didn't know a thing about them. We had to repeat this on the last day with the original person. The idea was to see 'how far we had come' and how we got to know people better!
The trouble was the person I had seemed ok on the first morning but was an obnoxious twat who loved the sound of his own voice and tried to make the facilitator look stupid. All I could think to say was that his hair had grown.

Hate hate hate stuff like that!!! Think everyone does though x

we had a great one at work we needed to make an egg drop for a height without smashing, it was fun

I used to work for a (now defunct) high street retailer. Just after I started I had to go on a 2 day “new management” course. It was fucking hideous.

We had a presentation on “how to blame your mistakes on everybody else” (seriously) given by 2 young men who were clearly seen as the company’s comedy double act. Every utterance that comedian no.1 made was followed by the other one saying “arse preservation!”

We also had an afternoon’s gliding lesson followed by a curry. The gliding was genuine but the curry was in the gliding school’s classroom and was out of a tin and heated in the microwave.

To cap it all when we booked into our hotel it turned out I’d been allocated a double room with another employee. No other rooms available. I’d never met her before and we ended up having to toss a coin to see who’d get the bed. I won.

I think Team building days should either be just about business planning, and about the real stuff of your job - or about just getting to know each other without the unnecessary 'activities'.

One of the best team building approaches, was having tea and cake at 11am every day...for all staff and volunteers.

A good management team instils team building in everything they do. A bad one has to get everyone together once a year and force them to eat pizza together.

YANBU. Had to really strongly tell my old boss this stuff wouldn’t go down well and if she wanted icebteaking she should just lay on an hour of reception with drinks and nibbles and tea and coffee.

She gave me a real bollocking for being negative. Then some very very high up bod cake over to us with his cake and tea and confessed ‘oh thank goodness, it said icebreaker in the agenda and you know I was at one of these last month and they made us play games! It was just disgraceful and we pulled out...’

I never got an apology....

Ohhhhhh that drumming video!! I cringed just watching.

I’ve got one of these days coming up - shouldn’t be too bad. Last time we had to build bridges out of newspaper in teams to see which was longest. We’re all competitive fuckers so it got quite intense.

I think they were aiming more for learning about teamwork than each team wanting to annihilate the others but there you go.

Dh had to do a team building jaunt that was supposedly such a ‘treat’ they called it the Christmas do as well

He had to travel miles to the middle of nowhere (armed with his old decorating clothes) to join his colleagues to help paint and air rescue building on a freezing December afternoon . It’s not as if we didn’t already have loads of decorating of our own that needed doing.

Anything involving the words team+building usually makes me heave.

Yanbu, they are horrendous!

Ice breakers OMG lol. As a trainer we should use them at the start of every session. My normal introduction went:
'Do you want to do introductions?' Group response 'No'.
'Ace, Just say hi to everyone then'
Room all says 'Hi'
'Just to let you know the more questions and talking you do the longer we will be here. If we are efficient we can get this 5pm finish down to 3:30, is that ok with you?'
Suffice to say I used to have some fairly quiet training sessions!

To be honest, this was more for those that were on their 8th year of the same yearly mandatory training. They knew it. Even though I changed it up, so there's no point in dragging them through it as if they had no knowledge.
But ice breakers. Every train the trainer I've ever done, teaches you how to do an ice breaker and the importance. You have a room of 30 who know each other, you have to play ones like tell me a truth and a lie, and if you have 30 strangers, by the time the 4th person is introducing themselves everyone's forgotten the 1st persons name!