Roy Charette, a founding partner of Best Corporate Events, recently joined Phil Brandt, president, and CEO of AAIM, on The Morning Briefing podcast. They discussed the current labor market, team building, philanthropy, employee retention, social media, and much more.
The full podcast runs 33 minutes, and it’s well worth listening to. But we know many of you are pressed for time, so here are 13 bite-sized nuggets of wisdom Phil and Roy shared during their conversation.
Most team building activities are competitive—and for good reasons.
Competition is fun, it’s engaging, and it helps set clear goals for the exercise. And business itself is, of course, a constant competition for the attention, loyalty, and dollars of clients and customers.
But success within an organization frequently relies more on collaboration than competition. People need to work together to design the best products, make the best decisions, and deliver the best customer experiences.
How do competitive team building activities provide value to organizations? How can they be used to teach collaboration? And how can team building combine competition with collaboration to deliver the “best of both worlds”?
Here are the answers to those questions and more.
Why? Because for most people, competition is their default. It’s innate, hard-wired into us. Collaboration is not.
Think about it. Turn a group of small children loose on a playground, then sit back and watch. What do they do? They race. They see who can get to the top of the monkey bars the fastest. They play tag—and try not to be “it.”
When you’re in college, you’re competing against other students for grades. When you’re going out to get your first job, there may be eight people vying for that job, and only one person is going to get it. When you get the job, four people are being eyed for promotion; you’re one of them. You’re always competing.
Even within the same company in the same sales department, people will compete for regions, compete for clients…no matter how much collaboration there is, people are usually rewarded for shining, for standing out.
The results of competition are also much more straightforward to measure. It’s easy to see who crossed the finish line first, who got the high score, who’s numbers look best.
Even in team sports, where collaboration is crucial, it’s hard to tease out its exact value. To what extent did the New England Patriots win six Super Bowls because they out-collaborated their opponents—and to what extent was it the individual performance of Tom Brady? The same could be asked about Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls, or Maya Moore with the Minnesota Lynx.
Collaboration doesn’t come automatically. Competition does. All of that makes teaching collaboration much harder than simply telling people to share information.
So, when it comes to teaching collaboration in a team-building workshop, it is one of the most difficult things to do. An effective facilitator can model the behavior, point it out, and celebrate it. But to actually teach it and have it ingrained takes a highly skilled facilitator plus great program content. Leadership, problem-solving, and communication are teachable. Collaboration is the most difficult skill to ingrain into people.
Of course, the competitive aspect of team building is certainly valuable. It just depends upon what the goals are. At Best Corporate Events, about a third of our clients just want competition. They’re thinking A Minute to Win It, Catapult, Corporate Survivor, Go-Kart Competition, Team Olympics, or a scavenger hunt. They want groups of x employees to compete, and to have one winner, or three teams to win the Gold, Silver, and Bronze while all the other teams are losers.
We offer many different programs, in-person or online, wherein one team is going to have the most points. They win the gold medals. Competition can drive people to make extraordinary efforts to win, which is great.
But what makes these team building competitions even more impactful is that although participants are competing against other teams, they are working highly collaboratively with the other people on their team.
Team members are problem-solving, brainstorming, looking for solutions, and pumping each other up. Within each group, the efforts are tremendously collaborative, but all the groups are competing against each other. So these programs provide the best of both worlds.
Another way to teach collaboration in a competitive team building situation is to add all of the teams’ scores together and make that the score for the activity. When participants realize the goal is to maximize every team’s score rather than simply out-scoring the other group, they will share information and discoveries in order to help the other team(s), and therefore maximize the overall point total.
Organizations often identify that realization as one of the highlights of the entire day: that even though the program was set up like a competition, someone recognized collaboration, verbalized it, and got the entire room to understand. Suddenly these teams of employees, who were all too willing to immediately compete for the highest score, started sharing information instead of hoarding it.
A twist on that is to recognize the high-scoring teams but also add the scores of all the teams together and calculate the average. Then there is a “half time” called. The highest-scoring teams are asked to share what they did, to identify and share best practices so that every team does better in the second half.
And then in the second half, though all teams are still operating and being scored independently, all the scores are added together again. The goal is for all of the teams combined to achieve a 25% or 30% improvement compared to the overall scores in the first half. That’s collaborating to compete.
The business benefit is the mindset those employees take back to the workplace. They look for opportunities to collaborate, and are excited about it. They focus more on how their activities and communications impact the overall organization, not just their own roles.
Virtually all of our team building programs involve competition. Most incorporate some level of collaboration as well. And if the idea of improving collaboration through competition sounds really intriguing, you may want to check out our trademarked Competition to Collaboration® program.
If Charles Dickens was writing his classic novel today, the opening line might read “It was the weirdest of times.”
Job openings in the U.S. hit a record high in September, as companies across industries and regions struggle to find enough help. There are a record number of container ships waiting to unload off the California coast because there aren’t enough dock workers to unload them. Even if there were, there aren’t enough truck drivers to pick up the containers. Even if there were, there aren’t enough warehouse workers to unload the trucks.
And so it goes, across companies and job categories. The economy is rebounding, but a record number of workers are quitting their jobs. In many industries, there aren’t enough employees to go around now. Businesses are struggling to find enough employees.
Employers have to think hard about retention and recruitment. Many are raising wages, but know they need to offer more than a paycheck. How does a company become an employer of choice—a place that people want to join and don’t want to leave?
