The Sandstone Team Building Blog

Hi all.  Well the weather was very kind to us for much of September, which enabled us to hold a lot of activities outside for a pleasant change. One event in particular benefited from this.  A two day Cube event in a very sunny Chesham in Hertfordshire took great advantage of the weather. Both days were blessed with glorious sunshine. We had the trike racing on a big open grassy area, giving us the space for a decent size track and our participants were able to race at a more challenging speed than they could have achieved inside. The table activities were approached very enthusiastically, with quite a few teams taking tasks away at the end of day one and returning next day with things made and answers filled in. They were very capable and competitive and all teams scored extremely high points - in fact, the highest we have ever seen! It was another great team building event.  At the end, it was especially nice to see seeing the 64 individual cubes disappearing off with 64 of the participants to be fully reconstructed back at Head Office in its full grandeur.  Not all clients take their Cubes with them, but we lavish such care in manufacturing them we are always delighted when they do.

Till next month

Paul

I was reading today that this August was the “gloomiest” on record. And September is hardly looking likely to offer a nice “Indian Summer” in return. Oh joy. Within our group of international partners, we are fortunate to count an excellent Portuguese company that has a little more trust in the weather at this time of year than we do. Although they are based in Lisbon, they run a lot of activities on the beautiful Algarve and rarely need to worry about booking extra space indoors in case of bad weather - especially at this time of year.

Although we do run a significant number of overseas events ourselves, most of them are held here in the UK and here you just can’t rely on good weather. Hope for it and be ready to embrace it with as much happening outdoors as possible, but go with something that can run indoors on the day without losing anything other than a chance for a bit of a tan if the sun dance doesn’t work.

That said, we were lucky ourselves just yesterday. We ran our outstanding Cube activity for 350 people and all the weather forecasts for the area were for heavy showers all day. We had plenty of indoor space on standby to hold those things that we prefer to run outdoors - like our famous trike races, circus skills sessions, discus championship and so on. It rained all afternoon the day before. It rained over lunch. It rained again 2 minutes after we finished. For that matter it is raining now as I type this! But during the time that really mattered, the rain held off and we were able to take everyone outdoors that wanted to go outdoors.

Had it rained all day, the group would still have had a great time and we’d have still run every activity. But it was nice in this gloomiest of summers to be able to take such a large group outside! Our sun dance clearly worked.

Alan

Hello again. It’s been a while since I’ve written a blog and for my second one I’m writing following the acquisition of some new skills! I have been offered a great opportunity with Sandstone. Until now my main role has been as an event assistant at one of our many team building activities - which I thoroughly enjoy. I’ve now been offered an extra role within the team over the summer months (well I am a university student and I need to do something with my 3 months off!). I now work with the team on a daily basis in our Head Office.

I was asked if I would like to become a receptionist for Sandstone. I was very quick to say ‘yes please!’. In order for it all to become official I first had to prove that I had the skills required for this new role - it really is very different to working at an event! And the fact that I am sat here writing this proves that I did in fact get through it all ok!

As an organisation that provides team building activities for their clients, it is really nice to know that that Sandstone doesn’t only help clients to improve their teams. The training I have received for this job has come not from just one person and focused on how to use the phones but from a number of colleagues to help ensure that I have the greatest knowledge possible when coming to taking on the job officially.

I think I am ready. If you call in, you’ll be a better judge than me, of course! I look forward to speaking with you…

Jenny

Well I thought I might have a go at the team building event of the month this time around - give Paul a bit of a rest. Not that he deserves one, since he’s just come back from two very pleasant (so I understand) weeks in Cornwall. His deliberations would miss out the other two and a bit weeks worth of events, so I reckon I’m a better judge of July’s events than him. I wasn’t there for them all (no one person was) but I attended more that most!

I’m delighted to say that we’ve had a whole variety of events going on this month. From Attributes to Liberation, from Romanbar to the now usual many, many Wild Wests! Whilst we had plenty of cowboys and cowgirls around, I think for me my favourite event this month was a Romanbar which we held in London. The weather was gorgeous and we were able to take the group outside for much of the day. As always the group really got into the activity and thoroughly enjoyed learning flair bar skills, making cocktails and testing their wine connoisseur abilities against one another. The highlight for me during the event was seeing how well their bars were doing - we had the highest scoring team I can remember for a long while! Very impressive!

Till next time …

Nikki

Hi all. I thought I would do this month’s report from a different angle - by telling you about two of our trips to foreign lands north and south to deliver two great team building events. We have done some miles this month, with the first journey of any significance being the slow ferry from Newcastle to Norway. Malcolm and I chugged our way across a very calm North Sea, meeting up in beautiful Stavanger with the rest of our team, all of whom had flown there, for an excellent Wild West event. On our return to England we just managed to squeeze in another event in Cheltenham before heading off the following day for another Wild West event to North Africa - Algeria no less! On arrival in Algiers we were met with wall to wall sunshine and a temperature of 31 degrees.

Thankfully, we had our own driver running us around. Travelling the 40 minutes from the airport to the hotel was a real eye opener. It was a bit like being in the Indy 500! Three marked lanes were consistently and constantly ignored. In front and behind it more often resembled five lanes of madly weaving cars, all jostling for positions at speed. It was no wonder only about one car in every thousand was in pristine condition without any panel damage. A total contrast to Norway, where you only needed to look like you were going to cross the road and the showroom-quality cars would stop for you. Road politeness in abundance everywhere we went. So - two great events in far away places, opposite directions and especially opposite driving styles that tie for my event of the month selection.

