Why So Complicated? Less is More with Employee Entertainment Activities

I’ve worked with many companies and corporate groups over the years, with the goal of developing customized employee entertainment in NYC and the surrounding areas. I don’t have to tell you how hard New Yorkers are working every day – especially since the economy tanked in 2009, and many people are doing twice as much work for little or no additional compensation. As a result, when it comes to NYC team building activities, the instinct of smart HR managers, recruiters, summer associate coordinators and other staffing professionals is to try and give staff the absolute blowout experience.

While the intent here is solid, in my experience less is actually more when creating events designed to boost employee morale and teamwork. Take scavenger hunts, for example. Before starting a professional trivia company, I had the incredible experience of creating adult scavenger hunts in NYC, primarily for corporate groups. As a naturally curious person with a knack for writing and an intense drive to create fun experiences for people, this was the perfect job; I would literally spend hours, days and even weeks creating customized scavenger hunts for individual companies, and loved every second of it. But was this hyper-detailed production really providing any additional value to our clients?

You see, for people doing a scavenger hunt (or trivia, or obstacle course, or competitive boat race, or cooking class or any other fun group activity) the experience itself is relatively short-lived, typically no more than an hour or two. Does the activity have to be so complex that the experience is muddled by the details? With scavenger hunts, I would become fixated on ensuring that the group got as much out of the event as possible: a fun and memorable experience, rolled into a social activity, with a hearty dose of culture and history education to boot. But you know what? People didn’t care about that so much as they did about winning, having fun memories, and often partying well into the night afterwards.

That’s not to say I don’t think detailed effort should go into trivia team building events – far from it. However, from the standpoint of creating experiences which will be fun and memorable for employees while simultaneously boosting morale, I think that overthinking the activity’s format and content is a waste of time. Keep things simple: events should be incredibly fun, completely different from the day-to-day office routine, incorporating customization to make them more memorable and leaving everyone feeling better about themselves, their colleagues and their work environment.

What do you think? Are you in charge of designing or commissioning staff entertainment activities for your company? What is your opinion on complexity vs. simplicity when assigning value to employee entertainment events?