One answer is to emphasize corporate social responsibility (CSR). How does community philanthropy impact employment choices? While its importance varies from individual to individual, as a whole, people feel pretty good about reaching out and helping others. And when a company does that, it’s not just saying, but showing that its leadership cares about more than just the bottom line.
Any type of team building activity—whether the objective is to improve collaboration, problem-solving, or professional skills—improves employee engagement.
It demonstrates to employees that their worth to your company is more than just the immediate value of their daily efforts. You’re willing to invest in improving their skills and their work life over the long term. You’re paying them not to do their regular jobs for a few hours because you place a priority on team building.
Even more than holiday bonuses or employee surveys, team building programs let individuals know your company really does care about them, by investing in developing their leadership and interpersonal skills, while having fun doing it!
We all know the statistics about how difficult and expensive it is to retrain someone when a good person leaves your company. So, retention is so critical. Employee engagement done correctly equates to retention and enthusiasm.
Incorporating CSR in your team building takes it to a whole different level. It’s tremendous when a company is willing to do something charity-related or philanthropic in combination with developing their people.
From the perspective of employees, it has to do with heart. It has to do with the spirit of the company, with the culture that your company embraces. At one of our recent team-building events, the client said, “I feel like every time we do one of these activities, it enhances who we are, the culture that we have as a company.” That’s a pretty powerful statement.
This manager felt that the fact the company took some time to do a team-building activity enhanced the culture; it had the entire group feeling unified because they had just worked through a very difficult activity together. They had just celebrated together, with each of the participants sharing something they learned from the activity.
At our Bike Build Donation® events, we usually don’t tell the participants that kids are going to be there; it’s a “reveal” at the end of the activity. When those kids come in, it’s very emotional.
Many of those kids have never even owned a bike before. And when the facilitator asks everyone to close their eyes, and they sneak the kids in and tell a story, when everybody opens their eyes and the kids are standing there with the bikes, it’s really powerful
It’s so emotional that it has an impact on employee engagement and employee retention. It’s above and beyond working.
A bike-build program has all of the pillars for a team-building event. It’s got a goal, roles, fun, communication, competition, collaboration, and problem-solving, plus it’s got building. Everything an organization could want in a team-building program happens in the bike build. All of our charity events have an inherent team-building foundation. It’s a double bonus.
Or there’s our Build-a-Wheelchair® events, often done in collaboration with Disabled American Veterans and other veterans’ support organizations. In one of these programs, a charitable representative came with two retired service members in wheelchairs…that really had an emotional impact on the participants.
For our Project Alzheimer’s™ program—we get calls from people who go to our website and might say, “I just went through this very difficult situation with my mom with Alzheimer’s. And I saw you have an Alzheimer’s program. I know one of my workers is dealing with the same thing. We’re absolutely doing this program.”
All of our CSR programs allow participants to reach out to others. It’s about emotions, caring, company culture, the community. Those are all things that any of our charity programs represent.
More often than not, our team building program options are a part of a full-day or multi-day offsite employee meeting. In those cases, the company is making a broader investment in enhancing the knowledge and skills of its employees, as well as defining their corporate culture.
Team building is a vital piece of that investment. A CSR program might even be a surprise piece of that because it has such a tremendous impact.
But whether the CSR team building event is hosted in a hotel, conference center, or on the campus of a Fortune 500 company, it enhances company culture in a powerful way.
Some companies allow employees to take a few days off each year, separate from their vacation days, when they’re paid to volunteer for different nonprofit organizations such as Habitat for Humanity or their local soup kitchen. For employees who value giving back to the community, any type of CSR policy or activity has a powerful impact on loyalty, engagement, and retention.
Again, any type of team building program has a positive impact on employee morale and engagement. But incorporating CSR takes those effects to a higher level.
For any team building or professional development program we deliver, we can end with a surprise CSR component. It’s the best of both worlds when team building is combined with charity.
For example, we’ll take off the tablecloths, and lo and behold, there are all these school supplies. What are these school supplies for? Because we’re going to be putting them into backpacks and donating them.
How about our Golf Build Food Donation program? In two hours, your group gets to build a mini-golf course using canned and boxed goods, play a round of golf with medals to the winners, and then donate all the canned and boxed goods to a local food bank – it doesn’t get any better than that!
BEST CSR activities increase employee loyalty and engagement by enhancing your culture and creating an emotional as well as practical impact.
Join our mailing list to receive our weekly e-Newsletter
Keynote Speaker is an often-misunderstood term associated with simply a motivational speaker, breakout speaker, industry expert, etc. Most professional speakers are not actual trained Keynote Speakers, who are specialists, therefore in much lower supply, and in higher demand.
Keynote Speakers are experienced, professional communicators who engage an audience, capturing the essence of a client’s meeting. They are able to highlight it to their audience while simultaneously delivering their own key concepts and proprietary content in an entertaining and impactful way. Most companies understand that this specialization is very much worth the time (around an hour) and the investment.
In order to capture the perfect essence, a Keynote Speaker spends the necessary time researching a client’s industry, their issues, and their audience to craft a customized presentation into a unique and distinctive moment specifically for the client’s event.
As a top Keynote Speaker, Tom Leu strategically uses compelling storytelling, humor, powerful visuals, audio and video clips, and audience participation elements to weave an impactful message into your event in a fun and memorable way. Tom can also pair his Keynote with Best Corporate Events programming, laying a foundation and setting a tone that best prepares participants for maximum engagement in the forthcoming team events that day.
