Edinburgh Treasure Hunt

Just back from a fabulous Treasure Hunt in Edinburgh. It's a great city for a Treasure Hunt because there's so much to do in such an accessible area. We finished up in The Caves in Old Niddry Street which is a great venue and perfect for the end of an event. We flew from Southampton and it took one and a half hours, with a half hour bus trip to get into the city centre. It's almost as close as London.

Team Building For 2011

Our Hustle event seems to be very popular at the moment. Teams play against our casino to try to tip the odds in their favour using techniques that our hustlers teach them.

The Parmesan Job continues to attract a lot of attention and we've followed this up with The Parmesan Job II, which brings speedboats into the plot. Very exciting and the ultimate sequel.

The trend for short notice events continues, we're often contacted one or two weeks before the event date. Some people in the industry say that budgets remain low but we think that if you have the right product you can still get the higher budget events.

Essentially if you believe that budgets are low and you reduce your offering to a lower budget level what result will you get? Low budgets.

It's important to keep the ideas big and exciting.

Gingerbread House Challenge

As a creative team building company we felt it was important to come up with something interesting and fun for our partner hotels this year. In our Gingerbread Challenge teams are invited to build their own gingerbread house and submit a photograph for judging. The best example will win the team a huge one metre tall gingerbread house.

All in all, that's a lot of gingerbread.

Treasure Hunt Locations

Treasure Hunts are a great way of exploring interesting areas. Favourite locations include London Tower Bridge and West End, Brighton, Windsor and The Solent.

In some areas it's quite difficult to find interesting clues but somewhere like Windsor, for example, has great clues every few places.

Here's a great Treasure Hunt picture featuring an interesting landmark in Windsor.

Green Team Building

It is possible to hold a Green Team Building event with really enjoyable activities without compromising on fun.

Laser Clay Shooting uses infra red instead of shot and it's a very enjoyable competitive activity. Pulse Ranger is an electronic combat game, a bit like paintball without the paint ... and pain. Segways are one of the most popular activities available, whether the event has a green objective or not.

All of these activities are safe and environment friendly. They don't damage the ground where they are held and they are very energy efficient. The cost of charging all three is less than £1 and they are fully charged for a day for 30 or more people.

Other activities are available with a minimal or event non-existant environmental impact. The Crystal Challenge event, in particular, makes no impact at all.

It sometimes seems that we need to compromise to fit in green ideals, but there are many events available where this is not so. That is when our commitment to a better environment will really start to work; when it is effortless, enjoyable and doesn't have to come with an evangelical message.

The Team Building Team

What a great bunch of people. Here is our team of event instructors at the open day of our new office and warehouse building. Dame Ellen MacArthur came down to perform the opening ceremony in front of 200 guests and we set up all of the activities in the adjacent field and put on a hog roast.

It was a great day. All of our people are hand picked for their attitude and aptitude and many of the emails we received after the event commented on how engaging they were on the day.

Great work team!

DaVinci's Designs

If ever there was a visionary and a genius in our midst it was Leonardo DaVinci. Although his ideas were legendary by all accounts he was not much of a team player, preferring to work alone.

In tribute to DaVinci's genius we created an event called DaVinci's Designs in which teams solve problems based on his work to earn materials with which to paint a picture, using our mosaic format. So teams build a crane and costruct a bridge using Davinci's ideas. Then they finish up by each contributing to a canvas which eventually joins other canvasses to make up one big picture.

It's a great event and a fitting tribute to the great man.

Team Building

Team building is starting to take off in a big way this year. Finally, after a long period where teams were being taken apart, the mood is changing and teams are being built again. It's great to see the large corporates coming back and investing in their people. For a while they were concerned that they should not be seen to be doing anything which could be viewed as frivolous.

It's a shame that words like 'frivolous' and 'jolly' are used around activity based team building. We always say that fun is not a four letter word in business, in fact it's an essential factor in increasing productivity and retention in a business. It would be intolerable if everything had to be serious after all.

Hustle - Learn to card count

Hustle is our latest event in which participants learn how to card count and master other techniques to improve the odds at a casino. They then get into teams to take on our real casino with trained croupiers. This can be set up in an hotel or venue in the UK.

Card counting is not as hard as it might sound. People usually think of Dustin Hoffman's character in Rain Man remembering the order of four decks of cards. Actually the technique is much more straightforward and it's interesting knowledge to get to grips with.

This is an interesting new event, and learning how to play Black Jack and Roulette is good fun.

It's A Knockout

We're looking for an outgoing host for our It's A Knockout events. Stuart Hall was the original host and he had a unique style, laughing his way through many of the games.

