The Lenze Americas Team Escapes the Elements to Assemble Bikes for Charity in Providence, RI

This workshop was a rollicking good time from the start as 90 people from the Lenze Americas team converged on the Providence Marriott Downtown for a Bike-A-Thon charity workshop. Originally, we were going to stage the event outside, but a couple days of rainy weather chased us inside. Fortunately, this did nothing to dampen anyone’s enthusiasm and we were able to pull off the Bike-A-Thon flawlessly.

Lenze AmericasPeople Work Better When They’re on the Same Page

This group consisted of engineers, salespeople, and marketers– groups that don’t often mix during their workday — so one of the most important goals coming in was to help the different departments see things from a shared perspective. All too often in the corporate world, employees start to develop a sort of tunnel vision.

While it might not seem necessary for engineers to understand what the salesforce does and vice versa, important things like productivity and morale actually increase when separate departments start to understand how their work plays a part in the larger whole.

This started to happen right away. The folks from Lenze Americas came in and got down to the business of having fun and working together. We spent the morning on communication development and role playing with games like Say What I Say and Air Counting. Then, after a short lunch break, we started on the Bike-A-Thon.

Two Great Charities Benefited: The Taft Early Learning Center and The Whiten Community Center

The staff from Lenze Americas chose to split the bikes they assembled between two different charities. These charities were the Taft Early Learning Center and the Whiten Community Center. Both groups sent representatives to accept the generous donations and that seemed to motivate our teams even more.

The Bike-A-Thon was a lot of fun and a great learning experience. Of course, the engineers thought assembling the bikes would be too easy, so we threw in a few twists and turns to keep everyone guessing. These made for good skill building, but they didn’t seem to slow down production a bit!

There were plenty of fancy bikes to go around for both charities and we heard nothing but praise and good comments from all the participants. Our facilitators left in good spirits too, knowing they’d helped a good company and the community grow.