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.