Post "away-day" thoughts

The "away-day" happened, there were no major fights, and lots of people went to the pub...

The morning consisted of us being split into cross team groups to discuss how our activities map onto the new department strategy - a strategy that currently make no mention of core activities, although that will apparently change. For some it was quite informative, and probably a worthwhile exercise. One aspect that we were expected to look at was where activities go across teams. To my mind this showed up two quite separate ways in which more than one team is involved in similar activities. There is a lot of positive cross team collaboration, but it is usually informal and ad hoc, however, I felt that we also discovered that there are quite a lot of occasions when one team inappropriately intrudes on other teams responsibilities.

In the afternoon we more or less went back to our normal teams, though the largest was split in two, and a couple of our team were transposed into the media unit to even up numbers. The bosses were in a group of their own. In these teams we were given a couple of pieces of paper, and asked to set one or more goals for three years in the future, with a list of actions (with dates and names) aimed at getting there. This felt to us like the classic bad management howler of setting rigid task completion dates, and effectively setting us  up as hostages to fortune...

Finally we went back into the morning groups to take our 'team' messages back, in a sort of very broken version of the jigsaw classroom. So what did we find out? Every team thinks that they do not get enough respect, and are not sufficiently involved in decision making. The cynic in me guesses that any specialist team in any large workplace in the world would say exactly the same...

Finally we were told that we will continue to occasionally work in our morning teams, presumably to improve cross team collaboration in future, before a large party headed to the pub. Large groups in pubs are not a nice environment for a partially deaf person, so I declined.

So was it worthwhile? Who knows?

Pre-away day thoughts

Tomorrow we have a department 'away day'... I've been fortunate enough to only be forced into taking part in three such events in the past, two planning/collaboration ones in conference rooms, and one team building one with paintball guns... From that limited experience, my expectation is that the only real beneficiaries of tomorrow's event will be the owners of some local hostelry, assuming sufficient of us are still on speaking terms at the end of the day. I'm a big fan of evidence based practice, whether it's for software development, teaching or management, so I've had a bit of a search for the evidence backing up the use of away-days. So far the best I've found is a suggestion in Dogbert's Top Secret Management Handbook that they can be used to reduce staffing costs, provided they take place in a suitably dangerous environment to ensure fatalities. There are a lot of websites espousing the benefits of away days, but always emphasizing that the best results will be achieved if you pay the site owners lots of money to organize it.

CPID have a page on 'How to... run a management away-day', which is less cynical than Dogbert, and less self-interested than the facilitation companies. Their first two recommendations are "a clear and agreed reason for spending the time away together", and "clear guidance on what the participants need to do before the event". - We're not off to a good start here...

But now I need to get back to work, because apparently the little programming task I was doing as a favour, that was due at the end of May is now an essential requirement for next week, and the specification has changed...

If  I survive the 'away-day' I'll blog again about how it went. Maybe it will be a nice positive blog post! (I'm hoping that the managers will be attempting planning, and the rest of us will be equipped with paint-ball guns.)