Showing the big cheese who's the boss
It's every worker's fantasy - but as corporate bonding gets more extreme, companies risk legal trouble
REBECCA DUBE ,Globe and Mail May 19, 2008
Unika Hypolite clenches his fist as though he's about to punch his boss in the face.
Instead he charges Damon Lau's midsection, hoists him over his shoulder and slams him to the ground.
He's acting out every downtrodden office drone's fantasy: the boss smackdown. But instead of a pink slip and a police record, Mr. Hypolite gets a high-five and a big grin from Mr. Lau.
Another job well done for an employee of Pressure, a Markham, Ont., advertising agency that has embraced mixed martial arts - also known as ultimate fighting - as the ultimate team-building exercise.
Unika Hypolite, left, kicks his boss Damon Lau with a combination of wrestling and jujitsu during a mixed-martial-arts class in Toronto. Mr. Lau, who co-owns an advertising agency with his brother, participates in the classes with employees of their agency Pressure. Aaron Harris/The Globe and Mail
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Unika Hypolite, left, kicks his boss Damon Lau with a combination of wrestling and jujitsu during a mixed-martial-arts class in Toronto. Mr. Lau, who co-owns an advertising agency with his brother, participates in the classes with employees of their agency Pressure. (Aaron Harris/The Globe and Mail)
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"It clears the mind," says Mr. Hypolite, 28, business development manager and senior account executive for the 30-person firm.
"It forces people to break through the standard comfort level," says Mr. Lau, 27, who co-founded Pressure with his brother Barron, the chief executive officer, who sports a wrist brace thanks to a fall he took while training.
Well, that's certainly true. Ultimate fighting has to be the strangest iteration of a trend toward new and exotic - some might say wildly inappropriate - team-building exercises.
Ropes courses? Yawn.
Trust falls? Been there, slept through that.
Companies today are looking for new ways to bond their employees and managers. In addition to martial arts, there are corporate hip-hop lessons, Survivor-style wilderness challenges, even barnyard adventures.
This month, the University of Guelph is launching a program called The Horse and the Gray Flannel Suit, in which business teams learn about leadership and communication by working with horses.
"This is where the next generation is," says Andrew Lionis, 28, Pressure's interactive-art director. He acknowledges it was a bit disconcerting the first time one of his junior designers pinned him, but he sees the company's unorthodox team-building as a recruitment tool.
"The talent coming out of schools now, they're young, they're active - they don't want to join an agency that goes out a couple times a year and plays softball."
That's great for those who welcome the chance to rough up their boss, but what about those who prefer not to see their co-workers wrestle with anything heavier than the annual budget? The more "extreme" team-building gets, the more companies run the risk of legal trouble.
A Utah salesman is suing his employer after his manager waterboarded him - a torture technique meant to simulate drowning - in an effort to motivate his sales team. A jury awarded a California woman $1.5-million (U.S.) for being spanked in front of her co-workers in what managers described as a camaraderie-building exercise. (An appeals court overturned the verdict due to improper jury instructions.)
In Canada, two former senior executives have filed a civil lawsuit and a human-rights complaint against Bell Canada for alleged gender discrimination; among other claims, they say they were expected to participate in a judo class during a martial-arts-themed retreat. The company denies the women were discriminated against. Their case goes before a tribunal in July.
"One of the potential problems of these extreme team-building activities is they can have the impact of feeling very exclusionary," says Janice Rubin, an employment lawyer at Toronto-based Rubin Thomlinson LLP. Someone with a disability might be totally left out of activities such as martial arts, she notes.
Managers should consider cultural differences as well as physical barriers, says Hugh Christie, head of the national employment law group at Gowlings. In a multicultural society such as Canada's, he says, "Among some cultures, being in physical contact with people from the workplace might be quite offensive."
Barron Lau, who for the record seems like a nice guy and not the kind of boss you'd want to punch, says the connection between Pressure and ultimate fighting grew organically.
He and his brother started doing it to get in shape after a few years of working long hours to build their business, and people in the office noticed the change in them and wanted to join. It's not required, but everyone who works at Pressure is encouraged to try it at least once.
"It brought us together," Mr. Lau says. "MMA is pure testosterone - it has jolted our team with a new level of creativity ... That camaraderie has transferred from our gym locker room into our boardroom."
How do the women in his office feel about that? Mr. Lau says they've all tried the workouts - you can do the conditioning without the physical contact - but none were in evidence at their training session last week.
The rise of extreme team-building leads to another, more basic question: Does any kind of team-building really work? Whether you're grappling with your boss or sitting around a campfire singing Kumbaya, is any of it truly necessary?
Probably not, says Jeffrey Gandz, a professor at the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario. A self-declared skeptic, he says team-building exercises can be useful for breaking the ice and blowing off steam, but most don't yield results in the real world of business.
"I use games occasionally in the first week of an MBA program, but to make that huge leap and say this is really going to help in a significant way, that's too much of a stretch for me," Dr. Gandz says. "The best kind of team-building is that which is focused on real tasks that have to be done."
Personally, he's participated in paintball wars and a cooking class. "People enjoyed shooting at the president [of the company]," he says, and he quite enjoyed the cooking class. "I didn't know how to make profiteroles before.
"But," he asks, "what was the point of it?"
Hall of Shame
Team-building exercises can range from fun to cringe-worthy. But when extreme team-building goes bad, watch out:
When Provo, Utah office worker Chad Hudgens volunteered for a team-building exercise last May, he was expecting something like an egg toss. Instead, his co-workers pinned him down while his supervisor poured water over his nose and mouth - a torture technique that simulates drowning, known as waterboarding. According to The Washington Post, the supervisor said afterward, "You saw how hard Chad fought for air right there. I want you to go back inside and fight that hard to make sales." Mr. Hudgens is suing the company.
A manager at an Arkansas furniture store was required to wear an inflated sumo suit and wrestle his colleagues during an off-site training meeting. He fell and broke his ankle, and later sued. The Arkansas Workers' Compensation Commission determined that the injured worker could only collect worker's compensation, and couldn't sue for damages because the injury happened as part of his job.
A dozen Burger King employees attending a motivational seminar in Florida in 2001 suffered serious burns on their feet while walking on hot coals, launching 1,000 flame-broiled jokes. According to the Los Angeles Times, the seminar's organizer defended the practice: "Some people just have overly sensitive feet."
