2013
the year we opened in the Emirates
60+
team building formats in the catalogue
13
years working with teams in the Gulf
79,450
people have taken part
Some of the companies that have chosen us.
The risk with any team building is…
That it ends with the photographs. That the fun stays fun. That everyone plays the role they already have at the office. That nobody says out loud what they saw, and the day after everything goes back to the way it was: the same meetings, the same emails with the manager copied in, the same silences.
It happens for a precise reason: nobody had agreed, together, on what was going to change. Every team runs on roles, priorities and beliefs that almost always stay unspoken; an experience lived together makes them visible in an afternoon, and our job is to get the team to recognise them, name them and decide what to do with them. That decision is the thing that stays, and it’s the only one you can see the day after.
Identity Role Values Direction Behaviour
An approach that became an Amazon bestseller.
The work on alignment rests on solid theory, from Kolb to Lencioni, and on hundreds of teams watched in the field: more than eight hundred companies and 79,450 participants, across sixty-two formats, in the Gulf and internationally. In the end it became a book about vision, identity, values, direction, priorities and behaviour: the same things we look at in a team.
Time Flies and the Pilot Is You, by Giovanni Gambardella, reached number one on Amazon among personal transformation ebooks.
See how we work on alignment →
Big events, from five hundred people upwards
Planning something for five hundred or a thousand people changes the problem entirely. The activity has to start at the same moment for everyone, run without a queue, and still leave each person with something to do rather than something to watch. We build large-scale days that hold a whole hall together: one shared objective, teams working in parallel, and a single result at the end that belongs to all of them.
See how we run big events →
Every team is different. The experience has to be too.
Ten families, and inside each one the same activity can be a light day or a piece of work with real training depth: it depends on what you want the team to take home. You decide that first, and the format second.
Urban
A city as the playing field: puzzles, stages, teams racing each other through the old quarters and along the waterfront. People from different offices learn to divide up the ground and to trust somebody who’s a mile away, and what starts out there carries on at a distance.
Escape
A locked case, a timer, boxes nested one inside another: it only opens if everyone shares their ideas, their hunches and their answers. You come out of it with the habit of saying out loud what you know, with a taste for thinking sideways, and with the patience to search together and argue over new answers. Up to 300 people at the same time.
Cooking
You cook together and you eat what you made. In half an hour you see who organises, who executes and who tastes, and you learn that the result belongs to everyone or to nobody. Pasta Making goes up to 300 people.
Action
Adventure and movement, where the org chart stops counting for a few hours: decisions taken under pressure, adrenaline outside the corporate setting, one strong experience in common. The team carries it back to the office, along with the leadership that came out of the doing.
Creative
Shooting a short film, solving a murder, building with Lego: to make something together you first have to agree on what. What comes out is a shared picture before the execution, and the habit of listening to somebody else’s idea.
Music
Music as a common language, from the gospel choir to the company song, from body percussion to the orchestra: you only play together by listening to each other, and each person finds their part inside a result nobody could produce alone. Different formats for working on deep things: listening, shared timing, trust in the person next to you.
Social
At the end of the day, something stays with somebody else. The team builds, repairs or grows something concrete, bird boxes, vertical gardens, a space to bring back into use, destined for a charity, a school or a community.
Leggi di più
It’s among the most demanding formats to organise, because there’s a real beneficiary to coordinate with, and among the ones that leave the most: social responsibility stops being a paragraph in a report and becomes something you can touch. What stays with the team is the sense of what it can do together when the result belongs to someone else.
Training
Experiential training: problems to solve, physical and mental challenges, structured briefing and debriefing. It’s the family for when the objective is stated out loud: the behaviours get identified, and the decision about what to change gets taken with a method.
Online
Thirteen formats built for the screen, for teams that meet in person twice a year and discover in front of a screen that they can work together.
For big events
Hundreds of people at the same time, each with something to do: an audience that turns into a team.
Days we’ve actually run
We like sharing the moments that got to us: the smiles, the faces of the people who were there, days that genuinely happened, with no stock footage. We show them because we’re proud of the work we’ve done, and of the work we keep doing.
Escape Box
A timer running down, a locked case and a series of boxes one inside another. It only opens by putting together what each person found: the team discovers what it costs to keep a piece of information to yourself, and what it pays to say it. It holds up to three hundred people by adding cases and tables.
Go to the page →
Pasta Making
A kitchen turns into a pasta workshop and colleagues turn into pasta makers. It looks light, and it is. Meanwhile the team goes through a whole process (dough, sheet, shape, cooking) with the handovers from one station to the next, and finds out where quality drops when two stages stop talking to each other. The result gets judged at the table, everyone together. The team takes away a working process seen from beginning to end, and trust in what somebody else’s hands did.
Go to the page →
Movie Making
Teams write, shoot and edit a short film in a day. Before the camera goes on they have to agree on what they’re telling, and that’s where the real work happens: a shared picture, decided before anyone starts. Then each person takes a role, director, actor, camera operator, and the clock forces them to decide instead of discussing. The edit teaches you to cut what isn’t needed, and the final screening, in front of everyone, is a recognition nobody can hand themselves. The team comes back with a story written together, and with the experience of having given everybody a role and a shot.
Go to the page →
Treasure Hunt
A city becomes the playing field. Clues, stages, teams racing: it’s the simplest way to get people from different offices to know each other, and an acquaintance made at a run lasts longer than one made over drinks.
Go to the page →
Corporate Song
Writing and recording a song that tells the story of the company. To write it the team has to ask itself who it is, and work on its own identity; to sing it, everybody has to keep time together. At the end we record it for real, and the team goes on singing it around the office for months.
Go to the page →
The experience is the starting point. The method does the rest.
During an activity, dynamics come out that stay invisible in daily work: leadership, communication, trust, decision-making, listening, handling pressure.
Our work follows David Kolb’s cycle of experiential learning, with one extra step that we added ourselves: before going back to work, the team decides together what to change. That decision is the thing that stays.
When it’s worth going deeper
If what surfaces deserves more than a day, the experience becomes the first step of a Team Coaching path.
Or start here: the Team Alignment Check is a free test of twenty-one questions, and the report arrives by email.
Take the test →
See the path →
It was a wonderful experience, above all because a side of us came out that we aren’t used to seeing. We all work in different offices, so we know the playful side of the people we sit with and not of the ones we only hear on the phone or by email.
Edenred
Who’s behind it
We’ve been working with teams since 2001, and in the Emirates since 2013. We started in the training room, moved through the use of play, and arrived at alignment, and the road in between explains a good deal about how we work today: who we are.
From the field to a TEDx stage.
The subject of alignment made it onto a stage too: a TEDx talk on how you find your direction again, and the consistency between what you are and what you do. It’s the same work, done on one person.
Where do you want to take your team?
Tell us what you want the team to take home, how many of you there are and where you’ll be. We’ll take care of the rest, and we come back to you quickly.
Prefer to talk? +971 50 795 9666 · info @ teambuildingincentive.ae