Adam Small and his employees were climbing the walls, but it was actually a good thing for office camaraderie.

Small, the operations manager for the Des Moines Menace soccer team, took his six-person front-office staff to a half-day team-building session at Climb Iowa in Grimes earlier this year.

“They’re a sponsor of ours, so it just made sense to try it out,” Small said. “It was a nice blend of the team-building side as well as climbing exercises.”

The indoor climbing gym, which opened two years ago, is an example of some of the year-round team-building opportunities available to Greater Des Moines businesses.

Having fun

At Climb Iowa, “the whole purpose of the program is pushing people’s boundaries and getting them outside of their comfort zones,” said Aaron Stevens, general manager and team-building facilitator. He previously worked for a climbing gym in Kansas City, Mo., where he led corporate team-building exercises for 10 years.

Team building and climbing “go hand in hand, since climbing is such a trusting activity,” Stevens said. Climb Iowa’s team-building program also incorporates a number of non-climbing exercises to build trust and problem-solving skills within the team, he said.

Closer to ground level, Employee & Family Resources Inc. (EFR) has seen a lot of interest in team-building activities, said Kirk Trow, EFR’s manager of workplace performance solutions.

“With what’s gone on in the business environment, teams have been put under a lot of stress,” Trow said. “So organizations are looking at, ‘What are some of the fundamental things we can do to make our people better team players?’ I think organizations recognize that high-performing teams accomplish more, and they also have fun doing it.”

EFR usually conducts the training at the client’s facility, offering both classroom sessions and activities that support the message that the team is working on, Trow said.

“It’s important to build activities within the training itself,” he said. “Sometimes we will send people out and about. One activity we have used is a scavenger hunt – to find things and photograph them. There’s some decision-making involved in that, and certainly some communication. But the other part of it is a fun element; there has to be an element of fun.

“The other piece of that is it helps create trust and communication,” he said. “In a high-trust environment, there’s a lot that can get accomplished.”

Overcoming obstacles

Another team-building program in Greater Des Moines is offered by Jester Park Equestrian Center in Granger.

The center has conducted team-building sessions for several large financial services companies, among them ING Groep NV, Principal Financial Group Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co., as well as groups from smaller companies, said Debby Crowley, Jester Park’s education director.

“Everyone just really enjoys it,” Crowley said. “We’ll have people come back here years after they’ve done one of our team buildings, and they’ll still be talking about it.”

At the same time, demand for the program has slowed, she said. “I don’t know if it’s because there’s no budget,” she said. “Quite frankly, we’re so busy (with other programs) we don’t do a lot of marketing about it.”

The sessions starts with a primer on horse safety, and then the real fun begins. Participants are paired up, and with little instruction work together to figure out how to catch their horse in the big indoor arena, attach a halter and then groom it.

“We do other exercises to encourage teamwork,” Crowley said. “My favorite is called ‘Life’s Little Obstacles.’” In that exercise, a pole is set up horizontally to create a low obstacle for the horse. Without talking, touching the horse or bribing it, the team must find a way to coax the animal over the obstacle. “And we will have a consequence, like jumping jacks, if the group violates the rules,” Crowley said.

The exercises are good for expanding a group’s thinking, she noted.

“I’ve had them figure out they can move the jump right in front of the horse, or boxing the horse in to make it easier,” she said. “In other words, thinking outside the box. After we do several exercises like that, we’ll discuss it. And then often we’ll take a trail ride or a wagon ride as a relaxing way to end the day.”

Bigger groups

EFR’s Trow said many companies’ work groups and departments have grown due to consolidations and mergers, which presents new challenges in providing team-building programs.

“We’ll work with the managers to determine what size we can work with to deliver the best results for that company,” he said. “We’re flexible; if the company wants us to work with a large group, we’ll do that.”

Trow, who has spent the majority of his career designing and delivering training programs, has also coached high school athletics for 25 years. He’s currently the boys’ tennis coach at Valley High School in West Des Moines.

Is it easier to coach teen athletes or adult workers?

“Sometimes on the athletic side there’s more of a defined objective (of winning the game) and what their role is in relation to that,” he said. “I think the challenge in business is identifying that outcome and what everybody’s role is in that.”

Most organizations that have used Climb Iowa’s program have found out about it through an employee who is a climber, Stevens said. “Every group is different,” he said. “It allows me to think on my feet about how to get this team to work together most effectively.” Stevens sometimes has one of the team members blindfolded or two people tied together to spur cooperation.

Small said the program helped his staff come together more closely as a unit.

“It has helped us to rely on each other more, more of building that trust,” he said. “Probably most importantly, just bringing us together outside of that normal office environment.

“We’ve been planning how we can do other sorts of things outside the office – a good team is united around a common goal,” he said. “We have camaraderie, but you can always take that to the next level. That’s a definite competitive advantage, when people are passionate about what they’re doing.”