Last week at Hewlett-Packard, a managers-only e-mail went out—the kind of memo that always baffles me.
"Tips for virtual recognition and celebration," the memo offers. A real problem, especially for a company like H-P, with many remote employees and contractors. The memo's introduction describes the problem well:
All right H-P HR, fire away with your ideas for non-monetary recognition:
• When you call to recognize an employee’s accomplishment, do so during the workday in their time zone.
• Find ways to “shake hands” virtually—use more words of praise than you might in person. Use your voice to “smile,” laugh to show you are smiling.
So far so good, as are some more ideas for warming up remote team meetings and using technology to bring far-flung workers closer.
But then the directive inevitably commands managers to "have fun" with their remote employees. Here's how:
• Party a la PowerPoint—ask each person to create one party scene slide. Include pictures, music, animation, sound effects. Consolidate the slides and share a virtual celebration. Great for celebrating milestones.
• Ask team members to share a photo of themselves, apply some image editing and voila! You create a virtual team photo to send to all!
Help me understand: How do grown people give such advice to other grown people? And how do the receivers of such advice, who presumably have enough reliable horse sense to be entrusted with management roles, actually inflict these ideas upon their charges? (And you know they do!) And how do the victims—and I've been floored again and again by employees' willingness to submit unblinkingly to the most humiliating team-building exercises—come away from their corporate days with enough dignity required to go home and look their children in the eye?
My questions aren't rhetorical.
I mean it: How?
Some people like this kind of “fun.” I ain’t one of them, and you ain’t, either, but some are.
They don’t build teams or interpersonal skills, and they aren’t “fun,” just painful.
But actual team building or interpersonal skill development is just a wee bit harder.
Me, I just want to get the job done so I can go home, where the real FUN is.
PS: My favorite team photo was for a greeting card where we were supposed to look like we were having fun. The head of the team, to whom I didn’t report and who didn’t like me, and who planted herself squarely in the center, threw her arm up in front of my face. When someone pointed out the photo should be retaken because I couldn’t be seen, she said, “No, it’s great!” You can imagine how functional that team was.
You asked three questions David. Here, in order are your answers:
1) Because doing things that GENUINELY recognize and include these far-flung folks is expensive and we’re not willing/able to spend all that money.
2) Because they won’t give us the money that it would take to reward our team-members in a real way, and, believe it or not, they follow up to make sure that we’ve all done these idiotic things. We have families to feed too, you know.
3)We’ve been in this screwed up environment for so long, we barely even notice how retarded it is anymore. Also, they pay us to put up with it, which allows us to go home and look at our kids, because we can then pay for the piano lessons and the braces, and the summer camp.
HOW do people do this? They get ASSIGNED this, that’s how. And then when they find that assignment impossible, some huffy HR person or smarmy exec plagarizes from some idiotic management treatise they recently read and forces communicators to publish it, much to their everlasting shame.
@Diane: “Some people like this kind of ‘fun.'” Yes, and some people like S&M, but we don’t do that on team-building retreats. Though because it’s a unique and honest experience, it would be preferable to a “Party a la Powerpoint.”
@Kristen: “We’ve been in this screwed up environment for so long, we barely even notice how retarded it is anymore.” You could say the same about battered-wife syndrome, and you wouldn’t be so blithe.
And I disagree with you when you say:
“Also, they pay us to put up with it, which allows us to go home and look at our kids, because we can then pay for the piano lessons and the braces, and the summer camp.”
No, they pay for the work, and we put up with this shit voluntarily. They can’t pay us enough to put up with this.
And when those kids tell us through their straight teeth to go fuck ourselves with our crazy values when they’re 15–“no one made you trade your dignity for my piano lessons. You decided to do it when I was six. Not mu fucking problem”–they’ll be right.
(I say all this as a hypocrite, who has never refused to participate in such corporate foolishness–except I do slip out of conference sessions when the speaker starts in with the “team exercises”–and who believes I hold onto my soul as long as I hold a subtle smirk.)
