Hippie CEO Life #27 - The No Team Building Building
October 14, 2022
Sometimes it’s ok to just let your teams have a bit of fun.
i’m sure we’ve all had our share of team building activities, some good, some bad, some downright awkward.
As both a participant and as one tasked with planning team building activities, the thing i despised the most was that because the company was “giving us time off” or investing money in the activity, it had to be structured in such a way that we were on prearranged teams, we had to learn some business lessons, and then we had to go back to work and have a meeting about what we learned.
i get it, we want to find fun, unique, interesting ways to help our teams work better together but most of these team building activities are not really accomplishing what management hopes they will. They just become an excuse to get out of work for a few hours.
So with that in mind, we wanted to try something different. We wanted to take a day off and just have fun together. No team challenges, no ‘what business lesson did you learn?’ meetings, none of that, just the team hanging out together. That’s it. And it was amazing!
Spending time together as a team is incredibly important, even more important when your team is spread across the world from LA to Bangkok. So how do we spend meaningful time together as a team if we are all living in different places?
Here is what we did: A few weeks before the event, we gave every employee a budget of $150 to purchase a LEGO set and food, treats, beverages for the day.
The day of the event, we opened up a Zoom meeting and employees could come and go throughout the day. And we built. We built LEGO together. And we talked, we laughed, we learned more about each other.
What was amazing is that i have worked with many of our team members for years, some for decades, and i learned new things about each of them during this event.
i guess what i’m saying is that it’s ok, maybe more so then ever as our teams get distributed around the world, to just hangout as a team. Do fun things together. Just be humans without having to have some elaborate plan to learn some meaningful business lesson. Heh…i guess that IS a business lesson, isn’t it?
