NYC Group Bonding Ideas

My path to becoming a corporate events professional specializing in trivia team building activities in New York City was anything but straight. People who know me well know this, and I’ve written about it many times here on my blog over the years. I never had any focus or direction growing up, throughout college, and for about ten years after. I could never really answer that seemingly basic question: “what do you want to do when you grow up?”

It’s not that I didn’t have interests or hobbies, or things I was good at; I always played the saxophone, enjoyed making people laugh, was a halfway decent writer, and had a knack for creating fun experiences for others to enjoy. But I never had one central drive, an instinct saying, “Someday, you’re going to be X.” I admit it put me at a real disadvantage, and caused me to have a late start in my professional development. Instead of prepping for the real world and starting a career right out of school, I was more of a dreamer, a guy who lazed in the romantic notion of, “oh, I don’t know what I want to do, I’m sure it’ll all fall into place.”

Well, let me be the first to tell you: it did NOT fall into place.

My first job out of college was a complete disaster (read about it here). Even though I was fortunate enough to have attended and graduated from an elite school, I had basically no professional work experience outside of summer jobs as a camp counselor and shoe salesman (yes, I sold shoes one summer in college. Did you know the name of that thing they use to size up your foot is known as a Brannock Device? Trivia! But I digress). As such, I was lucky to find a job at all; it basically involved nothing more than sitting in a cubicle all day, entering data into spreadsheets while wearing a tie.

In fact, that’s pretty much what the entire office was doing. To say it was a staid, sterile environment is putting it mildly. It was DULL. It was TEDIOUS. It was really no fun at all. Here I was, a 22-year-old guy, hearing stories from my other recently-graduated friends about how awesome their workplaces were, with their foosball tables and video games and hyper-relaxed dress codes and raucous happy hours and music pumping through the office while Nerf footballs and aerobies (remember those?) flew overhead. Not where I was. It was like working in a well-lip dungeon, florescent lights flickering overhead, with other prisoners chained to their desks. I think the movie “Office Space” came out right around that time, and believe me, it hit home.

Despite this, I tried to socialize with my colleagues. It didn’t really work. Whereas I was miserable in my environment and with the work, the other folks – even the younger ones – seemed perfectly content. They were more introverted, more analytical (click here for another useful article on team bonding for introverted groups). I got the distinct feeling that many of them weren’t seeking the Great Adventure so much as the safe ride; they didn’t necessarily need action and excitement or socialization, but rather something they didn’t mind doing from 9 to 5, then going home to enjoy their nights and weekends away from the office. I even went so far as to throw a happy hour party at my place one Friday evening. I sent an Email blast around to all the young folks in the office a few weeks in advance – I think just one guy showed up. It was terrible.

Nobody wanted to get to know one another.

Fast forward about five years, and I was in another job, this one at a major Manhattan PR firm. My first day there, they escorted me to my office. My OFFICE! You have to understand, I wasn’t a manager, or even a senior underling; I was a junior underling. And yet, here I was being shown my own private office, with a door and everything – it even had my name on it! I felt mighty important, and my ego was justly inflated – that is, until I realized that EVERYONE had their own office, not just me.

You know what a workplace is like when EVERYONE has an office? It’s quiet – deathly quiet. PR is a fast-paced industry, and it’s not uncommon to get 300+ Emails a day: news alerts, client Emails, reporter info requests, etc. But you know who you get the most Emails from? Your colleagues. And I’m not talking about your colleagues from other offices around the country and globe, I’m talking about your colleagues who work with you in your office – even across the hall or in the workstation next door! Maybe things have changed in the time I worked in that industry, but back then, people didn’t call from one side of the office to the other, they didn’t take stroll from their station to yours – they Emailed.

So, yeah – quiet. And incredibly isolating as well – it wasn’t at all uncommon to arrive at my desk at 8am, and hardly see, speak to or even hear another human being until I punched out. I moved on from that job after about a year, but I never really felt like I connected with any of my colleagues, or formed lasting friendships which could carry over to other jobs or roles. I wonder why.

All this leads me to the question I posed at the beginning of this post: does it even matter if people working together ever get to know one another? You could argue that cultural norms are simply different from one industry to another, one company to another, one team to another. From a managerial perspective, I suppose if the bottom line is being met and customers and shareholders are happy, than who cares whether your people become friends, or interact at all outside of work – or at work, for that matter.

But any way you slice it, humans are social animals. Doesn’t it stand to reason that people who socialize, who interact, who TALK to one another, will work better together? That they form bonds of trust and empathy, and learn from one another? Can anyone seriously say that an environment such as the ones I’ve described above, which limit communication and collaboration, are optimal? I always found it so ironic that I worked in PR, the communications field, and yet never communicated with my colleagues. To me, that’s just plain weird.

In my opinion, having planned and produced hundreds of team building exercises for New York offices, I feel that teams, departments, and companies which foster a more open, collaborative and social environment are the ones that thrive. It’s these offices where morale is higher, where retention is better, where recruiting top talent is easier, and where people just enjoy working more. And when people enjoy where they work, they’ll want to do better work – and stick around, too. So here’s my advice: do whatever you can to foster socialization among your employees, to let them forge bonds with one another and develop relationships. I bet you’ll soon see a happier, less stressed workplace, with improved efficiencies, increased productivity, and higher quality output. They’ll be happier in the end – and so will you!

Follow this link to learn more about how TrivWorks develops interactive corporate group bonding programs designed to boost communication, collaboration and teamwork.