Whether it’s building a solar-powered vehicle or creating a model for an energy-efficient city, team-building activities are heading in an eco-conscious direction that reflects today’s growing commitment to green meetings.
Event planners note that demand for activities with a social or environmentally conscious focus is skyrocketing. Among them is Celeste Pilkington, manager of franchise performance for PRA Destination Management in Carlsbad, Calif.
“Everyone realizes that going green and being green is not a trend, it is a way of life and something we have to embrace,” she says. “I would say it has been over the past year and a half that I’ve really seen it hit the meetings and special events industry.”
Alan Ranzer, executive director of Impact 4 Good, an East Hanover, N.J.-based company that facilitates green team-building activities for groups, also says environmentally focused team building is gaining in popularity.
“People in the meetings industry have come to realize how much waste comes out of a three- to five-day meeting,” he says. “People are now asking themselves, ‘What can I do to help?’ and ‘How can we help save the environment while we do this meeting in San Diego?’”
He adds that as an increasing number of planners execute green practices in their meetings, they are also looking at ways to make team building fit into that genre.
Activity Options
“Team building has to be fun and green team building is also fun,” Ranzer says. “There are all kinds of things out there.”
Impact 4 Good offers up a variety of green team-building options, starting with Go Green Racing, an activity where delegates are broken up into teams and given a kit with instructions on how to make a solar car. Simultaneously, groups are making another car out of recycled materials.
At the end of the challenge, the teams race each other and deem a winner. Then the cars, as well as a number of extra car-making kits, are given to local schools to teach children about using sustainable materials and respecting the environment.
Ranzer says groups absolutely love the activity.
“It is a speed race,” he says. “It turns adults into kids. It is the concept of taking something that was garbage and turning it into something useful. It has been our most requested activity.”
Another activity Impact 4 Good offers is EnviroScape, in which groups are broken up into teams and each team gets a kit designed to build a model of a city.
“They need to create a city that is not susceptible to pollution,” Ranzer says, adding that at the end of the task, water [to symbolize rain] is poured onto the model, and if it runs off clear, that team wins. Just like the car activity, the kits are donated to local schools.
“We make it a contest and do it in a ballroom,” he says.
Ranzer says his company is in the process of creating another activity called Green Casino, which he thinks will be a huge hit.
“People love casino nights,” he says. “Groups would play cards and anything they win they can use to buy prize packages that would go to local schools and communities—such as replacing all of the light bulbs in a school with compact fluorescents. It will give them the ability to say their team donated the most.”
TeamWorx, based in Sacramento, Calif., is another company that facilitates green team-building activities. According to Wayne Bennett, president and owner, it offers several different eco-conscious options for groups.
One activity is building hybrid bikes. Groups break up into tables of 10 and each table has a kit of puzzles. There are 26 puzzles in the kit, and each time a group solves a puzzle correctly they are awarded bicycle parts. Each puzzle solved equals another piece of the bike.
“If you solve the puzzle, you build the bike,” Bennett says.
Afterwards, the bikes are available for use at the team’s place of work or are donated to local children.
“We are giving them bicycles so they will hopefully ride their bike to work instead of driving an automobile,” he says. “It makes a direct impact and improves the world.”
Another activity TeamWorx facilitates deals with awareness-building. Each team is given a group of facts about global warming and a budget detailing how much it would cost to solve some of the world’s most challenging climate issues. They then have to pick and choose the issues they would most like to tackle and go in front of a panel of judges to present their argument.
“The one who persuades the most people wins,” Bennett says. “[It presents the] conversations that great corporate teams should be having and also introduces facts about global warming.”
Access Destination Services, a full-service DMC based in Southern California, is also big on green and socially responsible team building, says Jennifer Miller, general manager.
“We’ve worked with a Head Start program and put together an environmentally friendly playground set for the children in the community,” she says, adding that Head Start is an organization that offers before- and after-school child care for at-risk youth. “When we got there, there was the foundation for a playground set.”
According to Miller, groups were broken up into teams and given different tasks. Each team had to solve a word challenge or answer trivia questions in order to get the tools to put together the pieces of the playground. The project proved to be incredibly rewarding for attendees.
“It was a very touching program,” she says. “The attendees worked on the playground and at the end of it, the kids came out. There is nothing like seeing a 60-year-old man wiping tears behind his sunglasses.”
Green Guidance
For planners who aren’t sure where to start, Ranzer offers some advice.
“They [planners] need to look at their demographics and their goals,” he says. “It is important to know your audience and the goals of your team-building activity. You have to match the activity to the people. It doesn’t take much to give back to the environment; it is just how much you want to do.”
Miller advises planners to get creative.
“Think outside the box,” she says. “You can take something that has been done and put a green twist on it. Use materials in your team building that are environmentally friendly. Switch to environmentally friendly products. There is a lot of printed collateral that goes along with team building—use recycled paper for things like that.”
The Future of Green
“There is a general public awareness of environmental issues,” says Shawna McKinley, former executive director for the Portland, Ore.-based Green Meeting Industry Council, adding that such factors as natural disasters and the documentary An Inconvenient Truth have played a part.
While there is a large push for individuals to do their part, the business world is also catching on, and for solid reasons, McKinley says.
About five years ago, only a few groups [were considering green practices],” she says. “Now it is religious organizations, companies, corporations. It is becoming very mainstream, very widespread.”
McKinley, who is based in Vancouver, British Columbia, and works as a project manager for Meeting Strategies Worldwide, says being green is an issue being looked at more and more by potential employees when searching for a job.
“Here in Canada it is a retention issue,” she says. “Particularly the younger sector of the workforce is looking to companies that are strong socially and environmentally friendly.”
Looking into the future of green meetings and green team building, McKinley has high hopes.
“I think it is more than just a trend,” she says, adding that now it is optional to be green, but restrictions may soon creep up to mandate good treatment of the environment.“Right now it is a voluntary thing, but we are already starting to see little regulations on various things. We are going to see more and more of that regulation as the temperature heats up.”
