The Sandstone Team Building Blog

Well it’s been a little while since I last put fingers to keyboard, as it were, so rather than giving you withdrawal symptoms from missing your ‘Nikki Blog’ fix I thought I best write something! As you’ll know from reading Paul’s last blog we are here there and everywhere in the next month. Some of those are smaller ones and some are very much larger. With all of these I have the pleasure of creating our very thorough agendas. These ensure that absolutely everything runs to time. I have everything worked out to the minute for every member of each facilitation team. Lead facilitators, table facilitators, task facilitators and and team “runners” (kind people who move people and needed equipment about during our larger events) alike each need detailed agendas of what they are doing and when of an event is to run as smoothly as we demand it must! Now some of our team might say I’m a bit pinickety about these things – I prefer to see it as being very organised!

Try as we might though it isn’t always possible for things to run to time if we are part of a wider conference (as we often are). Presentations might last a few minutes longer, breaks might be extended and so on. There really are multiple reasons why this can happen – and we are always flexible and happy to change our start and end times as our clients require. However it does mean all those agendas I sweated over (ok that might be a slight exaggeration) have all the wrong timings on. Which means we have to start making changes. Now as I said we are used to this and it’s not really a problem, but our technical team have decided to reduce our reaction time (and my stress levels!) by creating a special little agenda program for me. Aren’t they kind! Basically I still have all the work to do beforehand, but now I put it into a larger program starting how into the activity each of the different elements are due to start. Then on the day and when we know for sure exactly when we will start, I can input the start time and any other changes quickly into the program and it will print all the team agendas out.

What does this mean? Well everyone has all the right times on their individual agendas, I’m kept happy and it is easier for everyone to make sure we deliver the very best team building event as efficiently as possible for our clients on their important days.

All round it’s great for everyone. Well done technical team!

Till next time!

Nikki

Hi all, it’s my turn again. Sorry it is a few days overdue but we’re all pretty busy here getting everything ready for a number of international events. But I don’t want to be writing about my choice for May in July, so I’ve put a little time aside between packing and filling in the import/export documentation to jot a few notes about … a Wild West event in Cambridgeshire.

None of the participants knew anything about what they would be doing that day - though they had been asked to wear headbands or scarves to add to the ambience - and they certainly did! One or two looked as though they had stepped off the tennis courts, but some really looked the part even though they didn’t know what part they were trying to look like!

My highlights of Wild West are so often the gunslinging or the team railroad race, but this time it just has to be the wigwam making. Rarely have I seen such detailed planning go so badly awry so quickly. It was a hoot to watch and everyone was in stitches trying to fix the unfixable. Picking a winner was impossible - we were forced to pick the team that lost the least!

June is very busy for us and there seem to be few places we are not visiting. Who knows - next month’s commentary might be from these shores. Or from Ireland, Norway, Algeria or even Denmark. I’d best pack some more…

Paul