Beyond the cubicle comfort zone: coworkers head out for some offshore sailing...

Out of the Cubicle

Adventure-travel firms take New Economy employees on rugged ‘team-building’ excursions in the great outdoors. There are risks, as well as rewards

By Debra Klein NEWSWEEK

April 16 issue —  Tanna Oldfield’s software company needed to establish rapport between some new hires and the firm’s old guard. She says the company, which is based in Austin, Texas, wanted to do something different—to “step out of the box.” So she asked her employees to step out of a plane.

“If they could conquer fears about sky diving they could overcome work issues.”
— TANNA OLDFIELD

“Companies are using team-building adventures to reinforce corporate cultures, and the high-tech culture is about taking calculated risks. Corporations want to take people outdoors and push them out of their comfort zones.”
— JOHN LOGAN
AdventureAlliance.com

E-Mail & Snail Mail
john@adventurealliance.com
1619 College Street
Georgetown, Texas 78626
Fax 512-864-9588
Phone 512-657-1589

“Companies are using team-building adventures to reinforce corporate cultures, and the high-tech culture is about taking calculated risks,” says John Logan, whose company, AdventureAlliance.com, arranged Oldfield’s trip. “Corporations want to take people outdoors and push them out of their comfort zones.” Despite recent layoffs and cutbacks in the New Economy, Logan and adventure-travel organizers say their team-building business is up from last year, with an increase in bookings for trips that start at $150 a day per person.

Hard times may even persuade some companies to loosen their purse strings. Diane Katz, who has a doctoral degree in conflict resolution, says half the clients who go on her year-old Working Circle team-building exercises in Arizona are there because bosses want to reward them for good work. “People need to let off steam in harder times,” says Katz, who uses horse whisperers—who claim to speak to the animals, a practice popularized by Robert Redford’s movie “The Horse Whisperer”— as facilitators on singing trail rides in the Sonoran desert (the people sing, not the horses).

After an office shake-up, Elizabeth Burg, a project coordinator for Visa U.S.A. in Foster City., Calif., staged a regatta to help employees learn how to work together in a new environment. A corporate training firm, Adventure Associates of El Cerrito, Calif., taught boating basics to Burg and 20 landlubber co-workers and then set them loose on 34-foot sailboats for a race on San Francisco Bay (with a professional skipper aboard each yacht, just in case). “As adults, we don’t usually get to play in areas where we’re not experts,” Burg says. “People cooperated and interacted differently.”
 
After a reorganization last fall, DMR, a New Jersey-based telecommunications consulting firm, flew more than 100 employees of various ages to the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia for a four-and-a-half-day program run by the Outdoor Wilderness Leadership School. “I expected a total disaster,” recalls John Tedesco, a fifty something sales executive.

But after dangling 90 feet above the ground in a rope harness on a granite rock face, Tedesco learned to rely on much younger colleagues. “You’re taking risks you usually don’t deal with, and suddenly your co-workers are helping you,” he recalls. “Nothing has been the same since.” That’s because rugged outdoor challenges can topple rigid office hierarchies and encourage the sort of camaraderie often missing from traditional off-site work events. “You see people in a different light,” says Tedesco. And when the most junior employee turns out to be more wilderness-savvy than the CEO, everyone relaxes—except possibly the CEO.

© 2001 Newsweek, Inc.