…and there’s no better season to book an outdoor adventure for your team.
Lorne on the Great Ocean Road is a half hour drive from our office and one of our favourite location from team building. Beach, forest, rivers, site-seeing and a very cool canvas for our navigational team building activities.
Join the locals and let Adventure for Life make your next conference in Lorne special.
Getting an event up is obviously difficult with covid. Capacity constraints and other restrictions put the breaks on the events industry in 2020 and 2021 and souring case numbers have rocked us again in 2022.
I do spot a trend and a window of opportunity when it comes to scheduling an event. The best chance of running a face-to-face business event is to have a lead time of 1-2 months and book everything as soon as case numbers just start to decline.
Our record number of reschedules for a client is 7 (we still haven’t run their event which is now 9 months late), but we have run multiple events on the client’s preferred dates. There’s obviously no guarantees, but short lead events booked just as case numbers decline looks like the best option.
It’s no secret the events industry has been massively disrupted by Covid. Yes we are still running events but only 25% of them have been on the preferred date.
We also have a backlog of events to be delivered when social distancing restrictions are eased.
In a world that’s been turned upside down, flexibility is the key.
Here’s a few tips to getting those really important events off the ground.
- Keep events flexible by having multiple alternative dates or a wide event window.
- Have a hybrid option if delegates from certain states can’t travel
- Keep events local to minimise state border crossings.
- Be prepared to hold your events at short notice.
- Keep numbers and concepts realistic. We just had a request for a large event across four states in September. (I would have loved to deliver an event like this, but the brief was so unrealistic during covid times, I recommended they come back for a proposal in 2022)
Good luck
Iain
Fun Fact: Almost half of our clients are requesting the Resilience program in 2021.
As the unemployment rate drops with the post covid recovery, staff, especially young people, are on the move. This is especially the case if they are doing highly repetitive work, under pressure, with little recognition. Think hospitality, logistics, fruit picking. etc, or just Google “Amazon” + “staff retention rates”.
Work Life balance is still king, and Covid has meant plenty of people have been thinking very hard about their big life choices and future.
It seems companies are starting to realise they are going to have to work extremely hard to keep staff from changing industries or getting poached by competitors.
Our Resilience program gives staff the tools to develop team and individual resilience. It’s designed to complement structural measure companies are bringing in to improve retention rates.
We also recommend team building that focuses on resilience should be held in conjunction with pure fun activities to recognise and celebrate company success.
If YOU don’t celebrate your achievements, nobody else will, and staff might just find a company that offers a little more recognition.
We’ve kicked off 2020 adding a series of new activities to our menu. These include:
Trading Table
This fast-paced activity is all about the buy buy buy and sell sell sell of the trading world; focusing on strategy, sales, competition and most importantly, collaboration!
Level Up
This high energy challenge will help participants master delegation, time management, strategic planning and explore team working skills.
The Pitch
In this creative and challenging game, teams will be required to create, market and pitch a product good enough to show off their business acumen and entrepreneurial skills.
Spy School
Tasked with a number of challenges, teams will need to channel their inner spy to succeed and reign supreme.
In the back half of 2019 we picked up a handful of very short lead events because “the team building company we hired just cancelled”.
WHAT??? Just cancelled and left the client hanging a couple of days from their conference? That’s right.
We also picked up a couple of events because other team building companies didn’t have a wet weather contingency plan.
On the one hand, it’s great to be able to help people out of a hole, but on the other hand this terrible level of service gives the whole team building industry a bad name.
If team building companies are dropping the ball this badly, they should just get out of the industry altogether.
Just found out that Adventure For Life has been crowned:
Best Team Building Events Organisers 2019 – New South Wales in the LUX Global Hospitality Awards 2019 
Prior to establishing Adventure for Life, I was working on a CSR Amazing Race team building activity where the client had a company plant 176 trees after the event. One of the guest mused “I wonder if that will offset all our helicopter joy flights?”
It was a snide comment but the guest certainly had a point.
Most corporate team building activities with a CSR component fall flat because they are extremely hard to get right. Corporate Choirs work hard to get a credible sound but their busking for charity doesn’t crack the $100 mark. Half that delicious food for a soup kitchen goes uneaten, and that fleet of bikes donated to a charity doesn’t last 3 months because there’s no follow up mechanical work. I’m a bike collector for Bikes 4 Humanity and recently picked up a fleet of unridable bikes from a Charity Bike Build. They ended up going to Africa where mechanics got them back on the road for low cost transportation in Namibia.
Sorry folks but that’s the reality of one-off charity events. The logistical costs are high and the actual benefits are quite low.
Cold hard cash donated to existing and reputable charities is going to go much further than a one off bike building program with amateur (although enthusiastic and altruistic mechanics). A musical trivia night where the company donates $1000 to the winning team’s charity is way more effective than a choir. A simple Friday charity beer club where employee’s $5 beers get matched dollar for dollar by the company is a simple way to provide an ongoing cash flow to a charity of choice.
One off events can be fun, but in terms of providing long term benefits to people in need, they are not effective.
The best way to see how well your team works together is to expose them to a crisis situation.
Avalanche is our newest team building program. It’s designed for new teams, executive groups and induction programs.
The program starts with Adventure for Life facilitators teaching delegates the basics of avalanche rescue.
We then head to the search zone.
Can your team use our avalanche beacons, probes and shovels to find a buried person (or 2). The clock is running and they need to get fresh air to the victim within 15 minutes to keep them alive.
If they find the body, they need to perform CPR and then prepare for an evacuation. Can they cope when the pressure is on? and what will they learn about their leadership style and team dynamics?