SMELLS LIKE TEAM SPIRIT
Love it or loathe it, team building is crucial to creating a positive, cohesive company culture. Charlotte Phillips speaks to local firms about their creative approaches
eam building arouses a range of emotions, some positive, some less so. It can embrace anything
important to look at what you’re trying to achieve with the team building, what’s going to suit the individuals within the team, where their current strengths are and where their current dysfunctions are – the things that aren’t working so well and how best to address that.” Perhaps the biggest change is that team building isn’t an occasional large production event but – as one firm puts it – baked into the fabric of the building – and a core aspect of day-to-day working life. Weather permitting, PiP Architecture lays on a Friday lunchtime barbecue that is cooked by the boss, while staff at the Cambridge office of law firm Penningtons Manches take part in the Penn50 Exercise Challenge, running, cycling and swimming to raise money for charity every day. At Simprints, which offers rugged, low-cost biometric fingerprint scanning to enable the millions of people who otherwise lack any formal identification or records to access education and healthcare, team building is huge, according talent manager Christie Civetta. “What we try to do is encourage a lot of interpersonal relationships, which is a way of saying that we’re just friends,” she says. The company allocates a budget that can be used for social activities, accessible by anyone at any level.
from airborne swinging through the trees to Lego days, where employees work together on assorted creative tasks a million miles away from their day-to-day working lives. One thing team building isn’t, is an exact science. For every piece of research demonstrating that teams who build together, stay together, there’s another, from an equally credible academic, suggesting that most corporate events do nothing but make staff miserable, denting the bottom line in the process. According to a Wakefield Research Study commissioned by the US cloud technology company Citrix, a third of employees cordially dislike team building activities. Anyone who’s been on the receiving end of a meaningless, sometimes even embarrassing corporate away day, where the only thing they’ve bonded with is the taxi service that enabled them to sneak onto the early train back home, will understand why. Talk to the dynamic firms in our area, however, and you’ll soon find that team building, like so much about corporate life in these new-style companies, has had a fairly fundamental makeover. There’s spontaneity, creativity and, above all, a sense of fun. No longer is team building an occasional bolt on that may, or may not, be attuned to the company’s corporate culture. In many cases, team building events grow organically out of a firm’s beliefs and values, and are developed with so much input from the workforce that the planning process itself could probably count as a team building exercise all on its own. “The key thing is to actually think about what is relevant to the individuals in that particular team,” says Emma Donaldson-Feilder, an occupational psychologist, director and co-founder of Affinity Health at Work. “I don’t think there can be a one size fits all. It’s
Challenge your business or team with a day or half-day event for between eight and 104 people at Bourn Golf & Leisure. Sports and activities on offer include archery, bushcraft skills, assault courses and pitch and putt, as well as a championship golf course. Training on Motivational Mapping is also available, helping participants improve working relationships and communication skills. For anyone finishing their round on the 18-hole golf course early, there’s always the pool, sauna and spa – as well as first-class food – to while away the time while you wait for everyone else to catch up. BOURN GOLF & LEISURE
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