Sometimes our corporate clients come to us with something very specific in mind for a team building exercise. In this case, RJ Marriott had an already-established community service program which employees were accustomed to and which worked well for them.  For their program for ITA Group, they wanted a little outside help and Magnovo was happy to provide a customized Mission: Military Care workshop that fit the client’s goals.

A customized experience for a casual setting

Customizing meant loosening up on structure so as to provide a scenario where participants could come and go during a space of two hours.  There was still a group goal, however, since we consider that to be paramount.  Teams were to assemble as many military care packages as possible given the time and organizational constraints placed upon the group.

Participants came in sporadically and were pleased to find activities all set up for them and a facilitator ready to get things rolling the minute they walked in the door.  People quickly got into the vibe of working together and were actually able to produce a lot of good donations for the troops.  In all, 25 people participated and were also able to assemble some Rescue Buddies in addition to the military care packages.

For a personal touch going out to the troops, participants wrote thank you cards to the soldiers to go along with the care packages.  They also created a banner which will accompany the packages, for a really nice presentation on the other end.

The Rescue Buddies were donated to a local charity.

A nice stress relief and everyone goes home satisfied

One unusual result of hosting this customized workshop was certain activities got the spotlight, whereas usually they are simply part of the entire package.  That might be explained by the fact that while this is usually run as a team-building workshop, the focus in this case was not on building teams.

Since participants came and went in a casual manner, this was more of a stress-relief activity, more just for fun than for building skills.

Indeed, participants agreed that the most popular activity was the Shooting Range, which was set up with Nerf guns and targets.  The guns were very powerful and participants commented on how shooting was a great stress reliever. The whole group seemed to enjoy themselves and Marriott seemed very happy with the way things went. Over all a pretty good success.