The days of the exhausting teambuilding without direction are long gone with those making use of any precious time out of the office to meet specific objectives.
Set within 36 acres of ZSL London Zoo, the ‘I’m a Delegate? Get Me Out Of Here!’ package includes a range of challenges and can be combined with a meeting or dinner. Delegates are informed there is a locked treasure chest hidden in the grounds of the zoo. The map for the chest’s location is contained in a locked safe and the task is to answer clues and complete challenges.
Center Parcs’s new Active8 eight-hour DDR provides a balance of business and pleasure onsite, while providing an opportunity to bond teams, create vision and set targets.
The Mission International offering at Center Parcs involves a teamwork mission around the park, using orienteering, problem solving and initiative skills, both on foot and on bike.
Bluehat Group’s ‘Up at The O2’ involves participants climbing to the top of London’s The O2 via a walkway suspended 52m above ground level. Once at the top participants reach the platform, which affords 360-degree views across London. In addition to climbing the landmark, the ‘Rock the Roof’ package includes a visit to The British Music Experience interactive museum.
As companies strive to achieve more success with fewer resources, Leicester Tigers has developed a series of rugby-related activities to entice companies to use not just the event space for their meetings, but to engage with the whole rugby ethos to enhance the experience of their events.
“Leicester Tigers is all about strength, power, and winning; all features of a good business agenda and meetings experience,” says Sarah Roberts, Head of Events at the club. “Not only do we have the largest venue in the East Midlands, but it also allows organisers to take a holistic approach to getting results from meetings.”
Nearby, the Knights of Middle England are a team of horsemen, and stunt riders who bring the much fabled sport of jousting into the 21st Century, offering tuition at a jousting centre located at Warwick Castle.
Jousting training is at the forefront of this experience, where teams will get a taste of what it is like to dress in medieval costume and light film armour, take up a training lance and battle it out in competitive mini jousting tournaments.
Medieval Corporate Jousting Days have been running for the last eight years and more than 4,500 people have now become ‘initiated’ Knights, including delegates from Microsoft, Barclays, O2 and Avenir Telecom.
For corporates, the arena brings a new dimension, where team skills are challenged.
Heading to the Shropshire countryside, Weston Park offers tailor-made teambuilding activities over its 1,000-acres of parkland. The events venue has a range of experiences on offer for up to 1,500 delegates, from traditional pursuits such as 4×4 off-roading and archery to challenges such as duck herding and breaking a world record.
Weston Park’s GPS Treasure Hunt sets teams off with pre-loaded tablets on a route plotted by GPS. Questions can be based on a topics to make the activity more relevant to the client. Activities include hover-crafting, laser quest or riding dune buggies.
As the birthplace of the industrial revolution, the Ironbridge Gorge World Heritage Site has 10 museums, and can run activities for up to 150 delegates. Based at the Enginuity Science Centre, teams of up to 40 delegates are welcomed as apprentice engineers and are given basic materials to design and make a prototype such as a pneumatic rocket, wind powered boat or motorised buggy, which will be judged at the end.
If being locked in a conference room in the city for eight hours isn’t your idea of getting a fresh perspective, The Vineyard hotel in Newbury can offer something different with four meeting rooms, breakout space and private wine tastings including charcuterie and cheese platters. The Vineyard hotel has a restaurant, 49 bedrooms and a spa. Opened in 1998, it takes its inspiration from the vineyards of California.
Heading into London, the Brigade – The Fire Station Tooley Street, offers wine tasting packages which include eight tasting wines, nibbles and the optional extra of a quiz. Adding food into the equation, delegates can join a private cooking class, which includes a three-hour cooking and breadmaking course.
Based in the new Cactus Kitchens cookery school above the BBC’s Saturday Kitchen studio complex in London, the course of the same name includes three demonstrations from a choice of celebrity chefs. Delegates work at individual stations to cook the same dish and the celebrity chef will spend time interacting with each guest. Once delegates have created their two-course meal, they can sit down and enjoy the fruits of their labour with a glass of wine.
