Seagate is a software company that, ever year, sends 200 of its employees to New Zealand on a team building experience. During this experience the team undergoes physical, mental, and quite possibly emotional tests. For five days the 200 employees are forced to work together in order to accomplish goals and for high-performance teams, accomplishing tough goals is the order of the day.
There is a certain value in teaching people about themselves. EcoGate's challenges are designed to force people to look inward as well as form bonds with one another and I think that last item is the most important. Forming bonds is something that transcends loyalty to company. CEO Bill Watkins learned from his Army days that people will not sacrifice for some vague idea like patriotism and or "Army" and in my own experience with the military I have found that to be true. I typically did what I did because the guy or girl to the left or right of me was doing it too. I didn't want to let the team down; I could have cared less about what happened to the Air Force as a whole. I still feel this way, I'm loyal to the organization I work for only to a point. In the end, its the team that I work with that motivates me to go to work every day.
Forming bonds with co-workers also adds to an informal information network that can be tapped when encountering difficult situations. So in that sense, these retreats also bring value. Value is something more than a dollar amount though I wonder if the stockholders feel the same way. It is personal opinion but I tend to think that if less emphasis was placed on the stockholder and more on the stakeholder there would be less of the issues we see companies facing.
High-performance teams tend to be goal focused and learning how to accomplish a difficult goal without tearing into one another is of huge value. While some tension in attaining a difficult goal is unavoidable knowing one's self can make that tension easier to handle. That being said, having fun in New Zealand is far different than meeting a goal on a factory floor or while designing new hard drives. One does not always translate to the other so I am skeptical as to how much a high-performance team really gains from this sort of thing. For that matter, I shy away from the term high-performance as that really just seems to be a label that teams give themselves in order to sound better. Every team is a high-performance team if it is accomplishing its goals. A team of janitors that does an excellent job is no less high performing than a team of engineers designing a hard drive. We use the term high performance more as a way to set apart the end result of the team's efforts from lesser important goals. To be sure a full trash can isn't going to bankrupt a company but that doesn't mean that janitors should not be encouraged to take pride in their contributions and their efforts.
Soapbox aside, I am not sold on the idea that these retreats add to the cohesion of teams away from the retreat themselves. What they can do is provide better tools for people to use provided they have the insight to find them within themselves. A skilled practitioner can help people find those parts of themselves as insight isn't gained without feedback.
My organization could do with many things but I don't think they are to the point where they've mastered the basics of allowing a team to be a team. In my unit we are separated from the hospital geographically and we've held our own team building activities, usually in a bar as we aren't being funded for trips to New Zealand. Our team functions well but I do think that is because we allowed to do our own thing just so long as our goals are being met. In that regard senior leadership is comfortable leaving us to ourselves. However, some of that is because we are far enough away we can ignore some of is directed at everyone else.
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