Message #46747

[andream]

Okay, because you're dealing with a raft of different personalities and varying types of jobs chances are good approaching this type of a soriee with the standard "management type" teambuilding exercises will not go a long way towards bringing the group together.
Because you're in the UK I would suggest doing something a bit offbeat.  It;'s summer, Organize an "ICe Cream Social" It;s a southern US custom that basically means "An excuse to get everyone in one place and get to know each other".  Serve a bunch of ice cream, set up a stand to do it from or rent a soft serve machine.  Create the sense of a country picnic,  even if your office is in the heart of central London. Hokey music, and all.

THEN...Some exercises to get them laughing AND Learning about each other.

Create removable name tags for everyone in the group.  (not the stick on kind). When they belly up for their first ice cream, drop the name tags into a large fish bowl.  Distribute numbers in their place on slips of paper.  Call the numbers up and have them drag a name tag from the fish bowl and give them 15 seconds to find its owner.  (even when they know the owner it's going tobe a stretch to get from the front of the room through to whereever the owner is in that amount of time.)

Once al the name tags are back on the proper chests, pull a number at random.

Hand this person a nerf gun or a foam based bow and arrow.  Explain that it's employee revenge day and they are allowed to target one member of staff BUT They have to tell why...Tell the group that if they THINK They might be a target they are allowed to hide.  let it run for about three minutes no more or it takes one a rather distressing air of hunter and hunted which is not good.

Assign everyone new numbers for instance if you have 200 people in attendance, assign them numbers up to ten and start again, so you end up with 20 teams who are all mixed up departmentally.

Move them into their teams, and tell them they have ten minutes to nominate a candidate for "King or Queen" of the social.  Then give them ten more minutes to create a campaign which culminates in a one minute Pitch, after which you vote and elect the King or Queen, create a throne, hand them a crown, let the winning team spend the rest of the day serving as the court.  In the process you\ll learn lots about each other AND believe it or not you've done some actual team building events in the process.  Not every kind of teambuilding has to be about vague esoteric concepts.  Sometimes getting the guys in shipping to know the guys in marketing is what team building is about....

Just my tuppence.

Andrea