Do you want to foster stronger relationships among your employees? Studies warn to tread very carefully. Good-intentioned team building activities, complete with custom tee shirts to commemorate the event — could get awkward or straight-up humiliate your employees. In the history of all team-building activities, there have been some pretty shocking and horrifying examples. Here are just a few.
Putting It All Out There… Literally
In Japan, you may end up bathing in a natural spring with your boss naked. Don’t make any assumptions about your boss’s attractiveness and an illicit affair; this is actually standard practice as a team-building activity! The bathing, called “naked relationships,” supposedly helps foster trust and honesty and involves only same-sex employers and employees.
The Bosses That Channeled Mean Girls
What is a slam book? The very last place you want to find out the answer to that question is at work — and yet, for some office workers in the U.S., that’s exactly what happened. Bosses asked employees to point out their coworkers’ flaws, and the experiment went so horribly that one woman doesn’t even remember if they tried to balance things out with a discussion of more positive traits. “We went from simply not being able to work together to actively disliking each other in about 30 minutes,” she explains.
Is It Possible To Be Too Old For Camp Activities? (Yes, And It’s Highly Likely That You’re Employees Are!)
You may laugh, but some employers ask employees to put on custom tee shirts, custom team shirts, or custom work shirts, and then ask them to do trust falls. Keep one very important thing in mind: your employees are not 11. Trust falls do not encourage deeper relationships and may make less touchy-feely employees feel decidedly awkward.
Do your employees a favor, and either put some careful thought into team-building activities, or even skip them altogether. Whatever you do, don’t end up on someone’s “worst of” list. More like this article.