Last month at the CHMSE Luncheon, I was fortunate to chat with Andrew Long. Scavengerhuntanywhere.com - Andrew Long’s company - specializes in corporate events that are designed to enhance teamwork and decision-making skills via fun and challenging activities. I thought it would be a perfect opportunity to pick his creative brain on what was hot and new in the world of team building. Doing some “good” is a recurring theme in our blog postings and what Andrew has to say went along with many of our own values.
DZ: What is the latest trend in team building and engaging a group of co-workers?
AL: Recently, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has emerged and is affecting events, especially corporate events. CSR manifests itself in a number of ways within events and has also had an impact on team building activities.
DZ: I’ve been pushing this idea to clients for a while – tell me why it is taking off now:
AL: CSR is a deliberate effort by a company to have a positive impact on the community, the environment, consumers, employees and other stakeholders. Companies are increasingly seeking to incorporate CSR into their events because it is another way for the company to demonstrate its CSR endeavors.
DZ: That is the tricky part, isn’t it? Doing “GOOD” is often challenging – tell me how you incorporated CSR into some of your programs:
AL: We toyed with the “build-a-bike” idea in which participants assemble bicycles for charity, but the problem we ran into was how to do that in locations around North America as well as how to make it a true team activity. We also had the idea that people could do community projects. We’d contact organizations in the local market and try to find someone who needed a large group of people for an afternoon. It was actually harder to come up with projects of this nature than we expected.
Then we landed on the idea of Pay It Forward. Participants are split into teams, given a quantity of money, and the mandate is to go out for several hours and “do good” in the local community. We look for the creativity of their ideas, the number of people they’ve potentially impacted and the insights they can generate. For example, one group bought flowers, gave them to strangers and asked them to “Flower it Forward”!
DZ: And your famous Scavenger Hunts – were you able to combine some of the CSR principles into those?
AL: Yes, we knew that our next step really needed to be how to incorporate CSR into our corporate scavenger hunts. We created a “Pay It Forward Add-On” aspect to our scavenger hunts. It is a mini-version of our full Pay It Forward activity and participants like it because it adds a unique element to our classic scavenger hunt offering.
For more about Corporate Social Responsibility, check out:
You can reach Andrew by connecting via his websites:
Hope my “Free Idea” makes your Friday!
To learn more, please visit www.andlogistix.com
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