Reimagining Corporate Team Building
It's understandable if you want to hide under your MacBook whenever you hear corporate team building. Cue the eye rolls and memes of The Office's Michael Scott flailing around as you imagine awkward trust falls and questionable scavenger hunts, a day marked with all the sincerity and success of a fake laugh.
But it doesn't have to be this way.
People naturally gravitate towards teams, from the hunter-gatherers of yore to kids knocking around a soccer ball on a muddied field to Google's devs coding into the night. Nearly a century ago, organizational theorist Elton Mayo's Hawthorne Study at a Western Electric Company posited the theory and value of team-building in the American workplace. By the 1980s, white-collar company "teams" became the go-to corporate parlance, shifting the perceived professional paradigm from boss and employees to a cohesive working unit, albeit still with a hierarchy intact.
In the 00s, Silicon Valley Big Tech reimagined what a workplace (and its perks) could be. Rumbles of extravagant office amenities and extracurriculars (Ping-pong! Nap Pods! Free Lunch?) left other industries scrambling to keep up with the ideal team experience for their employees.
And then, 2020 happened.
We're tentatively re-emerging from the post-pandemic cocoon with an information work landscape defined by remote and hybrid realities, i.e., scattered corporate teammates tenuously tethered by apps and platforms. Now, it's rare that everyone on a company team is ever in the same room together – commonplace to onboard without ever officially meeting anyone. It's a strange time. And a stranger time yet to team-build in a digital sea of separateness. The antidote? Zoom out from remote meetings and transcend Microsoft Teams with in-person interaction, which we built The St. James upon.
Corporate Games And Beyond: The Future of Teams
If you play a word association game and rattle off the term "team," the Phillies or Warriors will materialize in your head long before any business in the Fortune 500. The purest iteration of a team remains a sports squad, and that's a field we're well versed in – as we reimagined company team building for a new age, we transposed our athletic expertise into the making of our 2022's Corporate Games.
A rousing success, the Corporate Games answers your team-building questions. We hosted an electric, eclectic showcase of competitions from Indoor 1-Mile Runs to Home Run Derbies to 3-Point Basketball Shootouts, complete with collaborative wellness events in cooking seminars and yoga classes. We reconnected company teams and raised $20,000 for the Capital Food Bank to battle food insecurity in the Greater Washington Area.
The L.F. Jennings, Chase, and Gensler teams claimed the top three spots, but it proved a winning experience for all. We created a day of much-needed humanity for the professional set, letting teammates see each in another light, at least for a moment: "Oh, Greg's got a pretty sweet jump shot."
The namesake of The St. James means having a third place beyond work and home – our world-class venue remains your one destination for any team looking for a bit of togetherness. You don't have to wait for 2023's Corporate Games, either – whether you're looking to host Company Events, Family Fun Days, or Holiday Parties, we invite you to be part of the future of team building today.