I’ve heard people say, (paraphrased) “work is work: if your going to give me free time then let me go home.”.
On the other side, an impromptu surprise that you get to be relieved of your responsibilities for the day and go do something fun seems like it would be beneficial for people’s mental health and creativity.
Yet, one can imagine if someone had a sick child at home, or some other concern that infinitely more important than work that it might be a bit torturous to go out and try to have fun with your coworkers when you would rather, and rightly so, want to be home attending to the more important thing.
Although I would want to be the type of leader that I person would feel comfortable just telling that they needed to go home if such a matter of importance were to arise.
If you gave a person a choice at the beginning of their job between a day off or an office field trip, most would probably just choose an extra day off.
Yet, much like buying a gift card for someone you know would never spend money on themselves perhaps it could be a more memorable and helpful experience for them to go out and have fun with no responsibilities.
Yet this may simply be an expression of the lonely ness and desire for human connection that I personally feel, due the current circumstances of semi isolation (just me and my partner) in a new and strange city.
I am not a CEO, I just graduated and I’m working to get my first job. One day I would like to lead people, and perhaps this, per my lack of knowledge, seems a bit farcical, but I wanted to gather some opinions, thanks!
The best managers can find out exactly what motivates their people, and lean into that to make things fun and rewarding (or as much as possible, being work related).
The tricky part is that this won’t be the same for everyone, so a one-size-fits-all field trip won’t necessarily be received the same by all the employees. Maybe the group dynamic is such that everyone has a good time, and this may work out well. Maybe some members resent being compelled to spend relaxed time with people they don’t want to see that way.
In a perfect world, everybody could get their own individualized rewards and recognition, based on what they value most. The only way to get there is to put in the work to know the employees as people.
This I think it’s the crux of it, you def want it to be something everyone is interested it which can be hard. So I guess I probably won’t know until I get to know the heterogeneity of my hypothetical team and their personalities and interests