Watch photos from a corporate outdoor trip from Mumbai: Waterfall Rappelling at Kondana Caves
Corporates are increasingly choosing outbound off-sites to enhance the bonding and performance of staff. Today there is awareness of outdoor experience as an empowering option for increasing personal and interpersonal awareness among teams; and developing a sense of responsibility and self-management.
Outbound programmes are unparalleled in their capacity to build strong teams, encourage communication, promote leadership qualities and create bonding among team members. The exciting experience adds to the effectiveness and acceptance of the team building experience and the memorability is also transferred to the conscious and unconscious learnings.
The shared experience brings participants together and willing to work in alignment with the greater objectives of the company through a sense of belonging creating an organizational culture.
These outings are essentially the same adventure outings we conduct for adventure groups, but are more scalable in terms of scope. You may combine them with an existing training off-site or meeting, as a stand alone experience, or as a part of an outdoor training intervention. You could also use team building activities used in training as fun team building games for your off-site without any training involved.
Group adventure experiences like white water rafting, rappelling or even monsoon hikes can be a simple and effective space to reduce professional barriers to communication and relating and encourage a more cohesive culture within the organization.
To find out more about adventure activity possibilities,. explore the Adventure Section of Wide Aware.
Outdoors as a medium of learning through experience is an effective way of developing a corporate culture. It has many advantages over traditional training interventions, the chief among which are its high enjoyment and memorability leading to lowered resistance to training and change management initiatives; informal atmosphere reducing barriers of formal relationships and performance anxiety; and the engaging nature of the experience which allows actions to flow naturally and magnifies choices, attitudes, responses, and their results in a manner that is conducive to being easily observed and examined. The action oriented programmes also provide opportunities that are inviting and low stakes resulting in lowered risk in experimenting with changing behaviour to influence the results. The action based approach also provides obvious points to initiate change in order to create the maximum impact.
Outdoor Training Interventions can be one time stand alone interventions, or a part of an overall Organization Development Initiative and woven into the organizations training design. While the first is quicker and less expensive, it works on the level of the team, and provides little support for the team to continue the changework and evolve. The latter can leverage development interventions within the organization beyond difficult to change areas, creating an organization wide alignment, dissolving barriers to communication and most of all, encouraging risk taking and investment into organization goals. Such programmes can be designed to address virtually any problem diagnosed in the organization to create freeing opportunity.
There are two crucial elements of outdoor training that intertwine to create the development and growth environment:
Simple, unfamiliar activities
These form the platform on which the training is based. While the point in designing activities is to design spaces in which working on specific objectives is facilitated, the activities in themselves are usually designed to be fairly simple in terms of physical ability to execute. The idea is that it is not impossible and the limitations that block the group here, are in the mind (as they are in the work place). The strengths that exist in the group are also theirs, which they can engage in the workplace too.
Group discussions about happenings during the activity focus on the experience of the activity, and the thought processes attached to it. The group review helps the group assimilate unconscious learnings, adaptations consciously and collectively. It provides a space to examine automatic reactions to different situations that may be unfamiliar, difficult to execute, or otherwise challenging, and gives them an opportunity to consciously look at their assumptions and fears that cause them, and thus free the group to act from a state of greater empowerment and effectiveness through purposeful choice.
Which organization doesn't want teams that are 'healthy', happy, performing and motivated? Yet, it is easy to read and write these words, but a challenge to weave them into the organization's reality. Outdoor Training is exceptionally suited to addressing these objectives. >>
Leaders can do jobs, or they can drive change and growth. Leaders in todays corporate environments have greater pressures and scrutiny than ever before. Outdoor programmes provide a space for them to focus on their potential as a leader leading to an empowered organization.
Communicating is more than conveying. It is more than the medium, sender or receiver. It is a process that brings alignment and common perspective. Discover how outdoor programmes can create that instinct for aligning perspectives in a most enjoyable manner. Miracle? Not really.
Often, the vision for creativity gets described in bullet points on a 'to do' list as leaders wonder why they can't get out of that box. The free flow that knows no boundaries remains elusive as do the abundant free spirited unstoppable ideas that go along with it. Claim them.
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