Orlando Team Building And Company Growing

How have meetings and team building events changed in recent years?

Sharon Fisher, an Orlando team building expert at Play With A Purpose, discusses how companies have changed and evolved, and how technology has affected people’s views on meetings. She also talks about how this has created a need for team leaders to make their meetings more engaging and memorable — and how Play With A Purpose can help with that.

“We’ve been in business for 20 years, and our core business has always been the team-building and the community service events, as well as some networking and ice-breaker games, and those have been primarily geared to happen during cocktail parties. What we’re seeing is that meetings are totally changing shape and changing form.

There’s a couple of things all happening all at the same time. One, meetings are being required to show ROI. Companies are now looking at their meetings and they’re not going, ‘We’re just going to have an annual sales meeting this year like we’ve always have in the past, and we’ll put something together.’ Now they’re looking at it and going, ‘Do we need to have a sales meeting? If we do need to have a sales meeting, what are we going to do there?’ The pressure is on to make meetings much more results-driven.

Then we have with that, the confluence of the younger generation and four generations in the workplace, which we’ve never had in our history before, and the younger generation basically growing up with technology hooked to their body. It doesn’t come off, it just stays there. They are saying, ‘We can get this information that you are giving us anywhere. Why do I need to come to a meeting? Why can’t I stay at home and read it on the Internet?’ or, ‘Why can’t I sit at home and watch the speaker on a webinar?’ or whatever.

Meetings are now transforming and trying to figure out, ‘How do we become engaging? How do we really get people involved so that we’re getting the results we’re looking for from meetings? How are we drawing people to the meetings? What are we doing that’s new and unique and fresh?’ You look at TED, who was probably the first start of that, and they condensed and they said, ‘Okay, speakers, you’re not going to talk for an hour. You’re going to talk for 15 minutes or 18 minutes at the most. We just want you to give us your top, high-level, really cool thoughts, and we want deep thinkers to come, and we want it to be all about sparking conversation, not teaching or downloading information.’

We’re starting to see planners saying, ‘How do I shake up my meeting? How do I make it different? How do I make it more engaging and more hands-on? How do I really help people build those connections and those networks that they’re coming to the meeting for?’”