Team Building Programs

[Ken Anderson]

How many of you were employed in a job that made you go through organized team building exercises, usually put on by some company that was paid a buttload of money to sell that nonsense? These were the things that might have included falling backwards, depending on your peers to catch you, playing children's games, or asking and answering stupid questions that no one wanted to talk about, particularly not with co-workers. Objectivity, Ken, objectivity; okay, did you find these to be valuable in any way? I felt about these as I did about Vacation Bible School when I was a kid, which involved doing arts and crafts stuff that nobody was interested in.

 

[Ken Anderson]

From what I can see via search, team-building exercises are still a thing.

 

[Beth Gallagher]

Yep; I worked for a huge corporation and the team building exercises were the most annoying part of the job. Second was safety meetings. Good grief, all the time wasted on that malarkey.

 

[Marie Miller]

I refused to fly all over creation for those haha events. There were always plenty of participants trying to snatch a crumb of attention. Do I want to watch my manager chew a hole into a tortilla while wearing pot holders or do I want to use that day to finish a project?

 

[Beth Gallagher]

I still remember the team building exercise based on that stupid book, Who Moved My Cheese?

 

[Tony Nathanson]

The closest I got to something like that was during a silly group interview for a job with an ad agency. There were 8 of us at the interview. All of us were hired, so.....we didn't really care what nonsense we had to go through.
The manager would ask one silly question, then we would all take turns answering it.
"What kind of car do you drive?" What color is it?" After we all answered he explained what our choices said about our personalities.
"Who do you idolize?" (Everyone picked their favorite celebrity).

A comedian was doing his stand up routine & making fun of job interviews.
He said, "One of my favorite questions was: "Why do you want to work here?" "I've always admired the Burger King chain."

 

[Ken Anderson]

Similar to the team-building stuff, my first semester on campus in college, they had a dormitory thing that I suppose was intended to introduce us to one another, with one of the girls heading the thing walking up really close to people, invading their personal space to make some sort of point, and asking questions like, "If you were a kitchen appliance, which appliance would you like to be?" After a few minutes of this nonsense, I snuck away to my room.