Corporate bollocks and team-building.

To open, I'd like to offer this rant that has been languishing on my hard drive for a while. To set the scene: at the time, I was working a temp job for... well, the company name doesn't matter. At this point, I was suffering from a really bad dose of the flu, and should really have been home in bed. I was encouraged to come in, as this afternoon of team-building would be really important. Yeah, right. Anyway, I struggled in, nostrils full of snot, head full of ache. I wish I hadn't...

One heart, one soul, yeah! One Vision!
We began with a talk by David. I have to this day no idea what he did, as the programme for the day’s activities neglected to include job titles. By his performance, I think David may have been a random shy man picked off the street to deliver a presentation for someone who couldn’t make it. He was all but inaudible to those of us sitting four rows back. This was unfortunate, as he was supposed to be imparting his "vision" to us. All I could make out was that our department was like a rolling pin. I have no idea why. I would have said our department was more like an office processing invoices, but I’d only been there a few weeks. The top management people in the department saw it as a rolling pin. Eventually, I think after about two years or half an hour (Einstein was so right with that relativity thing), David stopped talking. Or at least, he sat down. He may have continued talking, but given his volume level, I couldn’t say for certain if he had stopped talking.

At this point, I should say that this might be the reason the rest of the afternoon seemed nonsensical. Throughout the day, people would refer to David’s vision. As I have no idea what this vision is, it could explain why the afternoon seemed to be bollocks. But on with the show.

Silence is golden
After David’s gripping explanation of his vision, it was felt a warm-up exercise was required. Fearing fifteen minutes of aerobics, I shed my jacket with a heavy heart and a runny nose (flu, remember?). Luckily (for me, not the dimwits I was stuck with), it was to be more of a mental warm-up. Each group of about ten people had to put themselves in order of birth date (day and month only, not year). Simple, you may think. But we had to do this without speaking or writing. Hmm, how to achieve this pointless exercise?

Standard group politics were on my side. Before I was required to expend any thought on this, the obligatory loud-mouthed, empty-headed lad stepped forward to take charge. After some frankly appalling miming, counting and cheating, we were in order. The wrong order, as we found out when announcing our birth dates. Oh well, it’s the effort that counts. Strangely, another team complained we had cheated. Whilst this was accurate, I can’t see what the problem was, given we made a total Horlicks of it, thus embarassing ourselves far more than simple failure would have.

What did we learn from this? Well the summary, from manager Jo, was that we had trouble communicating without speech or writing. She is the great detective of Baker Street reborn in the form of a management prat. Who would have thought people might have trouble communicating without spoken or written words? I must say, I was shocked by this revelation.

Our five year mission
Next, Jo wanted us to devise a mission statement. Why, I don’t know. I should have thought that if you need a statement to tell people what you do, it would suggest you’re not doing anything worthwhile. No one looks at a street sweeper and asks what his mission statement is. We know he’s there to clean the street. But we needed a mission statement. So we were divided into small groups of four or five and told to come up with something.

Unfortunately, my group consisted of at least two temps. As we have no idea what the department does, we could make no real contribution. I think our official job description was "Turn up and do anything anyone tells you to." I did ask what we did, and was told this was a good question. I know, that’s why I asked it. The answer was not forthcoming.

From what I gathered, the department checks invoices for errors. My mission statement, therefore, would be along the lines of "To make sure the bastards aren’t screwing us." I kept this to myself.

Fortunately, no one else seemed to come up with a mission statement, either. Instead, Jo settled for collecting words that could be used in a mission statement. I refrained from shouting out suggestions such as "the," "and," and "horseshit." Instead, we collected the usual suspects of quality, excellence, precision, and somewhat bizarrely, equality. I’m not quite sure what this will relate to. Perhaps there is fear our department will start discriminating against foreign sounding companies. However, Jo promised to revisit the mission statement at the next team briefing in a week’s time. I can't quite recall if she did or not, as I tended to zone out during those meetings.

Just Gimme the Prize
Onto the meat of the afternoon. And a rancid, maggot-infested meat it was. Split into three teams, we were to run sweet distribution companies. The winner would be the company that showed the greatest profit at the end. We had ten orders to fill, more might arrive late, for which we could add charges. We had to order the sweets from the manufacturer, package them and send them out with a correctly filled out VAT invoice. The three teams came up with three approaches:
Team 1: Carefully analyse the situation, work out exactly what has to be done, and then assign people tasks.
Team 2: Similar to Team 1, but with a little more initial action.
Team 3: Allow the loudest member of the group to throw tasks at anyone who isn’t doing something. I was in Team 3.

Of course, management professionals will realise that Team 3 will descend into chaos. They did. About four people were constantly measuring, cutting, ordering and calculating, whilst the others sat about until someone asked them to do something. I made sarcastic comments. We stole another teams package from the "delivery depot" we all shared, and spent some of our profits on sweets for ourselves. We were, of course, doomed to failure, but didn’t care. We finished twenty minutes before anyone else, and arsed about in the unexpected interval. Then, with everyone else finished, we had another fifteen-minute break for coffee, tea, pastry and nicotine poisoning. Then it was straight back into the action.

Analysis, Mr Spock
The results of the contest weren’t in yet, so we had to explain what we had learned without knowing what had worked. This seemed flawed to me. Surely you need to know which approach worked before you start drawing lessons from the exercise? Again, I kept this to myself.

So everyone gave out the usual pap about needing teamwork, communication, planning, yadda yadda yadda. I allowed myself to doze at this point, as I’ve attended team-building sessions before (the ability to sleep with my eyes open is perhaps my most useful business skill). When I awoke, it was to find that the results of the competition were ready. Team 2 were announced as the winners. Then someone else pointed out they weren’t. The guy (no idea who, some kinda computer geek) checked again and realised Team 3 were the true victors. How, I have no idea. We graciously accepted our £5 WH Smith vouchers, as everyone else wondered how the hell this had happened. The lessons learnt from this were:
*Cheats prosper
*Crime pays
*Never plan
*Communication is overrated

I’m not quite sure what we were supposed to learn from this. I still can’t believe we weren’t disqualified over the whole cheating/theft issue. I suppose this is acceptable business practise.
We also discovered that one team had made quite a bad mistake on their invoices. They had neglected to mark up their prices. So they were charging the same price to their customers as they were paying to their supplier, effectively making no profit. Now, what makes this worse is that the amount they should have been charging was on the pre-printed invoice form filled in with each order. So this team, working in a department that processes invoices, didn’t or couldn’t read a very basic invoice form. They were unable to read this line:

Red sweets x6 @ £2 each =

And come up with the answer "12." I’d have taken this as identifying the weak links in the company and fired them on the spot. Instead, this was a source of humour. Go figure.

And now, the end is near
The close of the day was… dull. I listened to about an hour on what the department had done in the last year, and what it would do in the next year. As I wasn’t there last year and had no intention of remaining for the next year, I safely slept through this. There was also a brief quiz on acronyms commonly used in the department. Again, my three weeks with the company had not really given me the ability to help on this.

And so the day ended. I had hoped at the beginning of this to figure out what I could take away from the experience. But I’ve got nothing. As is usual with this kind of corporate shite, no one seems to gain from it. On the plus side, the management seemed to feel it had gone well. So I guess at least someone was happy. Personally, I think I would have gained more from having the afternoon off.

There endeth the rant. A few final notes. Names have been changed to protect the guilty. I left the job by mutual agreement a few weeks later. It was the second-worst job I've ever had. Moral of the story? Just let people get on with their jobs, and they'll be happier.