The StorMan team-building weekend
About the Author
Having designed his first website at the age of 13, Andy has been with StorMan since 2006 and is now our Marketing & Web Services Manager. Andy also runs our client graphic & website design department, known as StorMan Business Services.
Whether your question's about web design, colour codes, Google or HTML tags, Andy's your man! You can get in touch with Andy via our Contact page.
This weekend just gone, staff from all StorMan offices attended a team-building and company-conference weekend in New Zealand. Included in the weekend were a series of activities designed to bond the team, expand the personal comfort zone (I certainly did this!), experience some NZ culture, and discuss all things company-related, with a view to further-improving systems, procedures, and so on. Whilst on our trip, I maintained a blog - excerpts from the blog are included below...
Thursday evening after work, we all bundled into a taxi and headed off to the airport. Unfortunately we made the mistake of thinking there would be food on the other side of the custom's gate at the Brisbane international... we were wrong! Rather than go through Customs again, we ended up snacking on the various chocolate bars, chips, etc we'd bought during the day instead. We boarded the plane at about 7pm AU time, and landed at about 12:30am on Friday morning NZ time. We went through the NZ inbound customs and then met Ben (StorMan AU) outside the airport in the hotel's shuttle bus. We all squeezed in and drove the 10 or so minutes to the hotel.
At about 9am, we were picked up by Aaron (StorMan NZ) and driven to the StorMan office in Manukau city. We had a few meetings and I got to meet a few staff members I'd seen in photos and spoken to on the phone, but never met in "real life". For lunch, we went to a pasta place down at the local Westfield, which was quite nice. Darran (StorMan AU) and I both had pizza - Tandoori chicken topped with banana slices and mint yogurt.
We left the office at around 6:30pm local time, and then, finally, I was able to see Auckland! We had an 8pm dinner booking at a nice Brazilian place called Wildfire. They basically keep bringing out meat like chicken, beef, pork, rips of all kinds, salmon etc until you turned this little wooden thing upside down - one side was painted green, the other red - red means stop bringing out the food! At about 11pm, we left and did a bit of a tour of the local area - down at the wharfs, etc. It's beautiful at night - and there was a huge sailing boat too - The "Spirit of New Zealand". I'd never seen a sailing boat of that size before!
The next morning, Aaron (StorMan NZ) picked us up in a bright yellow bus / truck / van / tank-type thing and we headed out the first of our destinations for the weekend... Rotorua (for Quadbiking, Luge, and so on). On the way down, we sang along and air-guitared to ACDC's TNT, and various other rock hits. At noon, we stopped in at a quaint little cafe on the side of the road and had lunch. While we were waiting, they gave us some bread to feed the chickens, emu and a giant goat (see photo below). At around 1pm, we pulled into the quad bike adventure park.
This was an activity that was outside my personal comfort zone - but I wanted to do it as it looked like a lot of much fun... and I'm glad I did it. The ride went for about 1.5 hours - up steep hills, down steep hills, sharp curves, boggy mud. It was fun to watch Aaron get stuck in mud (unfortunately there aren't any photos!). He was so badly stuck that they had to tow his quad out! Mud went absolutely everywhere.
Later on in the track, Darran (StorMan AU) somehow managed to get 'big air' on his quad and he landed up on a ledge half-a-meter off the ground! It was hilarious to come around the corner and see Darran up there on his quad stuck amongst some trees. I wish I had taken my camera along! Wayne (StorMan USA / NZ) also got stuck - and I mean really stuck - about 30cm of mud, and by the time they pulled him out, he was covered in mud up to his waist (there's a photo of that below, too!). After quadbiking, we checked into our hotel - covered in mud, mind you. Poor Wayne (StorMan USA / NZ), having been knee deep in mud had driven back to the hotel in his own car (since he'd met us out there), drove to the hotel in only his undies and jacket. He even went into the hotel lobby dressed like that!
After we were settled in, we had a quick drink at the bar, then went up to the Luge. It was awesome! We had 5 goes each. But due to the rain, I only got 2 in. Most did either 2 or 3 runs of the Luge. Darran (StorMan AU) did all 5 - he was there in the dark! By himself - the only guy left on the Luge ...talk about dedication to the task at hand! After that we had dinner up the same mountain. We chatted together as a group - it was a great felling to have the whole company together there enjoying a meal. We left at about 9pm and sat in front of the warm open fire.
On Sunday, we wandered into the conference room for a day-long team-building and conference session. It was really good - we broke into groups and discussed different topics using a Key-3 type system to vote and find the top 3 tasks we need to complete for each of the topic areas, plus an overall top-3 at the end. Department heads also provided reports on the last few months, and future directions. That evening, we went to a Maori Experience; this was fantastic - albeit pretty cold, at something like 3 or 4 degrees Celsius! Luckily they had lots of fires going. We saw some cultural dances, ate lots of food from the hangi, and learnt a lot about the Maori culture.
On the way back home, the bus driver from the tour company started singing a few songs. One of which was the tune "She'll be coming 'round the mountain when she comes..." and then a few seconds later, we come up to a roundabout on the road. And low and behold, we went around, and around, and around the roundabout as we're all singing. About 30 seconds later, another 2 tour busses from the same company (all filled with different groups) are also going around the same roundabout. So, picture this: it's about 10:30pm, and here are three full busses going around the same round-about, about 6 or 7 times. Hilarious! One or two poor cars are sitting there at the roundabout trying to get in, and wondering what's going on!
The next day, we had breakfast together and checked out of the Prince's Gate Hotel & headed over to the Agrodome. Here, you could swoop, shweeb, bungee, jetboat and freefall. I did the Shweeb & Jetboat twice. The jetboat is a lot of fun! The first time I went on the Shweeb, I raced Stephen (StorMan NZ). He did the 3 laps in 1m10s; I was slightly slower at 1m17s. Later in the day, I raced Robert from the NZ team and shaved a full 7 seconds off my score... tying Stephen's previous score of 1m10s... woohoo! We worked out that our average speed was about 31 kilometres per hour. Not too bad for pedal-power!
Ben (StorMan AU), Nick (StorMan NZ) and Darran (StorMan AU) bungee-jumped, and Josh (StorMan AU) did the freefall. We had an awesome lunch there (and what would have to be the world's best pumpkin soup - ever!) and then headed over to the Luge again for the afternoon. Poor Darran (StorMan AU) wasn't feeling well after his swoops, bungees and Luge's, and was feeling ill all the way back to Auckland. At about 8pm, we checked into our hotel for the night. Unfortunately we had to wake up at 4am to pack, and get the shuttle bus at 5am for our 7am international flight to Brisbane.
And that's basically it - we went straight back to work after landing... what an awesome weekend! I invite you to check out the photos below...
Regards,
Andy (Marketing & Branding Manager, StorMan Australia)