Catch you all again next month, if you are off on your holidays before my next entry have a good one, but if you are going to Algeria my advice is simple. Don’t tick the “fly/drive” box!

Paul

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

So I got my gun out the other day and gave it a clean. The same stuff that’s used on tyres works wonders I find. Then again, my gun is rubber. We import them specially from the manufacturers in Nevada, along with real leather - real western! - holsters. We use rubber guns to teach people gunslinging skills from the movies and the rubber keeps it safe - no sharp edges to hurt people when the guns start flying as people try all the fancy tricks!

I never saw myself as a cowboy until some bright spark in our team came up with the idea of creating Wild West as a new team building activity. Now I can’t imagine a time when I didn’t don the boots, hat, bandanna, bootlace and, of course, the belt-holster-gun combo. I love it, but it isn’t without, shall we say, complications…

My admiration for the real gunslingers of old is unbounded. Not, as you might think, for their fast draws and fancy gunplay - hell, I’m a match for any of them these days! Nor for their ability to eat beans until the cows came home — I’ve never shied from a can of beans since I was a nipper. No - my admiration is for their ability to wear them darned boots all day and every day! For me, three things are guaranteed at the end of any Wild West event where I am the gunslinger. One - we have a happy client. Two - the winning team wear the widest grins. Three - my feet hurt!

So if you attend a future Wild West event and I’m on it, you’ll understand why I look grizzled. It’s not that I’ve spent ages perfecting an authentic enigmatic and tough look of the stranger with no name. It’s my feet.

Steve

Although some clients like us to help them find suitable venues for our team building options (and we are always happy to do so), most prefer to make the arrangements themselves. Indeed, many commit to a venue before looking for a team building supplier. This can be problematical.

Clients who make direct bookings - especially those who book before involving us - are often reliant on the advice of the venue’s representatives about what rooms are suitable for their group. Yet venue representatives are unlikely to understand the requirements for running specialist team events such as ours - and, of course, their interest is more around making sure the logistics that is part of their offering, such as refreshment and lunch breaks, are timely and well received.

Activities such as Cube, Memory Lane, Romanbar and Wild West all benefit from about three times the amount of space that venue folk think is suitable. It allows the participants a base to call home for the duration and the space to tackle the variety of fun elements that each of those team activities offer. Without that “extra space”, we need to get creative to deliver to our own high standards.

A recent event we ran in the South East of England for a new public sector client is a case in point. They had booked with an alternative team building supplier, who then let them down with just a couple of days to go to their event. We find it surprising just how often this seems to happen and we are always pleased and usually able to help in such circumstances. The practical upshot was that the venue was already booked and we had to work with what they had. Which, to say the least, wasn’t quite as large as we would have preferred for their chosen activity - Wild West. If I had to choose a word to describe it, “tiny” would come high on the list.

First and foremost, we got there the previous evening to see for ourselves the challenge and set about planning our use of the space. And we got creative and indulged in a little light negotiation with the venue people. When we had finished laying out the room, our contacts at the venue were, to use their word, “amazed” at what we had done with the room. They had never seen it organised the way we laid it out - and, for that matter, dressed up in the way we had done! Well, it was a Wild West event and we always enjoy making people feel they have stepped back in time and across the world when they walk into the room. If we’d had to, our innovative layout of the room would have allowed us to do everything within it, albeit with some re-arrangements during the course of the day. In the event, though, the venue staff were good enough to understand our challenge and helped us out by making some normally public space available for our sole use.

Don’t get me wrong, we’d much prefer that the space we have aligns nicely with the guidelines we give to all clients ahead of an event. But we recognise that this is not always possible and, deep down, we secretly enjoy rising to such challenges. Well, we do encourage clients to rise to our challenging activities - it would be churlish for us not to do so to real life ones…

Alan

There have been a few blogs now and although I’ve tried to avoid doing a real one (I said Happy Easter to everyone, but I’m not sure that counts!) I can’t get away with it any longer though. I’m someone who prefers to be in the background – the thought of standing up and running one of our events fills me with horror. This isn’t quite as bad…

Luckily here at Sandstone we have some wonderful facilitators who do enjoy leading events, so I’m spared that particular nightmare. I enjoy being one of the behind the scenes team. We prepare and mop up before and after each event. The teamwork involved is really quite amazing. Even for one of our smallest events there is much that needs to be done.

An example of this would be a recent Liberation event that was run for just a couple of teams. To ensure that the event ran smoothly there were a number of us working together to make this happen. The computer and printer for each team needed to be set up and thoroughly tested, plus a spare in case of problems on the day (rare though that is, it can happen and we’re always prepared). We printed and bound the booklets for every participant. We counted and checked the construction components along with some of the more specialist equipment. We called the venue to confirm that the conference room in use was correctly set up, the refreshments ordered and would be delivered when required. It all helps our team and the client on the day and we are pleased to do it.

Following the event everything is checked back in. We recycle as much as we can - printouts from Liberation are reused in the office for general printing before they are sent for recycling; booklets are unbound, new pages inserted and then the bulk is reused where practical.

There were three of us on this occasion but on much larger events our team grows. We each play our own role but it all comes together brilliantly and it’s all down to team work.

Barbara