The Official Fluid Blog

Synergy, forethought, planning, and commitment are commonplace words thrown around in the sales cycle for agencies pitching products and services the world over, industry-wide. Fortunately, these buzz words are not isolated to direct revenue-generating activities.

Team building can be traced back to the late 1920s when researchers conducted studies and observed worker productivity in a mid-West industrial facility outside Chicago called Hawthorne Works. Behaviorists studied groups of industrial workers in various conditions and determined that the most compelling evidence was observed in the building of a sense of group identity, a feeling of social support and cohesion that came with increased worker interaction. The study also demonstrated that workers had a tendency to perform at higher productivity at work-related tasks, most notably after performing non-work-related tasks.  Shortly thereafter, the onset of company sponsored team building activities was born.

This berth aligns with federal initiatives like the National Service Bill signed by President Obama that calls upon Americans to volunteer in their communities. This initiative, created to bolster the efforts of AmeriCorps, is supported by $5.7 billion dollars, enough to triple the size of AmeriCorps’ service programs over the next eight years and includes new solutions for students trying to earning money for college.

In line with support from the aforementioned empirical evidence and initiatives by the new administration, many sites like idealist.org (which boasts nearly 16 thousand opportunities for individual and team volunteerism) and justgive.org (inspires users to make donations in the names of friends and family in lieu of standard gifts)to worthy causes) have realized increased membership and participation.

In the same vein that “going green” supports our global environment and is a sustainable solution for woes stemming from the economic downturn—so too are team building activities, designed around volunteer activities. Clearly, businesses are more likely to engage in activities that not only support the community, but also have cost-saving implications. Gaming activities like paint-ball for office team-building days have much higher cost implications than volunteering, and add no value to the world at large.

In keeping with our mission to provide value added and sustainable e-commerce solutions, Fluid recently engaged in an office-wide service event to add value (social commerce, in a sense) to our local community.

The outing included a donation drive for the underprivileged and under served members of the greater San Francisco community, in addition to participating in the kitchen dinner service for Glide, a radically inclusive organization dedicated to the betterment of SF through daily food services, health care, substance abuse rehabilitation, services for battered women and children, and GLBT advocacy since the 1960s. Fluid served 700+ diners that evening, and left the facility with a sense of pride, humility and mindfulness that couldn’t have been achieved by playing rounds of mini-golf, and brought the spirit of working together back to the office environment. While the measure of value that the outing has benefitted our working environment is difficult to quantify, the example below clearly demonstrates it.

Smiles all around: Pearly whites came to serve dinner

This entry was posted on Monday, May 4th, 2009 at 5:16 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.