Check out the highlights from our latest Mystery Day tour.
After the traditional summer holidays many employees will be dreading January 3 and January 10. These will be the traditional back-to-work days for workplaces that don’t operate in the 24/7/365 environment.
That first week back can be incredibly unproductive. Staff are still dreaming of the beach, their colleagues and customers may still be on holidays, important people aren’t returning phone calls or emails, and nobody is firing on all cylinders. A general malaise often settles in around the office.
A good way to break this cycle of unproductive inaction is to offer a “Welcome back to work” activity to kick off the year. Done well, these activities can energise your staff and boost office morale right when a shot in the arm is needed.
New staff can be welcomed into a team and favourite customers can be thanked.
Welcome back to work activities also send a distinct message to staff : “welcome back, we value you, we want this year to be fun, now let’s kick some goals”.
If you’re planning on a welcome back to work activity it’s now time to start planning them.
With Australian Survivor just hitting the screens the same motto applies:
“Outwit – Outplay – Outlast”.
I’m actually amazed some companies still offer Survivor as a corporate team building activity. In a perfect world, executives would study why people win Survivor and do exactly the opposite.
Survivor is a text book example of why teams fail. And let’s be realistic about Survivor, the teams (tribes) aren’t teams at all, despite all the faux goodwill at the start of the game. The players are just a collection of individuals forced to live in close proximity, all with different objectives.
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- there’s no common goal
- no trust
- alliances and cliques form and crumble in record time
- information is withheld
- lying to each other is routine
- most players leave the game in a humiliating way
- and short term self interest trumps everything.
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Why anyone thinks Survivor is a good reality TV show to base a team building activity on is a mystery to me.
If you ran your office like Survivor, after 55 days “in camp” you’d have 24 people who pretty much hated each other, your place of work would be a filthy mess because nobody works for the common good, and very little would be achieved.
Survivor, great for TV, lousy for team building.
Adventure for Life is a finalist in the Spice News Hot 100 industry suppliers awards. We have been recognised as one of the top 5 team building companies in Australia and the winners will be announced in August.
Congratulations to our facilitator Jack Taylor for finishing his double degree in business at Deakin University. Jack is celebrating his graduation by travelling for 6 months through Central America and Europe.
Bon Voyage Jack. Have a great time and see you in early December.
We also welcome Callum into the team. In true Adventure for Life style, Cal has done a few events for us and then buggered off to Europe for a month’s holiday!!
News is coming in that 8 kayakers have just been rescued in Anglesea. The winds are nearly 100km/h at the moment.
This isn’t one of our groups, and if this activity was conducted by a tour company they should have all their permits and licences revoked ASAP. They should also get billed for the rescue. Going out on kayaks in this weather is just plain stupid.
So far in 2016 we’ve taken guests road cycling, gone orienteering through the street art lanes of Melbourne, took a group out of executives out in Daylesford, done some mountain biking, and found some venues for clients.
March is crazy busy and long lead demand for October and November is very strong.
2015 has been another record year for Adventure for Life in terms of number of events, number of guests, beers drunk at events, and number of locations. We’ve delivered activities in Queensland, NSW, Victoria, ACT, SA and Tasmania this year.
We kicked off the year with a full on night time wilderness search and rescue mission, finished it with corporate orienteering, and had plenty of hard and soft adventures along the way. From wine tours to whitewater rafting, we’ve had a blast in 2015.
Click the following link for a 2 minute 2015 highlights video.
There’s a really great article in USA Today about this topic.
A long term staple of the team building industry is getting your team to put together a pile of bikes and then handing them over to a local charity.
Yes it sounds great and I’m sure participants get a sense of achievement, but there’s a few very good reasons why we don’t offer this program.
Here they are:
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- Bikes come fully assembled in shops for a reason. When non-mechanics put them together the warranty is void.
- Bikes assembled by non-mechanics can be extremely dangerous
- To stretch event budgets, cheaper bikes are often purchased for bike builds.
- Bikes need an initial tune after about 50km of riding. Cables stretch and gears need adjusting. If the initial tune isn’t done, cheap bikes become unridable within months.
- Bikes are often handed over with no maintenance equipment or instructions on how to keep them on the road.
- some people just aren’t mechanically minded
- I collect unwanted bikes for a charity that sends them off to Africa where they are reconditioned and used for low cost transportation. Half the bikes I collect are only 6 months old and have seized completely.
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If you are really keen to do a CSR team building, we are offering a Regional Victorian wine tour in exchange for a donation to our preferred charity. Your delegates will be much happier, and the long term benefits are way more substantial. For more information just call or email.