Team Building by Bike Building
Meghan King and BU Dining Services employees made bicycles for young girls from the Big Sister Association
A corporate district meeting may bring to mind conference rooms and mundane speeches, but for Boston University’s Dining Services managers, last month it meant competing to build and decorate bicycles and then donating them to young girls.
Meghan King, Dining Services human resource manager, worked with Team Builders Plus to customize a fun program that would strengthen respect, improve communication, and develop team-building skills among BU’s Aramark workers. Aramark is the University’s dining and food services management company. In the end, according to King, the program would benefit the community as well.
“After a long discussion on different options,” she says, “we thought it would be great to combine an activity that would help develop our management team as well as give us all a feeling of satisfaction.”
After participating in a program that assessed personal styles to improve day-to-day interactions, the 48 managers formed 9 groups for a team-building exercise. Each group was given a bike frame suitable for a 9-to-11-year-old child. King says that each group’s job was “to present a marketing campaign that promoted the group’s bike, build the remainder of the bike by completing short tasks or games in order to be awarded another piece of the bike, and decorate the bike by using our creative side.”
After inspection by a local bicycle company, the bikes were given to nine girls from the Big Sister Association. “It was a great day for all of us at BU,” says King.
Rebecca McNamara can be reached at ramc@bu.edu.
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