Our host needs to have an outgoing personality and the sort of voice that makes people smile. They need to comment on the ongoing event, interview participants and generally give the event tempo and enthusiasm.

Applicants should visit The Team Building Company's website and make contact.

How does team building work?

A picture speaks a thousand words. You can have the cleverest ideas, the most expensive equipment and the most comprehensively thought through itinerary, but what really work on the day are the random moments of fun that the particpants create themselves.

Our role, as the professional team building event organiser, is to create a stage and give the players everything they need to have a fun and enjoyable experience. The rest is up to them.

Successful team building away days create memories of fun shared experiences and that is one of the foundations of team building. It's no different from friendship. Your friendships are built on a series of good shared experiences, often hundreds of them going back years. They make a chain that is hard to break.

Conference Icebreakers

Another use of activities and events is the conference icebreaker. These sessions are usually run at the beginning of a conference to help delegates get to know each other and start the conference in a positive way. When these sessions are run during a conference they are generally 'energisers'.

The drumming event shown on the left is a good example of a professional icebreaker. It's fun and enjoyable and not corny, so people will want to participate.

Chocolate Making

Chocolate making is a relative newcomer to the team building market, and it's very popular. Teams are coached in the art of making fine chocolates and then undertake the challenge of producing a box of luxury confectionery.

A chocolate making event is different and appeals to many rather than being more popular with men. It can also be themed to Christmas, Easter and even Halloween.

Catapults

Catapults, or slingshots, are very popular on team building events, people see them as they approach the field and can't wait to pick them up to relive childhood fun and games.

A professional layout is set up using colourful targets and firing mini paintballs, which give a pleasing 'splat'.

This makes an ideal element in a round robin format where teams rotate around a collection of activities in round robin format on their away day. Other activities might include archery, quad bikes, laser clay shooting and so on.

Team Building for Schools

We've done a number of team building events for schools this year and it's been very successful. The activities are enjoyable and feel novel to the participants and they promote skills that will be very useful when they move on into the workplace, for example teamwork, planning and leadership.

It's something that we'd like to do a lot more of. The current generation of school leavers need all the positive experience they can get and having something like this that they could discuss in interviews is really useful.

Roman Numerals

When I started out over 20 years ago I used to use a conundrum as a time filler, when teams finished early or for extra points. What is this word?

100010001000UN1100AT100N

It's based on roman numerals and in those days I would say that half of team members would know what they were. They might not get it straight away, but they knew the principle behind the puzzle.

Nowadays people don't know and they look at you as if you're insane when you explain it. So, after many years of faithful service I am retiring this team building conundrum.

Team Technology

Team Technology is an incredible resource, full of information about team building theory. They do not deliver team building challenges as such, but their website is full of useful information on any number of team theories and management training material.

Team Building Blog

The blog at fun team building activities profiles some interesting team building activities one by one, including Go Mad In The Country, The Parmesan Job and Segways, the two wheeled ride on experience that is taking the event world by storm.

Falconry and Archery

Falconry and archery are good events for relaxed social team bonding. They can be part of a larger day and provide a moment of more sedate tempo. They are also very interesting. Experienced instructors can go into a bit of the history of archery.

Did you know that it's still written into the law that men of fighting age (over 14 years) must practice longbow for two hours every day under the watchful eye of the local clergy? More disturbingly it's still legal to shoot a Scotsman on sight with a bow and arrow in England (except on Sundays) and in certain cities you can shoot a Welshman within the city walls after midnight. I'm not sure how well your defence would stand up in court!

Archery has affected modern language with phrases such as bolt out of the blue, fast and loose, straight as an arrow, brace yourself and highly strung coming from the sport. Having more than one string to your bow is a sensible precaution for anyone, but particularly an archer.

Falconry also has interesting tales to tell. Stoop so low and one fell swoop are phrases from the sport. A 'fed up' bird will be reluctant to perform and when it's under control in the falconer's hand it's 'under the thumb'.

These activities suit certain types of events. They are enjoyable, fun and very interesting.

Teem Esteem

Team Esteem is about the self esteem of a team of people, or how they feel about the group they are in. It's something that we notice on events; some teams have a really good feel about them and enjoy each others' company and with others it's harder work. Generally most of the teams we meet on our team building days seem to have high Team Esteem. That may be because the days we run are enjoyed and looked forward to, or it may just be that teams who aren't like this don't do things like fun team building.

Whatever it is, there's no doubt that a fun team building event is great for morale and high Team Esteem.