The Sandstone Team Building Blog

With the seventh, and penultimate, film of the Harry Potter franchise now having been released I thought we would be remiss if we did not have a blog about it on the Sandstone website!

For avid readers of Harry Potter, they will know it is about the life of a wizard and his two closest friends as they try to defeat the powerful and evil wizard Voldemort.  I will not go into any more details about the books and storylines themselves.  But rather I want to explore the relationships between the three main characters.  We are with these three characters from the ages of 11 up to 17 years old.  And like any children of that age they have to go through the normal growing up issues.

Although these three close friends did have arguments and fall out, eventually they would always come back together and be friends once again, and stronger for it.  The reason their friendship works is that they are not all clones of one another, rather they have very different and complimentary strengths and combined they make a great team.

We can all learn a lot from Harry, Ron and Hermione.  We might not always get on with the people we work with, but it does not mean that we will not make a good team.  Sometimes you just need to take a step back to see how you compliment one another and then work towards your strengths together.  It will help you be a sucessful team.  And if you are struggling to identify those strengths and how to work together, then team building events are an excellent way to realise the team’s potential.

Nikki

I am delighted to inform you all that Sandstone are now running open team building events at our venue partner Village Hotels.

Open team building events are currently for our activity Wild West and organisations pay on a per team basis, with a maximum of ten people in a team.

We currently have our first one scheduled for Friday 18th March at the Farnborough Village Hotel.  We will be adding other dates and venues in the near future which I will keep you informed about.  If you would like further information please contact us or request information via our website.

Nikki

I attended Nottingham City’s fireworks display at the Forest Recreation Ground on Friday 5th November.  It had been a couple of years since I saw my last fireworks display and I was excited.  I love fireworks – if they are done right it can be a fantastic evening, but if they are done wrong you can end up wishing you had gone elsewhere.  The display did not disappoint me.  There were lots of different style fireworks involved in the display.  They had some very colour ones, different shaped ones, very noisy ones – all sorts really!  My friends and I all enjoyed the fireworks but we did each have our favourites.  Personally I liked the ones that were white or similar colours and showered us from above, others preferred the whizzing ones that went high in the sky and came down in great bursts of colours.  Despite us each having our favourites we all were in agreement that we loved the whole combination of the different fireworks.  It was how they were put together that made it such a fabulous evening.  It was seamless once the display started; there was no waiting between the different elements.  There had obviously been a lot of hard work in to the evening.  They had to decide the order the fireworks would be set off, which fireworks would complement which.  They also needed the timing to be perfect and they wanted everyone attending to enjoy themselves.  An excellent example of how working together as a team, working to deadlines, and ensuring it all goes perfectly means it is a fantastic event for the people watching.

It is the same with our team building activities.  We always want our clients to enjoy every aspect of the event and it works well because we work hard to ensure it all goes off with a bang!

I cannot wait until next years fireworks!

Nikki

I am very excited to be writing my first team building event of the month blog.  I was fortunate to be at a number of events this month.  I always find it hard to choose my favourite when I am asked.  This month though we all agreed that the winning entry comes from a fantastic Romanbar event held at the Holiday Inn in Corby.

The room we had was slightly on the small side for us, though the hotel conference staff were fantastic and allocated us a second room and were very helpful – thank you!

This was an afternoon event, and thanks to some changes in the agenda, on the day we were given an extra hour.  We were delighted as this meant not only did the client get to spend more time on the activity and have more fun, but we were also able to dedicate more time to their debriefing session which was very important to them.

As the event got under way we knew we were in for a good session by the noise and laughter we were hearing from the group as they started making the decisions for their first week in charge of their bars.

As always we had some interesting song renditions on the karaoke and some which were a delight to listen to. For us though one of the most exciting things that took place in this Romanbar team building activity is that instead of using our normal computers as input stations the client used their own smart phones.  This was very important to the client and it worked fantastically!

And I would be remiss if I did not mention the CO.  He gave a great speech at the end of the event, and this was despite him being cajoled by his team to be their team’s champion for the flair finale!  He might not have been his own choice but the rest of his team thought he was perfect for it … he didn’t win it, ah well maybe next time!!

Everyone really did get into everything we offered them and they had a fabulous day and in our client’s own words “it really has given me and the rest of my colleagues the boost we all needed“.

Fantastic!

Lorraine