Thursday, April 19, 2007

The dangers of team building

At work we are divided into teams of people, each headed by a single manager. Our site has been big into building the employee experience and one of the ways they are trying to do that is by encouraging games within teams. Currently my team is playing a game called 'Secret Agent'. The idea is that each agent will answer four personal questions and then everyone else will try and guess which agent it is from their answers. The questions are things like 'What's your middle name, favorite ice cream, dream vacation', that type of thing. Every day features a new agent and whoever gets the most right wins a gift certificate. Sounds simple, no?
Tuesday was the first day. We quickly realized that not everyone is there all five days a week as some of us work four ten hour days. Spirited arguments about how to handle that broke out. Some agents started emailing people questions about their middle names and so forth. Crafty agents eithered lied or refused to answer. After much discussion, an email was sent out asking people not to lie to each other. The crafty ones loudly declared that they just aren't going to answer then.
To recap, in response to our team building efforts we are now:
  • Fighting
  • Lying
  • Not talking to each other
Most people are taking this good naturedly but this isn't quite how it looked on the drawing board.

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