Field Day Off
With the team in St. Augustine
I read a book by Howard Schultz a while back where he said it took him a long time to realize that Human Resources was the most important department at Starbucks and for that matter, at any company. If you study the great team builders (in business), they have an obsession for finding talented people and getting their buy-in to the mission at hand. I don’t think there’s any perfect blueprint for this, and I’m far from excellent at this, but we do have a few people here who are really good at throwing (actually) fun team building parties, starting with Emily since the very beginning — and every so often, we all get together internally for a Field Day to remember that we’re not just email addresses and people who do checklist things. Our shared office space has helped with all forms of communication, but it’s still about the work there, mostly. Life outside the work is what Field Days are all about. Here are some pics from the day in our nation’s oldest city!
RUCK PUTT PUTT
It’s a fine line in these kinds of team building things between too much and too little structure. When someone stands there and says you sit here and do this with them, and smile, starts to feel like work. Mandatory fun sucks because it isn’t fun at all. What we did went like this: Show up at the Fort, downtown St Augustine at 930. Teams organized themselves, guidance was 3-5. They all got hit lists of a couple places to stop for fun team pictures, then we met at putt-putt about a 30 minute total walk away. Then RUCK THAT PUTT PUTT commenced for an hour, then a local Arcade / Fancy Grilled Cheese kind of place called Sarbez, where having fun is so much fun - everyone got a plastic cup full of $20 worth of quarters. It felt like when you were a kid at an arcade, except now if you want, there’s an open bar tab, too. Best of both worlds.
Final stop was back downtown at a local popsicle shop (Hyppo Pop) - some people kept the party going, others got home to pick up the kids by 3. The weather was perfect, so that didn’t hurt.
It was nothing fancy at all, cost a couple thousand dollars maybe (for 35 or so folks), and based on how loud and fun it sounded at putt putt and in the arcade and at hippo pop, and from the stories the next day, it worked great. Nice job to em and roxanne and bianca and the team for putting it on.
