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Sweat pouring down their faces, teeth gritting, the team members urge their blindfolded comrades to "move a hair to the left, take in a little." As they struggle, workers who initially deferred to more senior or aggressive colleagues start to come forward with ideas on how to swing the can onto the little deck. Finally, success! Then, after the team completes the assignment, parallels to the real world begin to emerge. "I work for a woman in London I've never met," says a young female systems analyst. Now the notion of working "blind," not personally knowing colleagues who are based on a different floor or even a different continent or working without knowing a project's ultimate goal, takes on new meaning. At the end of the day, the postmortem is overwhelmingly positive. "I'm on the road four days a week," says Anthony Coker, an Andersen director of knowledge management. "We get so market focused, so goal focused, it creates a lack of community," says Coker. "This forces us out of that."
That's the way the offsite is supposed to work, says Bob Carr, president of Executive Adventure, which put on the Andersen event. "Communication is absolutely the biggest problem," Carr says. "People get isolated in today's workplace. We'd like to move to a situation where a worker with a problem or task might say, 'Hey, wait. Jim handled a similar situation. I'll call him.'"
The concept worked for a footwear sales team at Salomon North America, a sports-equipment manufacturer. Two years ago, the 36-member team took part in a marathon race involving kayaking, rappelling and navigating on foot and mountain bike at the Presidio Adventure Racing Academy in San Francisco. Before the offsite, there was little communication between the sales-rep groups, recalls their director, Bill Dodge. Afterward, "people felt like they had become old friends in a weekend." Sales in the year after the offsite shot up 125%, Dodge says. "That was the most expensive sales meeting we ever had," he notes. And it was "worth every penny."
Offsites don't always pay off, however--in either good feeling or financial gain. After a group of U.S. postal workers went through a ropes course together, they complained that the coaching staff was too touchy-feely and wrote comments like "We hate you" to the firm that ran it. That firm now refuses to work with the Postal Service, because it believes that top managers didn't support the spirit the course tried to foster. Earnest approval from the upper levels of a company is key to the success of an offsite, says A.S.T.D.'s Bassi. If the CEO appears at an event with "arms crossed, sending the signal that he thinks this is not a valuable thing, then you are not going to get a lot of organization value."