Fierce Competition At Corporate Games

The dreamy City of Ventura, long associated with sun, sand and… corporate team building?

Each year, the City of Ventura, California USA plays host to the ‘Ventura Corporate Games’. From their website: “Corporate Games provides a valuable opportunity for companies and employees to work together to build team unity and morale, which has become very important with the challenges facing many businesses and employees in the last couple of years.”

It’s certainly an interesting spin on the office day out, and many companies, including sales outsourcing business Cydcor Inc have been seeing a fair measure of success in the games. While the sports arena is not often associated with the team building activities currently available in the UK, Cydcor‘s recent big win in Basketball in Ventura has certainly sent a clear signal to their employees.

The Ventura Corporate Games are open to businesses with betwen 51-150 employees, which ensures that a significant % of the workforce will be actively participating in the games. What strikes me instantly is ‘Why hasn’t this been done before?’. Firstly, we all appreciate that team sports are perhaps the most team-orientated activities in existence, and also that many companies already have football, basketball and rounders teams anyway. These games are a great fusion of work and adventure.

As Cydcor will have no doubt realised – you wont have a successful sports team without friction, and in the same way, most massively successful business projects encounter inter-personal issues at some point along the way. So perhaps a sporting environment allows individuals to come to peace with others in an environment where conflicting opinions are demonstrated much more openly and naturally. In this respect, I could see many previously dysfunctional work teams come back from Ventura with a far more harmonious vibe.

Let us just hope that the rising obesity figures in both the US and the UK don’t put a stop to the spread of these ingenious events.