Team building events are pure purgatory for those of us who don’t much like teams and eschew social events. Railtrack as was liked these things and they usually involved ridiculous exercise that achieved the square root of fuck all. We didn’t have gratitude ponchos, though.
An NHS adviser has been mocked for suggesting staff sign ‘gratitude ponchos’ on their colleagues’ backs as part of a team-building exercise critics called ‘a special kind of hell’.
A photo shows a group of people writing what they ‘most appreciate’ about their co-workers on their paper bibs.
Helen Bevan, who shared the image on Twitter, is a strategic adviser to NHS Horizons, a training unit in the health service, and a Professor of Practice in Health & Care Improvement at Warwick Business School.
Someone actually makes a living thinking this crap up. I put up with pretty much most of what Railtrack threw at me because compared to this, it was pretty mild stuff. This cack crosses a line for me and I’d have to dig my heels in and refuse.
‘I think this would be most effective with a mature team where most people know each other.’
Most of the people I know would die of embarrassment at such an exercise.
But her post received short shrift on Twitter, with users branding the idea ‘infantilising’ and one saying it would cause him to ‘quit on the spot’.
‘Everything wrong with HR in one tweet,’ another user wrote.
Can’t really argue with that.
Long ago, on a training course, when one of the execrable ’icebreakers’ was being rolled out, one of the (young) trainers made the mistake of saying ‘Of course, you don’t have to do this if you’re not comfortable with it…’
Cue all of us promptly saying ‘OK, let’s get on with the reason we’re really here then, since we all know each other already!’
I thought she’d burst into tears, but she got right down to the meat of the course…
I worked at the same firm for over thirty years, overall it was a pretty good place to work. It started to sour around 2015 when a new boss took over because he was into this kind of crap. There was quite a lot of other stuff that was pissing me off too and I had started to search for another job. As things turned out I had enough money in my pension fund to retire early in 2020.
I only remember one team-building exercise from my work days. We stayed late, got in a few beers and played Risk board game.
Imagine rolling this out in a construction environment, or in heavy industry. Do they seriously think people won’t just write ‘in’ jokes, draw knobs, and put swearwords on the back?
In Govan.
Ricky Gervais did training days to a tee in “The Office”.
I remember one we did in the police. It was two long tedious days and at the end the invigilator asked us what we enjoyed the most about the course. I replied- “the free lunch was lovely”. She wasn’t amused.
In Govan.
I hated team building. That’s why, for the last 15 years of my working life, I worked as a temp. None of that bollocks. Didn’t have to do appraisals either.
Likewise for the self-employed. No one will ask us for our pronouns either.
The firm that I worked for did used to do extra curricular activities that were organised in a more grass roots kind of way. Garden parties, treasure hunts, we once did the Lyke Wake Walk. These events weren’t forced but they were well attended because they were popular.