Quarter One Team Building Event

The team I have at work is quite large with most everyone located in Czechland, Slovakia, Poland, or Hungary, plus some folks in Malaysia.  So one of my goals for this year is to have quarterly team building events to get everyone (unfortunately except Malaysia) together.  With that I challenged the organizers to expand the invitees to include those colleagues we work closely with from other teams such as Finance or Compliance.

Braving the snow to get to the grill

What we got was a great mix of people that finally got to meet each other.  Thank goodness for the name tags.  We had well over 100 people who braved the snow and made it to Litenčice (about 45 minutes from Brno) for our first big bash of the year.

Piotr & Andrew showing how skittles is played

We fed everyone goulash soup, bread, and other snacks.  Then we had tournaments for darts, ping pong, and skittles.  I had never heard of skittles before but it is basically bowling, with smaller balls that don't have any finger holes.

There was also a baking/cake competition.  Later on we had people playing music and dancing too.  

Of course, you're never going to get Czechs, Slovaks, Poles or Hungarians together without there being plenty of beer and slivovice.  Another good thing was that we organized overnight accommodations so that people didn't have to worry about driving home.

Gary as grillmeister

While January in Central Europe isn't exactly the best time to organize such an event I'm glad that we did in order to build up momentum for the year.  And everything turned out really well.  

It's always good for people to meet up.  Some of the team have worked together for a couple of years but had never actually met up in person before.  So as far as I'm concerned it's "mission accomplished."



Now to start thinking about what to do next time.  I'm sure we'll have an even bigger turn out in May.