Looking for ways to improve the bottom line? Try selling the boss on this idea: take all the people in the office on a three-day trip. Fly them to an exotic locale so they can learn kayaking--at his expense.
It's tough to imagine the CEO of a lean, mean operation falling for that one five years ago. It's tougher still to imagine that it would work, as a lot of CEOs apparently now do. Major businesses like Pfizer, American Express and Southwest Airlines, along with much smaller outfits, are laying out more than $55.3 billion annually--almost twice what they spent in the mid-1980s--on training. And the hottest new training device is the offsite, a company- or department-wide session away from the office. But today's offsite isn't a few meetings in a windowless hotel banquet room followed by a round of golf and cocktails. More likely it's built around a truly exotic challenge, like white-water rafting, tightrope walking, adventure racing, even cooking. The common denominator: it's a group task unrelated to work.
It's tempting to write off this trend as a fad born of an economy that doesn't know when to quit, abetted by companies with more money than they know how to spend. But unusual offsites may be tapping into an economic shift that is more lasting than the bull market--the need for "soft" (interpersonal) skills in a quick-moving, unstructured service economy in which advantages are momentary and a slight shift in the business model can mean either big bucks or doom. "Because of all the complexity and chaos that we face in this era, we have to look for nonlinear ways to learn," says Laurie Bassi, vice president of research at the American Society for Training and Development (A.S.T.D.), a not-for-profit professional society. "What we are seeing is a lot of experimenting with other ways of enhancing productivity."
U.S. executives are more concerned than ever with a skills gap they believe could be crimping their companies' sales as much as 33%, a recent poll showed. But the skills that executives say they want most don't involve hard knowledge, like the ability to program in C++ or fluency in Japanese. The top personnel premiums they seek are attributes that support mental and social flexibility. They want listening skills, interpersonal finesse and problem-solving ability, and they're spending more to get it.
In pursuit of those ambitious objectives, however, not every offsite is worth a company's time and money. It's useless "to put employees out in some wilderness area and say, 'Well, no one got eaten by a bear,'" says Tom Zimmerer, director of the Breech School of Business Administration at Drury College in Springfield, Mo. The formula for a good offsite is much more complicated and practical than that. Consider the following examples:
One steamy afternoon in June, beneath a ring of pine trees near Atlanta's Stone Mountain, 10 managers from Andersen Consulting are on a mission. The objective: to place a gallon-size tin can onto a foot-square wooden platform in the center of a roped-off circle about 30 ft. in diameter. The catch: the team has to do it from outside the circle, using only ropes attached to the can. The members of the group with physical control over the ropes are blindfolded, and have no idea where they are or what they're supposed to be doing. The team has 20 minutes.