How to Participate in Team Building Exercises mp3

Good day, class. Occasionally your workplace will want you to participate in team building seminars. Today I will be discussing how to attend such seminars effectively.

First you will need to know team building exercises are instituted to do one of two things: build working relationships with coworkers you already have working relationships with, or build working relationships with other employees you will never work with. In either case, the effort seems pointless, especially considering real work is being interrupted. However, you must keep in mind such team building exercises are mandated upon your manager by the corporate bigwigs as a way to easily test your manager’s dedication to the company. His failure to be excited by what everyone knows is absurd will land him in the bottom ten-percent during the next round of corporate layoffs.

This brings me to the second point: participation in such events is mandatory. This means you will attend unless you are one of the fortunate few who fall off the face of a cliff and injure yourself to the extent that working is no longer a possibility and you must live off an inheritance or injury settlement windfall or government welfare program (if you happen to be lucky enough to live in a country that supports its disabled). While corporate buyouts may change the course of business resulting in seminar cancellations, or personal matters may interfere with the timing of seminars, these are only interruptions in the timing of the training, and eventually you will attend.

If you are lucky enough to choose between multiple sessions of the training, try to schedule yourself for the last session. Doing so will offer two benefits. First, if the training is canceled due to a buyout, you have gained additional time before the next seminar. Second, you can be briefed by peers who have already taken the training to understand the nature of the training, and can then devise defensive measures to protect your grey matter from corporate-induced brain rot.

Once you are in the team building training, your main focus will be to play Johnny Good-Little-Participant, drawing as little attention to yourself as possible. Those who are visibly resistant end up being in the bottom ten-percent bucket during company layoffs. Those who are overly enthusiastic garner the most attention, and therefore the most treatment, and will be pegged by management as future management material, or worse yet, future team building seminar instructors.

The best method to participate while drawing minimal attention is to shut your brain off during the proceedings. Doing so is simple to learn, you can train your brain to shut itself down by watching any reality TV show, any daytime TV show, or any programming on Fox. Once you have learned how to switch your thinking off, it will be easy to replace your normal thought processes with artificial ones. You will do this by assuming the role of “clueless idiot,” much like a method actor would immerse himself in fire to play burn victim number three on the daytime soaps.

Then, when class attention turns to you, and the instructor asks you how an engaging and complementing conversation with your coworker makes you feel, your answer “kinda hungry” will fit your training persona, and the instructor will remember not to choose you as a future respondent to her questions. An additional benefit of playing the idiot is: much like a real idiot, no one will expect you to retain any “learning” that is pitched your way.

Your most difficult task to perform during the sessions will be to refrain from laughing whenever ridiculous statements or analogies are made. For example, when a presenter makes a dumb comment like “The Zulu's have no word for crisis,” you must repress the urge to blurt out responses such as “They also have no words for 'team building seminars.' ”

Once the seminar is over, switch your brain back on and head to your favorite pub. Drink however much alcohol is necessary to erase the idea of the seminar from your mind. Then take a two week vacation and drink some more.

Class dismissed.