Corporate Team Building
Ten families of formats for taking a team out of the office, and bringing it back different
Training through experience
For us, team building means training through experiences that leave a mark. You take the team out of its routine and put it in a new situation, where its habits stop working and it has to find another way of being together. The setting matters as much as the activity: the old quarters of a city, the open desert, a boat, or simply a professional kitchen. It’s called experiential training, and it takes a great many shapes.
We’ve gathered our formats into ten families. It’s the way clients actually choose, starting from what they feel like doing: people who want to move look at Action, people who want to make something look at Creative or Music, people who want the day to leave a mark outside the company as well look at Social.
No format comes off the shelf as it is. Same activity, different objectives, different design: the Urban Game that introduces thirty new people is a different Urban Game from the one that gets two departments in conflict to collaborate. Inside every family the same day can stay light or take on real training depth, and the difference is made by what you want the team to take home.
The ten families
Urban
A city as the playing field: puzzles, stages, teams racing each other. People from different offices learn to divide up the ground and to trust somebody who’s a mile away.
Escape
A locked case, a timer, boxes nested one inside another: it only opens if everyone shares their ideas, their hunches and their answers. Up to 300 participants, and a meeting room is enough.
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.
Action
Adventure and movement, where the org chart stops counting for a few hours: decisions under pressure, one strong experience in common, and the leadership that comes 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, and the habit of listening to somebody else’s idea.
Music
Music as a common language, from the gospel choir to the company song: you only play together by listening to each other, and each person finds their part inside a result nobody could produce alone.
Social
The team builds, repairs or grows something concrete destined for a charity, a school or a community. Social responsibility stops being a paragraph in a report and becomes something you can touch.
Training
Experiential training with structured briefing and debriefing, for when the objective is stated out loud: the behaviours get identified, and the decision about what to change gets taken with a method.
Desert
The desert as a classroom: orienteering, survival, a treasure hunt among the dunes. The conditions take away every familiar reference, and the team has to find its own. It’s the family the Gulf gave us, and it has no equivalent anywhere else.
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.
How to choose the right team building
It happens to almost everyone, and almost always the same way: the date is fixed, the venue is booked, the number of participants is roughly known. The activity is the last piece, and it has to fit into the space everything else has left it.
Three things are enough to narrow the field: the objective, meaning what you want the team to take home from the experience; the number of participants; and the time and the space the meeting room allows you.
On the objective we’re direct. If it’s «give ourselves a good day together», that’s completely fine, and we’ll say so: you choose the format that suits the group and you stop there, without building a path on top that nobody asked for. If instead there’s a stated objective, like integrating new people, easing a friction or preparing for a change, the design starts from that and looks above all at Training.
Two ways to get there
If you like seeing everything, browse the ten families above: every format tells you what happens, for how many people and in how long. If you’d rather get straight to the point, write the objective, the number of participants, the date and the venue into the quick quote form and we’ll do the selecting: we come back fast with proposals that stand up against what you’ve already decided.
When what surfaces deserves an afterwards
An activity surfaces a great deal about how a team communicates, decides and works together, and sometimes what surfaces deserves more time, more depth and a method. That is where a Team Coaching path can begin: a different road, to be taken only if it is needed, to turn what the day made visible into a new way of working together.
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? · info @ teambuildingincentive.ae