Chillisauce’s Great British Bake-Off packages are one of the teambuilding company’s most popular choices. Under the guidance of professional chefs, each team will learn how to create their own pie, worthy of Mary Berry and her sharp tongue. The objective is for teams to concoct an original pie creation within a limited time scale and budget. They must also create the packaging and design a marketing strategy to sell their new pie sensation to their target market.
If it’s the water that floats your teambuilding boat London Duck Tours offer corporates the exclusive hire of its amphibious vehicles. Since there’s already something a little Bond-esque about launching straight from the road into the river Thames, the James Bond Tour uncovers the secrets of 007s London, including film locations, interesting facts about author, Ian Fleming, and real life spy stories plus there’s an quiz on the river.
For a slightly more interactive experience, there are two teambuilding challenge tours, with pirate treasure hunt and code breaking themes, designed to inspire a spirit of teamwork and boost morale among staff.
“We are always up for a challenge and we have found out that so are our clients,” says the Marketing Manager for London Duck Tours, Kelly Thompson. “The market was looking for more teambuilding experiences and as we are always looking for ways to expand our range of private hire tours, this was a perfect fit. We’ve provided events for companies both large and small including Vodne, BT, Aviva, PWC and QBE.”
The Cheltenham Chase Hotel in The Cotswolds, like all of QHotels’ venues, works closely with its preferred
partner, Team Spirit, to build bespoke packages that challenge and raise morale. In its Motorised Activities package, delegates can make the most of the six acres of flat land beside the hotel with a range of activities including Quad Biking, Hovercrafts, Reverse Steer Buggies and Blind Land Rover driving.
QHotels’ Forest Pines Hotel and Golf Resort is nestled in 190 acres of woodland in North Lincolnshire. The amount of indoor and outdoor space makes it ideal for a variety of teambuilding activities, including Army-style Boot Camps, Segway Driving, Archery, Laser Clay Pigeon Shooting and Crazy Golf.
In partnership with Off Limits Corporate Events, Cambridge-based Robinson College can now offer organisers options to complement their business needs; whether these are for early delegate engagement, to maximise knowledge retention, strengthen interdepartmental relationships or underline objectives.
As part of the package, delegates will experience an active afternoon of challenges, following on from a morning conference. Participants will be divided into groups, where they will work as a unit to complete an assortment of tasks including raft building, rocket launching, human sheep herding and castle storming.
Hamilton Park Racecourse includes 20 acres of grounds, 17 suites within the grandstand and two marquees, which can cater for teambuilding events for up to 500 people. Outdoor activities include archery, clay pigeon shooting and inflatable bungee runs. It partners with Team Challenge and Maxmillion for the experiences.
“The racecourse proved an excellent venue for our Family Man Fun Day,” says Fiona Robertson, the Senior Home School Partnership Worker for Education Resources. “The accommodation is flexible and enabled us to plan a programme that would cater for whatever the Scottish weather threw at us.”
Continuing the sporting theme, hospitality provider Keith Prowse is inviting teams of eight to 10 to learn the art of velodrome cycling in Manchester. Participants will be able to put their skills to the test on the track where their pedal-pushing heroes have gone before, see their trial times on the big screen and get a flavour of medal glory with a photo opportunity on the podium.
After the challenging one-hour taster session, a two-course buffet lunch will be served overlooking the track. Where dates coincide with GB training sessions, some lucky parties will be able to watch the country’s top cyclists in action, too.
For a more musical experience Keith Prowse has recently started to offer ‘For One Night Only’ event packages at Abbey Road. It offers bespoke events at the recording studio where the Beatles, Pink Floyd and Oasis, among many others, have created countless landmark recordings.
One Night Only for 150 guests includes hire of the studios, Champagne and canapé reception, three-course dinner, event management, full live touring production rig including AV and staging, room dressing, bar, table centres and security.
