The Sandstone Team Building Blog

Just a quick one from me on an overcast Sunday morn.  Went to a great dinner party last night and was hoping to have a nice lie in.  Which I have.  I even made it to when the bells started chiming.  Clearly there is a wedding in the village today.  My first thought was “why so early?”, or words to that effect.  Once I saw it was gone 9:30, that thought slowly dissipated to be replaced by “why so loud?”.  Well, that would be the fault of the overcast bit.  The cloud cover made it a warmish night, so all the windows were wide open.  My third and final related thought was “that’s really impressive teamwork – I should write a blog entry about that”.  So here it is.  A small team of people working together, getting the timing right in pulling lots of ropes turn that strange-looking effort into something very pleasant to the ear – once you’re properly awake that is.  For me, that’s a great example of a whole being greater than the sum of its parts.  That’s what our team building activities are all designed to help our client teams achieve.  It’s nice to have a musical analogy.

Alan

Games?  I’ll try not to get angry.  You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.  Not that I turn green or anything.  I’m just a lot more sociable when I’m calm.  And, trust me, I mean a lot more…

Games?  Why do so many people call all team activities games?  Even ours?  We put a lot of effort into ensuring that all of our options deliver real learning and development as well as participant enjoyment.  The learning side isn’t my department, but I see the care that goes into that side of things and I know that, as a company, we are very good at that.  I see how we make sure that the parallels back into the workplace are there to be seen so that our participants can really see the relevance and take real improvements back to their workplaces.  So why do some people insist on calling them games?

Thinking about it, I suppose I’m part of the problem.  I might not be the one to focus on the learning side of things, but my department is making sure people have fun at the same time.  Whether we’re gunslinging in Wild West, throwing bottles around in Romanbar, creating massive bubbles in Memory Lane or learning circus tricks in Cube, when people visit my department, they leave with massive smiles on their faces and an ache from all the belly laughter.  So maybe it is the fun side of things that make people refer to them as games.

Whatever people are doing on one of our events, there is always a point to it.  In Wild West, for example, people learning gunslinging skills to help them keep law and order in the towns they are running.  In Romanbar, they are learning bar flair skills to attract new customers to their bars.  It’s like in real life.  Making good decisions isn’t enough – you also have to put the plan into action at a practical level and make it all work.   We reflect that in our activities by adding many and varied fun tasks that need to be tackled successfully in order to help supplement some good decisions the teams are (hopefully!) making throughout the session.  That’s a key parallel my learning and development oriented colleagues help our client teams pick up on in the debrief, along with many others of course.

I’m calming down now.  I guess so long as people come to our sessions, have a good time and leave as better teams we should all be happy.  Whether they call what we’ve delivered a comprehensive, professional and effective team building activity or a game.

Steve

It’s that time of year again.  People have noticeably switched from asking about team building activities that can run outdoors to those that run indoors.  There’s always a mix, of course, but September is the time of the year that those planning activities in a month or two naturally recognise that holding their activity in the great outdoors may not be so great after all.

That said, many of those same people are delighted to hear that we have many activities that can take advantage of unexpected good weather and move outside on the day, yet be fully capable of delivering a fantastic option indoors if the weather is indeed inclement.  Certainly, more than a few clients were pleased of just that fact in what has been a pretty wet summer just gone!

In the banners at the top of individual team building activity pages, such as the one for Wild West, we often use outdoor photos as they look nice, but we also balance them with shots from events that happened indoors.  Hopefully, whether the shots were taken indoors or outdoors, they convey the level of engagement and enjoyment that our clients’ participants experience at any of our events.

So if you are looking for a team building event that can be run outside if the weather is feeling kind yet be run indoors if not, it may just be that you’ve found what you are looking for…

Nikki

Over the weekend, I saw this article on the ever-excellent BBC News web site.  It describes how a study has found that pupils are “no better than in the 1970s” at mathematics.  It is worth adding that the study also found that they were no worse.  So, interpolating the findings somewhat extravagantly and despite what today’s teenagers may think, there is at least one thing that I am their equal at.  Yes – I am in a small way a contributor to any study that uses the 1970s as a baseline.  Flares, long hair (my younger colleagues here have some difficulty imagining that), Deep Purple albums – I had the lot.  I only have the albums left to prove it and if anyone can help I’d gladly swap them for my old hair back.  You can keep the flares though!

So, despite all the claims of improvement in the education system, individual attainment hasn’t changed much.  They could have saved themselves the cost of the study and just asked us here at Sandstone.  We could have told them that.  There will always be a limit to what an individual can achieve, no matter how talented and committed that individual may be.  The real jumps in improvement come from effective teamwork.

Teams that deliberately choose to improve their performance levels can achieve leaps in their productivity that individuals will only ever be able to dream about.  It really does add up!  The whole can be significantly greater than the sum of the parts when a team’s way of working – its methodology if you like – is pulling its weight.

Too many organisations think that it is enough to just put people together and call them a team without giving them some kind of help to make it all work properly.  Our clients know differently.  They engage us to help turn their individuals into real teams.  We would gladly put up any of our client teams against their 1970s counterparts any day.  And those who opt for our Memory Lane team activity as a part of that process combine 1970s memories with modern efficiency!  It’s kind of fitting really.

It’s been years since, but I think I might just go put on Smoke on the Water now…

Alan

From time to time we are asked to run 2 back-to-back half-day events on the same day for the same client.   Usually, this is for a single team with mission critical work that does not allow them to all be away from the workplace at the same time.  This was the case for our choice of Event of the Month for August.

In what has been our busiest August ever, Memory Lane has been a regular contributor, ending up with the deserved accolade of being our most popular activity of the month for the first time.  It has steadily been gaining in popularity as the word has spread about what a great time it delivers to all participants.  Our double serving of Memory Lane in the one-day will have gone a long way to adding its reputation.  We’re sure of this because the noise each of our brilliant 2 groups made in Bolton must surely have been heard all over the North West and possibly even over the Pennines in West Yorkshire!

So where do I start!  Both morning and afternoon groups had a pre-event business meeting for 30 minutes.  We like to surprise people as much as possible, so we hid lots of our equipment from them – but our authentic 1950s Skittle Alleys are just too big!  So they had to stay out.  We went in and changed the room around whilst they had tea and coffee and allowed them back in.  A few looks of apprehension (as usual) as nobody except our main contact knew what was going on!

They may have stated with looks of apprehension but after just one minute, and as they realised we weren’t going to ask them to do anything they really didn’t want to, both sets of participants settled straight into their respective sessions.  Deep concentration was their first shared look as they selected their artists from the first decade – the 1950s.  Then onto the tasks!  We started with the Skittle Alleys – not sure we had many strikes or half-strikes but they all gave it their best shot and had great fun whilst they did it!  Telephone Booth proved its usual fun – both for the participants and for us as we watched them try to fit in!  And I have to say they were rather good at it.  When it came to the Hula-Hoop challenge, we had one clear winner across both groups.  In fact she would have beat everyone we have ever had on all the Memory Lane events we have ever run – but she did own up to once upon a time being her school champion!  Steve was trying to get tips from her!

Both groups dived head first into everything we put on.  The Macarena proved a huge success and when Robbie Williams song “Angels” came on, everyone got up and were singing their hearts out!  But my favourite moment in both our morning and afternoon sessions had to be the final for the Air Guitar competition – what fantastic entrants!  Normally we don’t give them a whole song (Johnny B Goode by Chuck Berry – what else?) but these guys were entertaining us all so much that we just didn’t want it to end.  Much like our participants for the each of these brilliant team building sessions!

Till next month

Paul