Team Building in Bogor

B’s work held a team building event. Why? They have contracted with an EPC (engineering procurement and construction) company for the detailed design and construction of the plant. There will be millions of man-hours of interactions and activities and being comfortable with each other and working well as a broad team is required. 

They left Jakarta early on buses that picked people up at the two offices. The destination – Bogor; about a 1 hour drive from Jakarta. The last 20 minutes was on small, windy roads that necessitated an escort and movement of scooters and other traffic out of the way as the road was as wide as the bus. Difficult to navigate unless the road was clear.

Here is a photo of the pond and flowers. It was very peaceful and serene and smelled great-- clean air!

The theme for the day was SATU.

This is “one” in bahasa Indonesian. Spirit was applied to S, Action to A; Teamwork to T, and Unity to U. There were warm-up activities, then each person picked a ribbon out of a slit in the top of a box. The color of the ribbon determined one’s team. There were 9 teams in total and approximately three teams were at each station rotation. Notice how the number of people involved in this project has swelled since our first photos a year ago.

At the S station. The teams had to transport themselves by walking on bamboo sticks held be other team members. The distance was 8-10 m and they had to go and come back. Station A involved filling plastic bags with water from the pond using a scoop to a bucket. The bags were then used as ammunition to rescue the team leader who had been taken hostage. Yes, the bags were thrown at the hostage takers.

Station T was a series of removing rings from poles. Station U was all done together. Each team had to build a raft like this.

On B’s team, there were 9 people. With 6 inner tubes and only 7 bamboo pieces, it was tricky loading everyone. In fact, when they started out one of the people who couldn’t swim got nervous and tipped the inner tube and they had to do some repair work. Note: the water was only 1.5 m (~5ft) deep but had a thick layer of mud. Each team had to race around the island, touch a flag, go to the next flag and then to the finish. All in all it was a lot of fun. Though I might add a comment about how XXX the water was. 

The activities were followed by everyone “signing” a pledge to be SATU. This was done by selecting a purple, blue, red, or green pad that had been soaked in paint, covering one’s palm with the paint and affixing one’s hand print to the SATU sign. 

By this time. It was early afternoon so lunch was served followed by Karaoke. Last were a number of games like sack races, racing on skis with four people on a ski, tug of war etc. The EMCEE called for different types of people from the group. At one point they asked for the women and only four volunteered for the tug of war. So they put all four on one side and selected one of the bigger engineers (1.94m and 127 kg (6’6” and 280 lb)) to compete against the four. B’s says it was a hoot as he was winning until they figured out how to literally drag him sideways across the finish line.

Here is a photo of some of the team standing next to one of the many banners around for the day.

The trip home hit traffic and took more than 1hr 45minutes.