An anonymous friend of mine just started a new job which involves a training program. Knowing that she’d been looking forward to launching her career, awaiting this day like a kid craves Christmas and studying the company’s stats the entire week beforehand, I asked her in a joyous voice after her first day:
“How did it go?”
She seemed confused, then stunned, then angry.
“We played ice breaker games,” she pronounced, shocked herself at the absurdity.
“Ice breaker games?” I echoed back. As someone who’s only worked in the creative industry where it’s not a faux pas for me to throw grapes (or any other food) and my co-workers and boss, I’ve always harbored a secret fascination with ‘Corporate America’ and what it must be like to actually change out of your pajamas before going to work.
“Yeah, and we decorated stuff,” my friend added. Suddenly, I could feel her irritation overwhelming me.
She went on to recount how their ‘training’ involved drawing on poster boards and using arts and crafts tools like glitter pens. Oh, and they also did ‘team building’ exercises in which the importance of proper office attire and ‘being on time’ was emphasized.
Excuse me?
This was a training program for future executives. Yet it perfectly mirrored the kind of activities I participated in at YMCA camp at age eight.
“We were treated like children,” she explained. “The entire experience was humiliating. It was like, ‘hello, I’ve had a job before you don’t need to explain to me proper email etiquette.’”
Apparently, companies feel like they do. Sure, an employee manual should exist which everyone should read on their own time, but do college graduates with previous employment really need to go through the importance of ‘being on time’ bullet point by bullet point on a white board as if they’d just been released from a playpen?
What are we? Apes?
What a great way to make it clear to your employees that
a) you think they’re fundamentally retarded
b) you have extremely low expectations for them
Shouldn’t a company set the bar really high and simply expect hires to keep up? These people are on payroll. Isn’t it immensely wasteful to treat them like monkeys for a full business week (perhaps more) when you could actually be teaching them something or (gasp) having them actually work?
And here’s my real question: Is there anyone on the planet who enjoys ice breaker games? Have these kinds of superficial activities ever benefited someone in a significant way? I detested these things as a child. Yes, I was a lonely and antisocial seven-year-old, but I saw the fakeness and stupidity of these efforts even them. If someone asked me to do one now it’d be really hard for me not to burst out in laughter or attempt to stab my senses out with a pencil.
Remember at camp when you’d have to go around in a circle and remember everyone’s name and wholly irrelevant facts about them like, “That’s Lisa and she likes laughing. That Brenda, she loves blue.”
Am I the only one getting hives right now?
These activities were stressful when I was eleven, performing them in front of my co-workers, I’d be mortified. Perhaps I just have really low self esteem.
My friend explained that what she found most irritating was that if you’re going to be ‘chill’ and play games then let people for real relax: Put their feet up, stretch out, speak to one another uncensored. Yet it’s lame to be forced to play things like office jeopardy while maintaining office formalities. Either be truly relaxed or be professional because ‘fun professional’ / ‘faux chill’ just doesn’t really work.
Or are she and I just curmudgeons?
3 comments:
In the corporate world a lot of time is spent on training due to the fact that these people are on the payroll. They want to keep you around, and ensure that they are not taking you on and just wasting their own time and money.
It was her first day on the job... is she supposed to just be trusted to jump in and know exactly what she is doing. Is she expected to not need to be introduced to people? A bond with your coworkers is necessary especially if it is a job where she will be working with her coworkers often. The mere fact that they went through the training will bring them closer and make the work environment much closer.
There is a distinction between being relaxed at work and being relaxed. I think she missed the point that you can relax at work, but an air of professionalism is necessary. In fact, I think she proves the reason that training is necessary by the mere fact that she thought that she should have the ability to completely relax while in a professional setting. You can be relaxed and comfortable but the point of that training is to remember what it is to be in a work environment.
I'll take it one step further in the world of corporate awkwardness and mention company outings. Am I the only one who gets anxiety when company outings are mentioned? Some of my coworkers are great and all, but spending a whole day with them? No thanks. I'm not particularly fond of the idea of me and my coworkers being throw together at some random place hours away from the office, forced to make meaningless conversation with one another when what we all would have preferred would be to have the day the off from work so that we could sleep all day.
Does anyone else know what I mean, or am I just antisocial?
subway_gal, I feel you on the company outing bs.
I just wanted to mention something that is a little off-topic. What I hate the most, are these non-creative mangement personnel who take everything that HR states as the ONLY way to do things, mainly manage people. HR has way too much influence and playing these team games has become a huge trend. Even those of us in management still have to play the games. Sometimes, I can't even work with people the way I believe is right because HR is telling me something different. Why don't they just hire a robot if that's what they want!
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