April 13, 2000 - Group Bonding Offsite

With the completion of Twister and the launch of the combined web site, the company had an offsite on April 13, 2000. It was one of those events "facilitated" by "facilitators" and involved several activities designed to promote communication within the company. Employees were seated around several large tables. At each table were several iMacs, networked together, running some custom "facilitation" program. The facilitators (let's just drop the quotes), asked the employees several questions. Below are the responses.

As you can see, not all was well in happy startup land. Merging two formerly competitive companies is very hard. Mix in past mistakes by previous management and stir until unrest. One thing to note is that all of these complaints were well known to management before the offsite. The event just provided a fun and efficient way to spread unrest throughout the entire company.

One other very important thing to note is, intermixed with the disgruntlement, is lots of great humor.

And now, for your enjoyment and possible future reference, are Mark's Top 3 Things Not To Do At An Offsite:
  1. Separate upper-management from the rest of the employees by having them on stage
  2. Not allocate enough time for management to answer tough questions asked by employees
  3. Get into the position where there is this level of unrest in the company in the first place