David – you and I agree fundamentally, but – as you’ve admitted – you are not forced to exist in “the corporate environment” and I don’t have kids or a mortgage, so both of us have the freedom to tell the crazy people what to do with their team-building exercises and damn the consequences. Not everyone has that luxury.
I bet if all the parents out there who read your blog felt they could be completely honest they would agree with me to some point.
Plus, I don’t think it’s necessarily a given that because you go along with this sort of nonsense during the business day, that you bring those screwy activities into your home environment. In fact, most of the people I know who have to put up with this craziness have a very solid curtain that they walk through when they leave their office each day. I know I am a very different person in my personal life than I am at work.
Do I like having to cover up and stifle my natural opinions and tendencies for a paycheque? No. But as someone who’s about to be unemployed and who is worrying about where the rent money will be coming from until I find a new job, am I going to continue slapping a smile on my face when someone says: “let’s have a PowerPoint party” I sure am.
P.S. Sorry, but I can’t agree with the comparison of ridiculous corporate team-building baloney to a battering situation for a number reasons that I won’t bore people with, but having known women who’ve been battered, that was a bridge too far for me.
Of course the battering situation was a bridge too far, which is why I made it.
But the acceptance of this “curtain,” as you call it–“I know I am a very different person in my personal life than I am at work”–is something I think we all ought to question, in the certain knowledge that surrendering our personality at work MUST have consequences to our lives at home.
P.S. I’d put up with a little more for a “paycheque” than I will for a drab old paycheck.
Ha ha! You have to move to Canada (or Britain) to get that magical “u” and I don’t think you’d be happy with some of the other things that come along with said “u”.
Colour me green with envy.
I have a relative who’s one of the remote workforce at HP. From what I can tell (although I didn’t discuss this bunch of inane BS with her), she’s worried on a daily basis about the safety of her job. My guess is that if she’s asked to come up with one of these goofball “team” things, she’ll probably do it. Not because it’ll make her feel good–she’s a smart, capable, amazing woman–but because she’s a single mom in an unstable economy and she’ll do what it takes to keep her job.
What she’d really like, I am sure, is something tangible: a bonus; some extra training; something real that she can add to her resume.
Did I tell you about the “teambuilding” here at my job? We shut down the office and everyone went out to a paintball place and fired weapons at each other. Somehow I managed to be the only woman who showed up for this “mandatory” activity. When I asked just how shooting at one’s coworkers contributed to a more effective team, I was told, and I quote: “If you were a guy, you’d get it.”
I’m thinking maybe these contrived teambuilding things are better left off the corporate agenda altogether.
“Did I tell you about the ‘teambuilding’ here at my job? We shut down the office and everyone went out to a paintball place and fired weapons at each other.”
Well, it does sound like a lot of fun.
But guy stuff has never been lost on you. After I sold my “rig,” as you called it, you boycotted this blog for a month!
(I’ve got the Triumph, Joan; a photo here as soon as I find a tenuous connection to communication.)
I must say I find it interesting that we are discussing these teambuilding things as malevolent corporate behavior that we have to put up with in order to hold into our jobs.
I believe that ultimately, malevolent is exactly what they are: Activities whose only effective function is to remind us that we don’t own ourselves between 8 and 5. They do.
But if someone else owns us nine hours a day, do we really own ourselves at all?
Oops, forgot to type in the magical letters and lost a post. I just wanted to tell you that I haven’t been boycotting you, David. I’ve been following the conversations whenever I have a minute; but I’ve been, in “guy” talk, balls to the wall busy with this new job. (I now have a hearty appreciation for all those contractors who build and maintain the world as we know it!) Plus I haven’t felt like I really had anything to add, or I’d have made some time.
But my question remains, and I really do want some insight into this: how DOES shooting at your coworkers contribute to a stronger team, from a guy perspective? I’ve noticed that I do seem to be more highly regarded since showing up and taking part, to the best of my ability, in this exercise. I went from being the last person picked for a team in the first round, to being the first or second picked from there on out, so apparently what I was doing was estimable from their perspectives. But I honestly didn’t feel like I gained any greater commitment to this team than I did before. I just feel like I put myself through an exercise that I didn’t particularly enjoy in order to please the testosterone owners.
