You know, I rather thought that corporate team-building events
went out of style before the end of the last century, but apparently I was
wrong.
Very, very wrong, as this story
from NPR indicates.
The same managers who happily lay off employees and
replace them with contract workers at half the rate and no benefits to look
fiscally responsible to stockholders are finding money in their budgets for group
activities that deliver the maximum of alienation and humiliation to all those
taking part.
Well, perhaps the managers—being clearly clueless—don’t
feel the humiliation, and of course they don’t care about alienation or else their
companies wouldn’t be the hellholes they are.
You just have to wonder who signed off on things like a
piñata full of bits of metal, to be bashed open in an enclosed space, or
distributing magic mushrooms on the company dime. I don’t wonder who approves
paintballing or any other activity involving faux hunter-prey play; they are
male, have compensation issues and are poor losers.
The one team-ish event that I ever organized, to get engineers
and non-engineers from England, Wales, France and Belgium comfortable with each
other, involved assigned seating at the group dinner, and an inter-table
competition to match pub-quiz type questions with their answers and deduce the
overall theme of all the questions. One of my word processors drove her table
to victory in less time than it would take to chamber a paintball round.
And they were playing for bottles of champagne.
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