Games people play

Managers are starting to see the benefits of corporate team-building events. But they come at a price.
By : Celia Barnes

   It’s an autumn evening on the edge of Warsaw’s Zegrze lake and in the flickering light of a bonfire a group of young corporate achievers from Johnson & Johnson shout encouragement.

   One of their colleagues is about to make a barefoot dash across a bed of glowing hot coals. With only a moment’s hesitation, their loud cries urge her to sprint across the smoking earth, and in seconds they form a spontaneous group hug around her.

   Welcome to team building, Native American Indian style.

   Since the arrival of Western investment in Poland in the early 1990s and the growing influence of Western corporate culture, regular training has become as indispensable as the office whiteboard and water cooler.

   And one of the fastest growing forms of training here is team building.

   Instead of subjecting staff to two-day seminars filled with talking heads, pie charts and liters of brewed coffee, Polish companies are also using team building, which incorporates trust-inspiring games, fear-inducing physical challenges, and role-playing scenarios – all usually conducted in the great outdoors – to bind colleagues together.

   Thanks to the tuition of Edi Pyrek – who lived and trained for three years with the Black Foot Indian tribe in Canada – these Johnson & Johnson staffers can now build a teepee and a backyard sweat lodge. They can leap from an oak tree with confidence, they can play Indian Warrior games and, of course, they can walk across a bed of hot coals.

   But what do these skills have to do with increasing talcum powder sales, or negotiating a new baby shampoo contract? Nothing.

   You have to look deeper, said Pyrek, who works for a Polish training company called Team. He explained that what these J&J employees were learning was to be good corporate warriors with improved team integration, good communication skills and drive.

   “This training can make a woman or a man can feel like a warrior and it’s beautiful,” he said. “They believe that they can change and they believe they can achieve.”

   Research on how successful team building is as a training tool is still far from comprehensive. But everybody (bar one) who contributed to this article – both trainers and trainees alike – insists that it works.

   Come together

   “If I didn’t believe in it, I wouldn’t organize this training,” said Katarzyna Dylik, training specialist with telecoms company Polkomtel.

   “I think it’s effective because you communicate better after training. You know the potential of the team; the bosses can see people in other situations and that helps them to get to know them better.”

   Following Polkomtel’s launch in 1996, new team recruits have been regularly subjected to weekend sessions of bungee jumping, cave expeditions, boat building and paintball fights, all focused on breaking the ice and building communication skills.

   “This training also works as an energizer because our staff work hard and they work under stress, and we have a lot of new products and new information to absorb,” Dylik said.

   It’s a similar sentiment from Avon Cosmetics’ HR manager, Zosia Korzycka.

   “Team building brings people together in different situations and makes it necessary to work in a team, even though they don’t know each other,” said Korzycka, who organizes biannual training for Avon’s managers through the Zakopane-based company, Tatra Extreme.

   And she hasn’t overlooked that other important team-building benefit: Employees love to see their boss just as terrified as they are.

   “They think, ‘well, he’s human after all,’ “ said Korzycka with a laugh. “Of course, it depends what kind of general manager you have. If someone is very strict and official, it’s difficult to get someone involved in such games and to feel comfortable with their staff.”

   One of the first team-building companies in Poland was Team Builders International (TBI). When it opened for business in 1997, Lesław Stępień, one of TBI’s founders, and a former commando with the Polish Army for 12 years, said there were only three other companies in Poland offering team building.

   Today, he estimates there are more than 70 companies on the market.

   Market research collated for TBI indicates that the level of interest in outdoor training grew by 26% in 1999. Traditional “workshop training” is still the most popular method of training, followed by lectures, case studies and simulations. But Stępień believes outdoor training will continue to grow in popularity as more companies incorporate it into their training programs.

   “I think because of Poland’s socialist past, we didn’t know about this type of team-building training,” Stępień said. “Companies were attempting to do some integration with staff at work, but it was usually going out to the bar and drinking or mushroom picking.”

   In the early days, multinationals were the main users of TBI’s services. Today, Stępień said Polish companies account for the vast majority of the 12 team-building events TBI organizes each month. Most of TBI’s clients are large, successful companies from a variety of sectors, spending anywhere from zł. 600 to zł. 2,500 per person.

   “Cost depends on how many days, how many events, the complication of the scenario or if they want to use 4x4 quad bikes, or go scuba diving or parachuting,” said Stępień, who tailors the programs after consulting with the client on the corporate issues and problems they want to solve.

   Like most team-building companies, TBI also employs psychologists to conduct a ‘debriefing’ session afterward.

