The terms ‘team building’ can give rise to panic in our hearts at the best of times, but during a pandemic, they also mean a few extra hours on Zoom – something we could all do without.
A Colleagues are standing in two groups, arms outstretched, hoping to grab their co-worker. They’re playing a confidence game, and the man in question is now moaning at the edge of an elevated wooden platform. “I’m going to go first,” he says, more confidently than he looks. Nothing is going to happen. “Can I ask you, please… Can you hold me?” he part-jokes, half pleads. Oh, yeah, they’re muttering together.
At last, he throws caution at the wind. His rigid body is plunged into his arms. It’s already obvious, when he collapses, that this isn’t going to plan. There’s an unnerving level of screaming here. Their tight-knit system is starting to split up. One lady, on the front, jumps backward, obviously realising that she doesn’t want to be the only person to stop his slide. He’s hitting the deck, head first. Great teamwork, guys!
This is a kind of ‘team-building’ worst-case situation, of course. But, still, these two words stirred terror and contempt in the hearts of all – healthy outdoor events, games that force you to literally contact your colleagues, cruel flashbacks of the most shameful facets of adolescence, from school sports days to rounds of “two truths and a fib” that eventually wind up insulting someone.The most heinous team bonding activities are perhaps the 90s clichés such as confidence slips, pseudo-scientific personality checks and brain teasers. One example is the iconic chicken-and-fox puzzle, which originally dates back to mediaeval times and was immortalised by the British TV series The Office: a farmer has to bring a fox, a chicken and a sack of grain from one side of the river to the other, but his boat can only accommodate one at a time.
Whereas at least before the tasks involved may have included a day’s off work or a weekend abroad, now there’s still more time on your plate, stuck to your computer screen. When millions battle Zoom exhaustion and, interestingly enough, even longer working hours than ever, simulated team building is perhaps even more agonising than the actual thing. It’s fundamentally faulty, too.
