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Lockdown gave rise to the virtual version of team-building sessions and games. Yay! If you Google teambuilding.com, you get a free ride back to your childhood. They offer a variety of “fun” & “engaging” team-building activities for remote teams to build close relationships between employees, essential skills, and habits for remote work.
Their online Office Olympic Games, for example, promote the development of better communication by using collaborative tools. Do you know what I found when I looked at it? A drawing charades game. I saw four grown-up people drawing clocks, circles, triangles etc., on their notebooks and the others had to guess what it was. I mean, seriously. All I can ask is, WHY? What do we learn from this? How is this fun? But most importantly, why do we spend money on that?
Another one of their activities was to build a colourful lama on an Excel sheet. Like, what? They even use cartoon figures of teddy bears, hippos, frogs, and cats that might appeal to 5-year-olds but generally not to those over 12s. They treat you like a kindergartener, and you get everything a kindergartener does. You get colouring exercise with the lama, you get to draw something, and you have ghost storytelling, just like at nursery when the teacher reads you a story, and you get teddy bears. You get everything except nap time. Give us nap time instead of silly games!
They also do “Tea vs Coffee team building, a virtual tasting ceremony for remote teams. They highlight drinks that are a blend of unusual teas, coffees and infusions like turmeric tea blend and a dark mushroom roast. The team activities start with mindful icebreakers followed by guided meditation, then transitions to the tasting ceremony.” But in case you don’t like tea or coffee, you can participate in the guacamole-making or the gingerbread house-building competition.
Suppose you continue researching “fun” activities at work. In that case, the pain will become increasingly unbearable as you go from one activity to another, like the “moving on game” played using a pile of cups. Everyone starts with the special cup on the bottom, and they race to get their cup to the top by taking the top cup off and moving it to the bottom one at a time. Or you might come across the “sliding yourself on the floor to the finishing line on a bathroom mat” game.
You will fail not to wonder; what is the purpose of this? Do they sound like they help anyone do their job better? Will any of these activities help solve the disagreement between Jane and Karen? I don’t reckon. They are a perfect waste of time and company resources directly led by HR or the managers who oversee company finances. Well done!
Fancy more adult kindergarten stories?
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