ExaBee Langkawi Team Building – Part 1

And so we all went to Langkawi, the land of the Eagle & Red Limestone. Every Exabee was there, along with their spouse or partner or single as the case maybe!

15th October 2010

Friday being a weekday, the office had to be open to welcome our guests and customers, so we all left in groups, four in all, scattered across the day, dividing work equally amongst all ourselves. Keeping true to our motto of customer first, we had our support team and sales team working from Langkawi too in turns 🙂 Our customers would never suffer from lack of attention!

Below is some pictures of how the OneHotel Helang Langkawi where we had our team building. This hotel is just right beside Langkawi airport. It is 5 minutes walking distance from Langkawi Airport to our hotel, but the Hotel do send van to carry all of us from airport to hotel.

The entire staff assembled for dinner in the evening which was followed by a session of team-building exercise. It was the start of what was to be an eventful next couple of days. It all started in right earnest with each of us formally introducing ourself – mentioning our name, home-town and favourite animal and soon enough it was time for us to unwind and then rewind to become kids! It was the game where we were divided equally, partitioned by a curtain and then had to guess the other person’s favourite animal by memory! It was fun all the more. You could trust exabees to have some weird faves, we did not disappoint, out came from the closets of our mind favourites like cockroach, pokemon, godzilla, dinosaur! One of us had ‘human being” as favourite animal!!!

Having broken our inhibitions so to say, we got down to some work (fun work). We formed in all four teams comprising an average of 9 exabees namely – Team ‘9 King Coconut’, Team ‘The Cube’, Team ‘Tarzan’, Team ‘Wonder Blue’ with respective captains, war-cry, flag and a logo too!!! Friday comprised of very sober happenings, like the proverbial lull before the storm so to say.

16th October 2010

Saturday morning was breakfast followed with stretching exercises it should always be the other way round, but then you know that at Exabytes we do things “differently”, pun intended. It was a new way of exercise, one which was intended at making us all relax and really get into fun mode and frolic. Stretching was followed by a game of follow the leader kind of thing. We discovered new terms like “whoosh‘ – a pseudo for pushing the onus on your neighbor, ‘Hantu”, which would mean we all change our places in the big circle and run to another place – we did not spare the CEO either in this, and sporting that he was, he also did not let a misbehaving spine meddle in the fun.

The first serious activity of team building in-room activity began with a game about togetherness, we were given a few ice-cream sticks and asked to make a triangle of it without using glue. Once done, next challenge was to put up a star with 15 sticks without breaking.

Time was then for jig-saw puzzle with 6 pieces being given and told to form an A-4 size perfect rectangle.

Further bonding was forged when all of us put together had to pass on a stick to each other without letting it drop even once on the ground from any person. Doing it with 2 or 4 people is a tough nut to crack, try picturizing this being done by 36 people all in co-ordination, in rapt attention and concentrating. We were all pushing each other for this, and lo and behold, we managed to pass the stick around 9 times to each other i.e. a total of 324 passes without a miss – Sir Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United cant do it!!! The purpose of the entire team building exercise was being realised there itself.

It was 90 minutes before lunch. Time for the “Amazing Team Building Race”. It was upto the teams to visit 14 locations within the resort, click team photographs as proof of visit (sabotaging was allowed too!). Points were awarded based on who came first to the training hall after visiting all 14 places. A further twist was to resolve 5 separate puzzles – a combination of brain & brawn with subtlety.

Picture below is one of the spot given by our instructor.

and picture below is picture of “The Cube” team took at this spot.

It was time for lunch on Saturday and so do we also rest the team building update here. There is plenty still coming up in our next update, as always we promise bags full of fun, games, activity but more importantly teaming with each other. Part II follows . . .