company outing are Pat Borelli and
Karen Eastman. (Al Alexio)
The company outing is no picnic.
Well at least it’s not a regular picnic. More and more companies are spicing up their corporate outings by integrating new elements into the mix to either build teamwork or just to increase the level of fun.
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Providence-based industrial design firm Item recently held a pig roast for its 30 employees. Mike Twist, design strategy manager for the company said he wanted to do something different from a traditional picnic or a clambake, and this turned out to be the perfect situation.
“We’re a design firm, and we’re always trying to push the envelope with different new activities,” he said. “And this whole teambuilding thing, although it sounds cliché, is what we try to make the foundation of what we do, and a pig roast sounded like something most people don’t do on their own.”
Twist said it worked out better than a traditional hamburgers and hot dogs picnic because everyone was eating from the same animal. He spoke to the nature of a pig roast.
“We had one pig that had to make a ‘commitment’ to the pig roast, as compared to say 30 lobsters who would have had to make that ‘commitment’ if we had done it another way,” he said.
The Item pig roast was organized by North Providence-based Funtastic Events, a division of Borrelli Entertainment. The company, in business since 1928, sets up a variety of corporate functions from the traditional picnic to full-out theme parties with amusement rides, celebrity look-alikes and Rocketman, who for $20,000 will fly into your event on his jet-powered backpack.
Paul Borrelli, owner of Funtastic, said the company organizes about 300 events per year, a third of which are corporate functions.
“We only try to do one event per day so we don’t spread ourselves too thin,” said Borrelli. “These events can be anywhere from 50 to 2,200 people.”
Providing everything from the food to the portable toilets, Borrelli said his approach to business is “one call does it all.”
“We’re completely self-contained,” he said. “It’s great to be able to look at a blank field with no facilities and we roll in with our trucks and in two hours there’s a party happening.”
The Item picnic was at the Tillinghast Estate in Barrington. Twist said that two of Item’s partners are Rhode Island School of Design Alumni, so getting permission to use the grounds was not difficult.
Twist said he is aware of other sorts of corporate events, but is happy with his choices so far.
“We have more of a low key approach to the team thing than a pseudo outward bound sort of thing,” he said. “We’re more kitsch than class. We’re designers.”
Another alternative to the traditional company picnic where many companies can go to get more than just a ‘pseudo outward bound’ experience is the Whispering Pines Conference Center at the W. Alton Jones Campus in West Greenwich. Here companies can use the ropes course on the 2,300-acres and build camaraderie through physical activities.
But this is not the only place where physical activity and teamwork can work together in establishing camaraderie between co-workers. At Painted Warriors in Coventry and West Greenwich, companies participating can learn teamwork and sportsmanship with a splat.
Wanda Noel, who owns the paint ball courses with her husband Garry, said many companies leave Painted Warriors sweaty and exhausted, vowing to return.
“The best thing we can offer as far as companies coming in and playing paint ball is that it’s usually done on a real team-building basis,” she said. “Some companies actually make a five-hour day of it.”
Noel said the employees get a kick out of shooting the boss with a paintball gun the same way participants go after the bachelor at bachelor parties at Painted Warrior and the person whose birthday it is, at birthday parties.
“It’s in a kidding way though,” she said.
Not all corporate outings have to involve physical activity to evoke camaraderie.
Providence’s Improv Jones delivers improvisational comedy to companies looking to participate in a laugh together.
“To actually yell something out in a group can be really fun for people,” said Jed Arkley, an actor with the group who also does the booking.
In improvisational comedy, or “improv”, the actors make up comical scenes according to the audience’s suggestions, which at corporate functions can sometimes involve work-related issues.
