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All-star teams

Team building can forge employees into a more cohesive, productive – and sometimes crazier – team
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Earls restaurant staffers take part in the company’s annual team-building event | Earls Restaurants 

With "wild goose chases,” Clue-style murder-mystery games and escape rooms forming part of the zany mix, corporate team-building activities sound like child’s play, but take a look at a company like Canadian Outback Adventures & Events and you will discover it is big business. 

The North Vancouver-based company, one of the largest of its kind in North America, has cooked up all manner of craziness for the Microsoft, Disney and Coca-Cola companies of the world. 

It has created fun and games and unloaded barrels of laughter from Haida Gwaii to a beach in Mexico to resorts in Costa Rica and beyond. By 2025, it aims to have 10 million employees taking part in its team-building activities. 

It has facilitators and event co-ordinators scattered throughout North America and 14 “event-solution experts” who spend their entire day talking to companies to help them find a good fit for their needs, says Philip Keen, the company’s corporate development director. 

One of the latest crazes is games using smartphone apps. They are cost-effective because clients can run them themselves. 

“It’s kind of like team building in a box,” says Keen, adding participants download an app, sign in and then complete a series of challenges, supplying photos and videos along the way. One of the most popular activities on offer by the company is a smartphone scavenger hunt called the “wild goose chase.” 

This line of work might sound like a lark, but before bringing an activity on stream, Canadian Outback staff put it through the wringer. 

That’s because corporate teams are exceptionally competitive, says Keen. “Sometimes people will forget that they are actually at work and they will do anything they can to break the rules.”

Sink or swim: teams see if their creations can float in a cardboard-boat-building challenge | Canadian Outback Adventures & Events

Carolyn Weston, who is on the marketing team for the Earls restaurant chain, says the company throws a team-building event every year, typically in Whistler.

Employees in marketing, finance, design, information technology, operations and culinary divisions are thrown together on teams for some healthy competition.

Sometimes, the crazier, the better. 

In one, they swapped outfits with a stranger. “That certainly got interesting,” says Weston.

In another, participants had to re-enact the famous water fountain scene in the television show Friends in which everyone dances in a water fountain. “Everyone just got wet, but it was fun.”

One year, 75 Earls employees took part in a team-building wild goose chase. Another year, they took part in an escape room, a trivia day and group yoga in Whistler. It changes all the time. 

“I think they are vital,” Weston says of these events. “They bring everyone together.”

Venues like Grouse Mountain offer team-building packages that capitalize on the stunning location.

For Dan Grima, manager of camps and corporate adventure training on Grouse, the job rewards are simple: “I just absolutely love giving adults the opportunity to get out and play.”

Activities range from high-octane sprints around the mountain to something more serene, like a welcome by a Squamish elder followed by a painting session in a carved cedar longhouse. 

In the winter, office escapees are fired up with activities like showshoe tours ending with fondues and snow-cave-building competitions. 

Grima says Grouse offers customized events where a company might start with mountaintop yoga and finish with an axe throw in the lumberjack show area. 

The most popular activity is the alpine adventure in which teams go through a series of stations where they face activities with curious names like “washed-out bridge” and “the handcuff challenge.” All seem to involve getting out of some predicament. 

The beauty of this adventure, says Grima, is each station tests a different set of skills, so different individuals tend to shine at each one. 

Employees see who can fly their airplane the farthest as part of the Eagle Glider Challenge | Canadian Outback Adventures & Events

Taking employees out of their comfort zones can lead to surprising results.

One stands out for Grima. A team was required to compose a song or poem to share with others. One of the more reticent in the group flipped her cap on backwards, took centre stage and gave a dynamo, almost rap-like performance. Her peers were in awe. Who knew?

Keen of Canadian Outback is the first to admit that employees aren’t always happy about the prospect of going out on these bonding exercises. There can be an element of dread.

“But when they finish, there is definitely a high because people are amazed at how much they got into it.”