But the problem is that they had this consultant, Mr. X, for the team building exercises. He doesn't work at the company, but the same guy came and held the team building exercises every year. He didn't know much about the company or us, the exercises looked like they were generic and he held the same thing to many IT companies.
I hated Mr. X and his exercises. This was an extreme, most people there seemed to enjoy the exercises and Mr. X much more than me. I think I participated in this event only two or three times, but this became clear every time.
(Eventually they stopped doing these trips, but NOT because of anything to do with the team building exercises, but side effects of being drunk when socializing.)
To this day I don't know if the problem is that I hate all "team-building exercises" or this guy was particularly bad at them, because luckily I haven't had to participate in them at any other time.
(There was one other team-building event the company organized during the six years I worked there, once: one of these locked room puzzle thingies that were in fashion then, and still are. I excused myself from that.)
On these trips, the workers were assigned in like three to six teams randomly (I'm not sure of the exact number, and I think it changed between the years because the company grew).
Since this is not a very big company, we had between 30 to 50 people while these trips happened, so in each team many people had already worked together or knew each other already, so it wasn't hard to start working together and get to know the others on the team a bit.
So that definitely wasn't the problem. I was always happy with the team and could work together with them, and socialize with coworkers in general outside the team-building thingies. The team-building exercises themselves were the problem.
Many of them were these very stereotypical stupid team-building exercises, with nothing to do with our job. No egg-dropping in particular, at least not in the years I were there (perhaps it had already been used in a year before that), but we did build a spaghetti tower.
Anyway, one year one of the exercises was to record and edit a short video, with some rather general topic about the team and the meeting itself, telling why our team is best or something like that, I don't recall exactly.
This we was supposed to do sort of in the background, distributing it in the pauses between the lots of tasks and meals on Friday and early Saturday, and present it some time in Saturday morning.
So one of the problems was that there was too little time for the whole thing. We had to write some rough screenplay or scenes, do some rehearsal of the acting, record every scene, edit it to a video, and put it to presentable form.
The second problem is that they didn't tell us in advance before the trip that we'd be making a video. This is an IT company, and around 2014, so Mr. X just assumed that enough people would bring a notebook and mobile phone cameras and all sorts of IT equipment that in any team there'd be enough to put it all together.
Plus he knew that there were already presentations by the CEOs and some upper managers planned, with slides and projectors, that there'd be IT equipment brought for that too.
Still, it was a very borderline assumption.
This is a company where many of us had worked with videos, including me, so at least I knew a little about the topic. But we didn't specifically bring hardware or software or prepared for making and editing a video, so we had to figure out how to put together everything right there, so there were a lot of technical problems.
Eventually we got a video that was cut very badly, and with no sound, only video images, because we didn't have time to add the sound, even though some sound was recorded. So during presenting the video, one of the team members who was reasonably good at speaking just read all the dialog and whatnot to understand the story presented in the video. It was awful.
It would have helped a lot to tell us in advance that we'd be making a video, because then we'd have brought all the right equipment and cables and media and stuff, and prepared by installing software in advance and figuring out a plan on how we'll edit the video and who will do each part. And obviously more time for making the video would have helped, but the other team-building exercises also took a lot of time, so it was just impossible.
(The spaghetti tower is a very stereotypical team-building exercise. A spaghetti bridge would have been even more stereotypical of course, but still, I want a bit more originality, and more specialization for what our company is workin in, because we are not working there to design and build towers from twenty strands of spaghetti. Sure we do magical things on cheap consumer equipment, we're that kind of company, but still.)
The lego exercises were also bad.
I also remember some stupid hypothetical exercise with two sheets of some stupid story about three people being stranded in the middle of a desert with a combination of some very unlikely random events, and how they should use each object to maximize the chance to get rescused. Which he claimed was also an exercise, also in written form to teams, not actually done in practice, to people trained as cosmonauts at NASA, or some shit like that.
The first problem is that obviously we weren't people trained as cosmonauts at NASA for emergencies in case the escape pod of your rocket lands in the desert after five sorts of failure, we were working in a comfortable office.
The bigger problem is that Mr. X had like zero creativity for this sort of exercise, so all he did is listen to the solutions each team gave, and then told the official solution for the cosmonauts, and compared them, and gave scores according to how much of the official solution we matched. Which could work for actual cosmonauts who could probably find almost exactly the same solution because they were well-trained, but useless for use who invented some half-working stuff which
might not have used the objects exactly the way designed, but Mr. X couldn't tell which of our solutions were actually useful or would have worked, he could only tell if we used each random unlikely object (shoe, bottle of water, cord and canvas of the parachute of the escape pod, whatever) in exactly the way the correct solution had.
Oh, and our video was among the better ones, other teams had even less luck with it, not because they didn't work well, but because they had less luck with randomly being able to come up with all the right sort of equipment and cables and software and installing video software from mobile internet and quick video editing and put that together on the spot.