Fun team building activities NYC

This past week, I had the unique opportunity of producing and hosting an event like few others. As the founder of a company specializing exclusively in creating enjoyable group bonding ideas in New York City and beyond, the challenge given to me by clients tends to fall within a select number of categories:

• We want to boost company morale
• We want the group to work better together as a team
• We want to improve collaboration, communication and work processes
• We want people to get to know one another better
• We want to reward the group for a job well done

However, this most recent event fell into an entirely different category, which is by far the most delicate a professional group facilitator for the office can encounter: the team recently had something bad happen, and desperately needed to feel happy again.

I’ve been in this line of work for almost a decade, and it’s certainly not the first time I’ve encountered something like this (nor do I suspect it will be the last). Particularly after the global financial crisis of 2008 – which led to me starting TrivWorks in the first place – I found that a lot of companies needed a solid lift in spirits after multiple rounds of layoffs, restructures, and salary freezes. I’ve since produced events for companies which have had mergers with subsequent layoffs of redundant staff, teams which have had dips in performance, have had key managers retire (or, tragically, pass away). Basically, lots of “bad stuff” can happen at the workplace, which disrupts not only the natural flow of work, but the overall cohesion of teams, production, quality, and the bottom line.

For the event I had this past week, they definitely had something bad happen recently; I can’t get into it here out of respect for the privacy of my client, however I will say that it was absolutely something traumatic, which affected every area of the organization from top to bottom. The impact of this incident was still being felt weeks later, all throughout the ranks; people were deeply unhappy, in what I was told was typically an incredibly jovial, positive and spirited workplace, full of passionate and dedicated employees who love what they do.

I walked into the event space (actually, more like ran – I was late from a subway mishap, sweating profusely underneath my blazer on what was the first 90-degree day of the year here in the Big Apple) to find about 50 gloomy participants, already broken into teams and ready to go. Only they didn’t know WHAT they’d be doing – only that it would be a “staff team builder” of some kind.

I quickly got settled, wiped my brow, took a slug of water, and just dived right in – setting the tone right away that this would NOT be a dreaded exercise involving cheesy trust falls and icebreaker games for the office. No, I did what people in my line of work rarely do: I made them laugh.

“Who here got all excited when you heard that you were doing a TEAMBUILDING EXERCISE today??” I exclaimed loudly into the microphone.

That was it – that’s all it took. They erupted with laughter, more than I was expecting. And that’s just it – THEY were expecting something else, most likely a dull, forced game or something that they didn’t want to be a part of anyway, but that they had no possibility of avoiding. The rest of the gig was cake – I pulled out all the stops, in order to ensure that the event was packed solid with the maximum number of laughs possible. Nothing was off limits as far as eliciting the funny: team names, wrong answers, heckles, you name it. I even made sure to bring a bunch of goofy, silly prizes to give away throughout the trivia contest, to keep those laughs and humorous moments coming.

After the event was over, the organizer came over to me, and she was beaming. Usually after a gig that’s been well-received by an audiences such as this one was, the planner will tell me things such as, “that was a blast!” or “you guys were great!” Don’t get me wrong, hearing this makes my heart sing – I put in a tremendous amount of work and emotional energy into each and every event, and when it’s a success, I feel like a million bucks. However, this client told me something that I don’t usually hear, and which kind of gave me pause:

“We really needed this.”

Wow. I knew going into that this group had suffered from something big, and that they would likely appreciate a couple of hours of fun to let their hair down and relax a bit. But the way she looked at me and said that, I knew it was much deeper this time – that this group REALLY needed an experience such as the one I’d provided, and that it meant more than just entertaining the troops for an evening.

There’s just something about laughter which has an incredibly disarming power to it. For people who are stressed out, anxious, frustrated or just overall on edge, having a positive shared experience which elicits tons of sustained hilarity has an almost magical way of defusing thing. Like releasing the air from a balloon, sharing laughs with the group of people who are otherwise the source of your troubles instantly allows you to not take things so seriously, especially the inevitable power struggle which I find exists in EVERY workplace, regardless of industry, office or location.

When I left that gig this week, the temperature had cooled off, and I was able to enjoy my leisurely trip back home thinking of what the client had said. And you know, I couldn’t help but smile – a big, doofy one, which anyone walking the other way would’ve noticed, and thought I was some kind of weirdo. Not to be sappy, but this is exactly why I do what I do – I want to make a difference in the workplace, to make people feel more appreciated, and to help groups not let “the job” become overwhelming.

To learn more about this special line of work I’m so lucky to do, follow this link.