Why was this so important to them? I need a guy who’ll talk to me here.
PS: If you ever do get talked into participating in a paintball war, I have some advice: beyond the obvious, which is to wear thick clothing wherever you can (I chose snowpants, a long-sleeved tee with a vest and a quilted flannel shirt, and a baseball cap under my helmet-thingie), there’s one thing nobody told me: Paintball wars mostly involve hiding behind some sort of barrier, peeking your head and arm around, and firing. So the only things exposed are your head and arm. My arm was well protected; but let me tell you, if you take a paintball to the head, a baseball cap doesn’t cut much of the impact. I strongly recommend a stocking cap under the baseball cap.
“Why was this so important to them? I need a guy who’ll talk to me here.”
Well, until a guy shows up, a woman footballer will have to do.
All I have to say about this is: team sports (and I imagine paintball feels like that; it wasn’t everyone for themselves, was it?) are more bonding than teamwork for a corporate purpose.
I’ve had a lot of happiness in my career, but I can name only one or two moments that I’d associate with “teamwork.” Actually, only one: When the entire creative staff at Ragan Communications worked a couple of sleepless nights to put together a memorial issue of The Ragan Report the week Larry Ragan died. That was 1995!
But my recent football foray acquainted me with the comforting team feeling you can get from team sports: When the goal is clear and the need to rely on and trust others (and forgive them their inevitable fuck-ups as they forgive you yours) is equally clear.
I was touched by that experience, and I wonder if these fellows are thinking: Compete together at sports/war, see what we’re made of and feel bonded back at HQ.
Who else?
If I didn’t know better I’d assume, from reading this post and many of the comments that “team building” activities comprise the majority of our work time. That, of course, is not true.
These types of activities and recognitions consume a mere fraction of the time. Let’s not lose sight of that shall we? The majority of our time spent on the job is SPENT ON THE JOB and yes, David, people really do tolerate the teambuilding and the recoginition stuff because they want to hang on to their jobs.
Ask someone who is currently unemployed – and has been for months – if they would be willing to tolerate an occasional teambuilding activity in order to have a regular paycheck again. I think you can guess what his or her answer would be.
So, let’s keep this in perspective, shall we?
Colleen, how would it look if we were keeping it in perspective?
Kind of sounds like what you’re saying is, “Quit complaining. You assholes are lucky to have jobs at all.”
Sorry, but I’m not going to turn my blog into a rosary of nervous gratitude.
Are we bad people for grinning and bearing the occasional idiocy of others, David? Is our integrity impugned by NOT fighting losing battles over things that ultimately trivial?
I assure you that corporate life — in which I’ve been working for the past 10 years — is harder to navigate than it looks. Many of us who do this every day are telling you that this is how it really is, and you’re telling us that we’re wussy, shameful people who lack integrity for not putting up a fight or quitting flat out when we don’t win a fight — over things like “smile with your voice.”
Communication IS politics, and some of that means having to put up with minor stuff you dislike so you can publish things that matter to employees. I work on the “crowd it out” theory of providing so much that matters that there’s very little room left over for “smile with your voice” and the like. Still, when someone in a position of power gets a wild hair, you learn to deal.
Life would be wonderful if we all could stick to our principles purely and absolutely. But what seems easy and tidy in the safe world of theory is very different in the real world of practice.
Amy, show me where I’m criticizing you or anyone else for putting up with this shit? I’ve actually said that, when confronted with team-building exercises, I go through with them too.
This isn’t a Rosa Parks issue.
It’s a much subtler issue–but I’m arguing that it’s not a trivial one, although in this economy it may seem so.
Of course, when one has a gun to one’s head, an ass-fucking seems trivial.
