Occasions
Year end, Ramadan, Family Day, the new season in September. The moment of the year changes what makes sense to propose, and sometimes it changes everything.
Almost all our formats run all year round. But an activity never arrives at a neutral moment: a group coming back from a break needs one thing, a group closing the year needs another, and if the employees’ children are in the room the rules change altogether.
Below are the occasions we’re asked about most often, with what usually works.
Year end
It’s the most requested occasion of the year and also the most misunderstood. The December dinner with a speech from the chief executive is a dinner. It becomes something else if you put something people do together at the centre of it.
The cooking activities work well here, Classic Cooking, Choco Making, the Cocktail Challenge, because they end with everyone at a table in front of something they made themselves. And the Corporate Song works, which in December becomes the present the company gives itself.
One practical warning: December fills up in September. If you think about it in November, the good dates have gone.
Ramadan
The working day changes shape: hours shift, the afternoons shorten and the evening becomes the moment when people actually gather. Most of what we are asked for sits around iftar, when the group is together anyway. Where the company works through the day, the shorter formats fit as well, an hour or two placed where the day has room for them.
The Social family fits the month particularly well, because what the group makes goes to somebody who needs it.
Summer
From May to September the middle of the day is out of the question outdoors, and that makes summer the indoor season rather than a dead one. It’s the stretch of the year when the formats that need a room, and only a room, come into their own.
Escape Box, the cooking formats, the musical ones and the construction ones all run in air conditioning without losing anything. Water still works if it’s a pool and the sun is down: Carton Boat goes well in the evening. And a Cocktail Challenge at the end of a summer day explains itself.
The new season
September and October are when teams come back slowed down and when the objectives for the year ahead get set. Of the twelve months these are the best for starting something serious, because there’s time in front of it for the work to produce something.
If the objective is simply to switch the group back on, the Wine Experience and the creative formats do it. If in September you’re redefining the course instead, what you need is the Alignment phase rather than a day.
National Day
The second of December, and the week around it, is when companies look for something that has the country in it. It works with the formats where a whole room does the same thing at the same time and the result is one single image.
The one we propose most often is the Sparkathlon: creative challenges released through an app, one after another, each with its own clock, and a leaderboard everyone can see. It stays indoors, it runs in about an hour and a half, and it grows with the number of teams, so it holds a large room together.
Family Day
The company opens its doors to the employees’ families. It sounds like a nice thing and nothing more, and instead it’s the day colleagues see each other for the first time as whole people: with their children, their partner, the way they talk at home.
It has a rule of its own: the activity has to work for a seven-year-old and for their father at the same time, otherwise it splits in two and the adults end up watching. Construction formats, cooking and treasure hunts all work, with the teams mixed by age rather than by family.
Teams spread out, or working remotely
It isn’t a season, but it has become a recurring occasion: groups working from different homes and offices who are almost never in the same place. We have a set of formats designed for the screen, rather than adapted to it on the day.
How they work, and what gets lost and what doesn’t compared with being there in person, is on the remote team building page.
And the occasions that aren’t on the calendar
The most important ones, often. A merger, a reorganisation, an objective reached that deserves closing properly, a new manager arriving, a year that went badly. In these cases the company decides the date rather than the calendar, and the choice of activity counts for a great deal more: write and tell us what’s happening before choosing the format.
Let’s talk about your next team building
You don’t need to have picked a format yet. Tell us what you want your team to take home, how many of you there are and where you’ll be, and we’ll do the rest: within 24 hours you get a considered proposal for your case, with the formats that hold up against your numbers, and what each one leaves the team the day after.
Prefer to talk? +971 50 795 9666 ยท info @ teambuildingincentive.ae