For those booking their team building events in Australia’s summer months the choice of whether to venture outdoors or to pick an indoor option can be a tricky one indeed.
Summer brings great opportunities for the outdoors, but common sense and caution must also be exercised liberally to ensure that the outdoors is your friend and not your foe.
Going outdoors is a great stimulus for novelty. It’s also a nice way to get jaded office-dwellers outside of the usual four walls, but their sedentary indoor lifestyles may also make it a ‘double edged sword’ to do so.
The summer season brings with it longer and warmer days that may tempt us to the outdoors, but if staging a conference or off site in the tropics in particular, then outdoors can bring with it some serious OHS perils.
Summer heat and humidity can easily cause discomfort or worse to individuals not properly acclimated to it, even with water stations and “slip, slop, slap”.
Anything requiring extended periods outdoors, and / or any rigorous physical activity must be given serious risk assessments first. Unless there is very good reason to do it (or working with sporting or Defence teams where physical robustness may be common to the whole team), we do in fact recommend complete avoidance of such approaches.
Events that offer periodic forays into the heat, but also regular shaded stops or indoor breaks are often a nice compromise for the usual business or government team. Options like The Agency, or a well-designed Quest can work well here.
Well-intentioned organisers keen to have their teams enjoy the great outdoors can have a rebellion on the hands after a couple of hours exposure to the summer sun. This can especially be the case for hangover sufferers at conferences.
Team building in summer also lends itself well to water based options like our Kon Tiki challenge, but plenty of shade is required for the briefing, preparation and building stages to assure delegate comfort.
Increasing intensity and unpredictability of storms can also create a nightmare for event planners locked into purely outdoor options.
To fully commit to an outdoor approach can be a bit like rolling the dice in storm season. People often associate this factor with Brisbane / QLD, but increasingly team building Sydney and Melbourne has been impacted adversely by storms of late as well.
We therefore also offer a range of events that can work indoors and / or outdoors.
Hope this helps in your deliberations for summer team building fun.