Licence to thrill
Set within the grounds of Blenheim Palace, the birthplace of Winston Churchill, delegates will be taught all the necessary skills to turn them into ‘00’ agents with a licence to kill – or thrill. The activities include spy training challenges, ranging from code breaking and defeating laser alarm systems, to sniper shooting and observation tasks.
The emphasis is on creating a great fun experience for the group in a controlled environment where delegates are encouraged to participate at their own pace and within their own limitations. Each team competes against one another as they take part in their various training zones.
Sticking with this theme, Churchill War Rooms offers unique event spaces to hold training sessions, meetings and dinners. Its Leadership DDR and dinner packages include a talk from the museum director and Churchill expert Phil Reed giving an insight into Sir Winston Churchill as a leader. The events team can also recommend management training consultants specialising in Churchill.
“Just wanted to say a huge thank you for an excellent event,” says a client from EDF Energy. “The Spy Games worked really well and we had a lot of laughs. They loved the cigars and the ration books, too.”
If spies and mind puzzles are what is in order then the HMS Belfast’s Code Cracking Dinner Party includes participants remaining seated while special agents deploy various activities and challenges to their table. Initially a locked briefcase is given to each team and they need to crack the code to open the case. In between courses the tables are invited to take part in further code breaking and safe cracking and after dessert a representative, or possibly the whole table, are invited to the stage to take part in the head to head pistol draw competition.
Arctic Quest is a husky ride company in the UK which offers packages to suit all levels, including learning how to run the dogs or discovering the art of teamwork from the masters of working together. The programme can be run at any location or teams can venture into the wilderness at Croft Farm, Tewkesbury, where they can enjoy a taste of the arctic, which includes an authentic tipi and herder’s hut.
As well as learning how to mush the day can offer bushcraft activities and food options, such as trout gutting and cooking over the campfire or a traditional cheese and meat fondue.
UK-based Wildgoose Treasure Hunts experienced a 68 per cent growth in its business in 2012, with prospects for 2013 already looking to exceed last year’s success. Wildgoose has taken the treasure hunt concept and added technology to create a GPS ‘tablet’ Challenge or a self-run ‘Takeaway’ range of games that can be played in either urban or rural settings.
Each team will receive a tablet PC pre-loaded with their unique event and packed with a range of features that will engage and motivate teams, such as interactive maps, instant feedback and live scoreboards, and a variety of great clues, questions and trivia that will test the teams, get them working together, and having fun.
Delivered by course leaders of Maori descent, the Maori Haka teambuild Incentive package at Twickenham Stadium is designed to teach delegates to release inhibitions and partake in the ancestral dance of the Maori people indigenous to New Zealand and made famous around the globe by pre-match permances of the national rugby team.
Fresh Tracks teambuilding company suggests the Chocolate Challenge for companies wanting to simulate business processes in a light-hearted and highly creative environment, requiring co-operation, mental and artistic skills. Participants are divided into teams of five to undertake various challenges. These include designing and producing an original box of chocolates from raw materials.
Fresh Tracks also suggests the Team Machine, which is a high energy, large scale team exercise requiring participants to co-operate with other teams to achieve a common goal. It demonstrates the hidden value of co-operation and the danger of unnecessary rivalry between teams that serve the same organisation. Each team is given a set of tools and building materials to create their own working mechanism. The plans are then muddled requiring sharing of data before building can commence. The group then set to work on their devices such as a helterskelter.
Wellcome Trust Conference Centre in Hinxton has unveiled plans to target the corporate teambuilding market in partnership with off-road activity park, Wildtracks.
The Cambridge location offers space for outdoor corporate team building activities such as group challenges, ranging from blinld 4×4 off-road driving to archery.
Set in over 100 acres of parkland on the banks of the River Cam, the conference centre can accommodate many Wildtracks activities onsite and both indoors and outdoors.
Maybe now is the time to embark on a little team motivation ensuring your teams are refreshed and ready to compete effectively.
This was first published in the September issue of CN. Any comments? E-mail conferencenews@mashmedia.net
