Of Corporate Bonding

Over the years, I was involved in any number of corporate team-building activities. Given how much I genuinely enjoyed working with most of my colleagues over the years, I’m at a loss to explain why not one of the positive team building events is coming to mind. There must have been at least one, somewhere along the line. What was it??

Oh, yes, when I worked at Wang, we took Myers Briggs assessment tests and found out that we were all introverts who despised team building of any kind. We liked each other just fine. Just leave us alone.

Given this, it will be no great revelation to say that I can, of course, clearly recall any number of team building horror shows.

There was the ghastly dinner at the Medieval Manor, where one of my colleagues grabbed a baguette, placed it between his legs, and ran around terrorizing all the women with it. (High hilarity, as you can imagine.)

There was the one where we were handed some Tinker Toys, split off into groups, and told to build helicopters with them. When our Leonardo-less team was not able to both build a helicopter and follow the rules (which called for using every piece), we were openly called out and ridiculed by the team building coach. This had the practical result of bonding the members of our little subgroup together.

I was once at a week long sales kickoff where, at one point, we were forced to create – and perform – company cheers.

At another sales event, at yet another company, we took a poor-man’s version of Myers Briggs, and all ended up in color-coded groups. Pretty much all the home office attendees were blues, greens, or oranges. The sales guys – who predominated the attendance - were reds, or, as they came to be known, flaming reds. Once we were put in our color coded groups – we were to do some sort of before and after exercise, the eventual point being, I believe, to demonstrate that diversity worked better than not – the reds started rioting. Screeching, yelling about the superiority of reds, jeering at us blues, greens, and oranges. One salesman who’d somehow ended up among the blues was almost in tears. He then announced that the test was wrong, and he was, in fact, a red. Although drugs and alcohol were generally involved in bad behavior at this particular company, I think this was a morning, and thus mostly sober (albeit hungover), session.

At the same company, at yet another week-long sales meeting, the blue-green-orange folks from my division decided to skip an after-party and hole up in our president’s suite to play Trivial Pursuit. This was not a popular decision, as we learned when a group of rampaging sales guys – wrapped in toga-party sheets, and many with Jockey shorts on their heads for some reason or other  – attempted to break into our suite, using the standing ashtray by the elevator as a battering ram.

None of this made me want to bond with the sales team, that’s for sure.

Oh, there were other team building events that I recall. In one, we were forced to sit back to back with someone we didn’t know that well, and reveal deep, dark secrets to each other.

And, of course, there were plenty of events where we all had to get blindfolded and throw ourselves backwards into a colleague’s arms.

Seriously, the only team building any of these exercises succeeded in creating were either us against the person running the exercise, or us against the sales group.

But however badly behaved anyone was, however poor sporty others of us were, I don’t recall anyone ever getting fired for doing something stupid while engaged in team building.

This was, of course, in the days before Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram, so there was no incriminating pics or videos of the guy with the baguette “package”, or the numbskulls with the Jockey shorts on their heads. It was also the day before political correctness was quite so pronounced, and people could get away with behavior that today would be denounced – and, in most cases, rightly so.

As a group of just-fired HSBC employees in the UK found out.

Employees on a team building day dressed up in balaclavas while one donned an orange jumpsuit for the ‘abhorrent’ video which was then posted on Instagram

HSBC has fired six staff after they performed a mock Islamic State-style execution video during a team-building day and posted footage online, a bank spokesman said on Tuesday.

The bank described the video, showing staff members in balaclavas holding a fake knife over a kneeling man in an orange jumpsuit, as “abhorrent”.

“We took the decision to sack the individuals involved,” a spokesman for the bank said.

“This is an abhorrent video and HSBC would like to apologise for any offence caused.” (Source: The Guardian)

And in case viewers didn’t get the balaclava and orange jump suit point, one of the wits yells out “Allahu Akbar.”

The actual original HR-ish point of the team building day was not noted in the article, but they may have succeeded on one level. Those six fired employees may well have bonded as a team. On the other hand, they may all be blaming each other for instigating the shenanigans. Sometimes team building just up and backfires!

Sounds like, moving forward, all team building days should begin with a warning about videoing-and-posting. Bad enough if a few colleagues see something stupid. Worse when someone not in on it catches a glimpse on Instagram and blows the whistle, ensuring that the entire world finds out.

Maybe you had to be there, but if something seems crude, idiotic and tasteless, guess what? It probably is. Stuff like this used to be overlooked. No longer. Live by the Instagram, get fired by the Instagram.

When are people going to learn?