Seagate Technologies, the hard disc drive company, has this program called Eco Seagate. Where they send 200 employees among the 55,000 it employees around the world to a week long ‘team building exercise’ in New Zealand, all paid for by the company, with an estimated cost of around $1.8 million a year. You can self nominate yourself or managers can nominate you.
Three employees in 2007 got video blog, here is what came out to be:
I personally think its a great program!
So the question is, are there any other companies around the world that do anything close to this?*
1.8 Mil is lot of money to be spent on few individuals in a large company. There are number of other 'team building' programs that can achieve the same results if not better at a lower cost. The main issue with this program is that you are going on a team building exercise without your immediate team. As a manager, if I want to build a stronger team, I will take everyone in my team to such a exercise so that there is more comradery and team skills development across the board. Also team building is a ongoing process and programs of this kind only has a short term impact. Rather the one massive/expensive exercise, I would vote for more frequent programs that will help me sustain my team over a long period of time.
In the last 3 to 4 years, our company has started putting a lot of emphasis on team/synergy building. On a global level, we have multi million dollar funds allocated for team building events but as our work space is around the globe, these funds get distributed around the globe in smaller chunks. As Boston pointed out, our strategy is similar. We prefer holding frequent team building events on a smaller scale rather than a few on grand scale.
I agree with you guys that team is very local. Its far better for team building if the manager throws a party once a quater ( a HALO party for the kind of co-workers I have) or join some tournament as a team with all the people that work for him. Much less on budget.
A friend of mine worked for GE Transportation and he said his boss would take the whole group to watch nerdy movies as soon as they would come out. Like Star Wars, Transformers etc.
back in the day Andersen used to have a multi-week in-residence training program for its new employees. we jokingly referred to teh process as creating and-roids but it had team building exercises and teams were constituted of ppl from junior analyst level all the way to partners.