   The president of Saska Kępa-based Team, Tomasz Grudniak, has also noticed a shift in the past 12 months, with more Polish companies curious to try team building. He suspects that top companies are now beginning to employ Polish managers who have had experience in big, multinational companies, where they saw the benefits of regular training.

   The biggest obstacle Grudniak sees, particularly with the slowing economy, is that many Polish managers still don’t understand the importance of investing in their employees.

   “Most of today’s top Polish managers or company owners are people who started from the bottom level, as simple employees,” Grudniak said. “So when they hear about team building, they tend to think, ‘I didn’t need it to get where I am, so why do my staff need it?’ “Basically I think it’s a matter of business culture.”

    “I learned nothing except new and novel ways in which to be bored.” – anonymous telecom employee.

   Reality games

   Another long-term player on Poland’s team-building scene is Haxel. Created 10 years ago as a boutique tour operator, it has expanded to become a specialist in team-building events – in particular reality games, where clients find themselves unwitting players in a scenario or mystery, with actors assuming roles for authenticity.

   Haxel president, Cezary Wilemajtys, prefers to use the overall term of “incentive travel” for what his company does: Trips or events that are a “prize or an incentive for employees” either in return for hard work, or to make them work harder.

   Wilemajtys estimates that Polish clients account for 30% of Haxel’s business, and although the market has slowed with the economic slowdown, he insists company income is continuing to double each year.

   “Incentive travel is a sophisticated instrument and it has to be used very carefully and thoughtfully,” Wilemajtys said. “Polish managers do not always realize what potential lies behind incentive travel, when you compare their international colleagues who have been doing this for some time in other places and have seen the results and effects of this.”

   One of Haxel’s popular foreign incentive travel destinations is Venezeula, where prices start at $3,400 per person. However, Wilemajtys, and some of his contemporaries on the market, are reporting a strong slowdown in overseas trips because of the publics’ reticence to fly since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States. Wilemajtys said domestic events are an easier – and cheaper – option, costing anywhere from zł. 20,000 up to zł. 100,000 for 15-20 people.

   So team building doesn’t come cheaply. Polkomtel’s Katarzyna Dylik estimates that team-building training costs are 50% more than ‘traditional’ training – one reason why Polkomtel only uses team building when it is really necessary, and why Avon only does it once every two years.

   Avon’s Zosia Korzycka also questions whether team building achieves long-lasting corporate change. She is also careful to point out that staff are not forced to attend, or participate in events. (During Avon’s last session, a 50-year-old employee refused to go caving due to a heart condition.)

   Clearly not everyone is so gung-ho about spending their weekends with their colleagues. One former telecoms employee, who asked to remain anonymous, said for her team building was a “complete waste of time.”

   “The tasks involved doing things like telling the group something personal about yourself – I refused; falling backward off a ladder on to a human mattress – I bailed; and trying to navigate through snow and trees as a group from point A to point B while blindfolded,” she said. “I learned nothing except new and novel ways in which to be bored.”

   She also felt uncomfortable with the level of physical contact most of these activities entailed, but her protests saw her labeled as “being uncooperative” or “a bad sport.”

   One type of team building that doesn’t involve so much physical contact, and is proving very popular in Poland, is paintball.

   Participants are given a high-powered gun that shoots balls of paint, some nifty camouflage clothing and protective head gear, and they spend the day racing through the forest taking pot-shots at their marketing manager, or CEO.

   Tomasz Matuszewski, from paintball company Skill, believes the paintball industry, which first appeared in Poland about six years ago, is growing in value by 200% every year.

   He estimates there are about 70 paintball companies in Poland with commercial playing fields, and about five distributors of equipment. Last month, Poland held its third annual paintball Polish Open, where 45, mainly European, teams competed in Warsaw. A national competition has existed here for four years and last year the Polish Paintball League debuted.

   A game of paintball costs around zł. 150 per person and Matuszewski estimates that almost 100% of Skill’s customers are corporate groups on team-building exercises organized by team-building companies. Their patronage accounts for around 85% of Skill’s income; the rest comes from public players.

   “And the majority of our commercial clients are from international companies,” Matuszewski said. “They are much more wealthy. Right now, the Polish companies are not that wealthy and we have noticed that.”

   So what exactly does Matuszewski think paintball contributes to the corporate work environment? “I think outdoor exercises are better because you have some emotion and adrenaline and some interest. They also help release stress,” Matuszewski said.

   “Each time these people get together outside of work, they have some experiences and they come back to work and they say, ‘That was fun! Do you remember I shot you in the back?’”