There you go again, David. Attributing something to me that I never said. I did not say nor did I ever imply that the result should be nervous gratitude. I didn’t say the unemployed would be grateful but rather they would see teambuilding for what it is – 1 percent (at best) of a job. It’s not a deal breaker if everything else about the job, i.e., the actual work, is a good fit for you.
It seems to me that you’re doing what we complain about the media doing. Taking something small and making it appear much more significant than it really is.
Colleen: “kind of sounds like what you’re saying.” This is “attribution” in your book?
Secondly: I do not complain that the media takes small things and makes them appear significant. I usually complain that they ignore significant things as if they are small.
Finally: It may be true that I overreact specifically to this team-building stuff. It has always stirred in me a rage that it hasn’t always stirred in others. Maybe this goes back to my days in a drug treatment center as a teenager. (Now THERE’S another blog item for another day!)
Still, no one here actually defends the stuff, or even claims it’s effective in a Machiavellian way.
So what’s the harm in asking, at whatever volume and frequency we each deem appropriate: Why do we have to put up with this stupid shit? Why can’t we make it stop?
“Team-building exercise” should not be a familiar collocation, but it is. I think the mistake companies make is to treat team-building as an exercise.
Saying you’re going to go do something together isn’t just calling the same thing by a different name; it shows a different intent. When I worked as a lexicographer, we were divided into small teams, each reporting to a senior editor. We had high quotas to meet, if you can believe that: imagine trying to do the mind-bendingly hard work of analyzing raw linguistic data and writing dictionary definitions, all at an expected pace to meet a schedule!
But we did some things right: you might poke your head in one of the rooms to see a team taking a ten-minute break to play jacks. We would go to a pub with a beer garden during lunchtime once a month on a Friday. And every few months or so, we’d have a departmental outing–to the greyhound races, to a ski-simulator run, to something that was just about being together as people.
That kind of “exercise” is really worth doing, I think: it made your annoyance at having your decision about how to split some subsenses overruled fade into the proper perspective. (I know, you’ll say “Your whats into whoozits, and you’re telling me people got upset by this?” Just shut up and focus on the point here.) It didn’t treat us as people who somehow needed another enforced activity to make us work together better; it was voluntary, and people were actually disappointed if they couldn’t attend for whatever reason.
So, no babies out with the bathwater. And no, you don’t have to drink the Kool-Aid to suck it up and just deal with the occasional misguided diktat from happy-company-land.
Besides, sometimes you really do want a legitimate excuse to try to shoot somebody–which I think is what the paintball was about, Joan H. When guys have to–yikes!–submit to other guys at work, or they have to act all civilized when really what they want to do is deck somebody, there’s little more satisfying than being able to inflict some corporately sanctioned pain.
Great comment, Wendi.
I agree that managers ought to gather employee groups for off-site or at least off-subject activities now and then.
It’s a question of organic vs. artificial, casual vs. forced, over-strategic vs. simply sensible.
You know it when you see it, but generally with these things, I favor bartenders over professional facilitators and picnic tables over flip-charts.
David, dear, you are so NOT a pipsqueak.
I’m proud to be a member of the crack team of trolls, misanthropes, curmudgeons, shut-ins, cynics, nay-sayers and miscreants who inhabit this blog (a.k.a. my fellow writers).
But, sheesh. We’ve had this conversation before. I guess I’m the only one here who LIKES happy-snap PowerPoint shows, team building exercises and goofy role playing. In fact, I wish I could get a nice cool drink of that juice (you’d surely call it Kool-Aid) these days. It’s one of the things I miss about my previous lives in the corporate world, where I participated in, and even led, some of the activities being decried above.
When done right — which means with sensitivity, good humor and a basic level of trust, and with a group devoid of Writing Boots readers — team building exercises can help build mutual understanding, strengthen relationships, convey new ideas, breed tolerance and even, over time, change an organization’s culture for the better.
I’ve seen it happen. And I admire leaders who have the courage, humanity and creative energy to bring their teams together in new ways.
those posts were very entertaining to read. Lots of ideas, opinions, and stories.
Thanks, cheap paintball. Keep reading!