Corporate Away Days, Your Idea of Heaven or Hell?

Are corporate away days your idea of heaven or hell? Do you see any value in them, or do you think it all a waste of time? There's no standard answer and it really depends on your own personal experience as to what you may think.

However, these away days can be highly beneficial for all concerned, but they have to be properly planned, structured and managed for any kind of success to become apparent.

The main reason why anyone will see the away day as a waste of time is usually because the whole thing hasn't been thought through. A treasure hunt, or some similar activity, is arranged. The team are given the clues and they then set off to find the hidden treasure. If that's all there is to it, then maybe you are justified in thinking they are closer to hell than heaven.

Corporate away days can achieve a lot. They can improve communications within the team significantly. They can reveal the thinking and working patterns of individuals that in turn will reveal a team member's preferred learning style. They can unravel the working dynamics within a team, and much more besides.

It has been noted in studies that workers from a company tend to relax a lot more than usual on team building away days. This creates a situation that never exists in the work place. It allows the ordinary lowly worker to open up and display useful traits that may have been hidden all along. It lets the managers drop their guard a little and become "one of the boys," so to speak, allowing them to show their human face. All this can have a surprising end result.

Because the team is now working at a level they have never experienced in the actual work place, the interaction between team members changes dramatically. Each team member gets the unique chance to learn how the others think and how they react to various things. The team bonds much closer as a result.

When everyone is back at the work place, everyone goes back to playing the expected roles that everyone held before the away day. However, everyone consciously or even subconsciously remembers what they learned. They have discovered the real way to interact with each other and they start to apply this knowledge.

The results can be quite startling. The team becomes much more cohesive. Team members can often find themselves becoming more engaged in their work. They understand their role within the team better, and they feel part of the greater whole - part of the team and its shared objectives, in fact.

The end result is greater team commitment and greater company profits too. Everyone wins. That makes the corporate away days something closer to the ideal of heaven. Everyone looks forwards to the next one, knowing they will personally benefit. The company also knows that it is money well spent, and not just another tax break.

Are corporate away days your idea of heaven or hell? They should be the former, and if they are not, blame those in charge who are organising the event.