Putting a sedentary staff through special forces training isn’t a great way to build team spirit, says Billy MacInnes
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Back in 1977, The Stranglers had a big hit with a song called Peaches, featuring a young man letching over girls sunbathing on the beach. One of the lines goes “Oh, shit, there goes the charabanc”. Maybe it was because they were too caught up in the rest of the song but not many people buying or singing along to Peaches seemed much interested in asking what a ‘charabanc’ was.
Besides, who would know? Well, if they’d stopped to ask their grandparents, they may well have got the answer they were seeking. A charabanc was, as its name suggests, a French invention, a mobile open top vehicle with benches for people to sit on. It was often used to take employees on work outings to the seaside. Dylan Thomas features a charabanc in his short story, The Outing. The motorised version was eventually replaced by buses but it’s likely that older people still referred to them as charabancs for a while and that’s probably how Hugh Cornwall learned of it (either that or charabanc was, for a brief moment in the 70s, cool slang for a bus).
Anyway, back in the 1940s and 1950s in the UK when people worked in factories, they would all pile on board charabancs for a day’s trip to the seaside. Things are different today. Most people work in offices but bizarrely, when work organises an outing or team building exercise, it’s never anything as sedate or relaxing as a day at the beach. If anything, the trips, often called ‘corporate retreats’, tend to be more physically demanding for employees the less active their actual jobs are.
Operation Epic Failure
Technology companies are particularly susceptible to this approach which brings us to the cautionary tale of US software and media streaming company Plex and its $500,000 corporate retreat in Honduras. While we’re on the subject, who thought ‘corporate retreat’ was a good term for these types of company excursions? Looked at from a military perspective, they sound like admissions of defeat.
Of course, that’s not what they’re supposed to signify as they’re primarily aimed at encouraging team building, boosting morale, and providing some rest and relaxation away from work. Funnily enough, the first result on the Ecosia search engine for corporate retreat is a horror-thriller, which is not that far away in spirit from Plex’s experience at Plexcon.
According to a report in the Daily Beast, things started to go wrong before they even arrived with news that the manager and chef of the resort had resigned. Then Plex’s CEO, who had arrived a day early to be in-situ to greet the 120 workers got E.coli and was confined to his bed, losing 8-10 pounds during his ordeal.
Meanwhile, everyone else got on with it under the direction of chief product officer and co-founder Scott Olechowski. The team-building exercises, being run by an ex-Navy SEAL (why?), soon came crashing up against the harsh reality that, as Olechowski tactfully admitted, “this is not a super fit group in general”. They relocated to the golf course for “guerilla warfare” exercises. Ordered to hit the ground, senior product manager Greta Schlender dropped and landed directly on a hill of fire ants. “I was wearing shorts, OK? I jumped up, and I had hives and bumps from the bites. It was horrifying, and it was so, so itchy,” she recalls. “The medical area didn’t have any regular antihistamine. So they’re like, ‘Oh, we can shoot some into your butt cheek.’ That was a first for me.”
Back at the hotel, they endured uncooked meat for dinner. One staff member woke up to find a porcupine in his shower. Sean Hoff, founder of Moniker Partners, the independent retreat agency that planned the trip, was so busy trying to control the damage that he started having heart palpitations and needed to be hooked up to an ECG machine.
A day trip to a nearby island, intended to provide some succour to the participants, ended with several of them stranded there because the planes failed to return to pick them up.
But before we leave this story, it’s probably worth mentioning the old maxim about history repeating itself because, in this case, anyone clicking here to Plexcon highlighted in the Daily Beast article will be amused to find the video was uploaded in February 2018. Either this is a story about an 8-year-old event or there was a repeat of the event this year and, as the maxim states, it was repeated as ‘farce’.
I can’t help feeling there’s some kind of metaphor here for the world we live and work in today. In retrospect, maybe a day trip to the seaside on a charabanc isn’t so bad after all.