Coffee Time Science: Staff Retreats – Corny or Constructive?

Don’t knock the team building experience until you’ve tried it

Every day as I come in and out of my office, I am reminded that my team won the ‘Olympic games’ at our institute retreat in New Hampshire last September. What serves as a reminder is the shooting target of our winning performance that I hung on the wall opposite my door. The organizers – in an endearingly nerdy way – had put up a schematic of the HIV envelope protein instead of regular targets and we had to shoot the regions of HIV that we one day hope to target with a vaccine with 22 caliber rifles or bows and arrows to get points. Other Olympic categories included splitting logs with axes, canoeing, balancing on a giant wooden seesaw, and an exercise where we had to get the group across an imaginary swamp without leaving anyone behind. This may sound extremely corny to some (or maybe most) of you – but it was not.

This retreat was different from all others I had been to. For one, there was very little science on the schedule. On both evenings, all faculty gave brief summary talks about the big picture of their work while we sipped on beers or wine. And that was all the scheduled science time we had. I’m not saying that I don’t want to talk about science. Of course I do, I’m a scientist. My point is that we talk about science every day, over coffee, at seminars, in lab meetings, at conferences. The point of a retreat, in my opinion, is not to discuss science as much as to build and improve collegial relationships, which in turn will no doubt have a positive effect on our science, not just through the possibility of establishing new collaborations, but also by creating a friendly and social work environment.

For 3 days, everyone stayed in what is normally a summer camp for boys. This means open sleeping cabins, sleeping bags, portable showers and toilets, campfires, the whole hog. Now camping is not everyone’s cup of tea, and New Hampshire nights can get surprisingly cold in September, but to my surprise everyone seemed to enjoy themselves and people were generally in a very good mood. For the most part, we spent the days doing outdoor activities, ‘training’ for the Olympics, kicking footballs around, getting to know the people in our assigned teams and enjoying the beautiful scenery and fresh air. Our institute has about 250 employees, and I have to admit that before the retreat I did not know the names of many of my colleagues and for the most part did not interact much with people outside my groups and immediate circle of lab mates. Our Olympic teams were deliberately comprised of people from different research groups, as well as administrative and clinical staff, and getting to know my other co-workers while learning things like axemanship and competing together against the other teams was a great deal of fun and has changed my pattern of interacting with many of my colleagues for the better.

I know that every workplace has a different budget and number of staff, but I think investing in building good relationships among co-workers is important and should be a priority for every business. You don’t need to go camping for 3 days to get your staff to bond, even a day out where people can talk to each other about things other than work every now and then is important and should be a regular exercise everyone participates in.

About me: My name is Christine, and I am currently working as a research specialist at the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After my undergraduate studies in Oxford, I moved to London for my PhD and first postdoc. After 7 years in this magnificent city, I was ready for an adventure and decided to go to Boston for 2 years for a second postdoc. As love and science made me swap rainy London for alternately deep-frozen or tropical Boston, 2 years turned into 5 (and counting), and I decided to deviate from the traditional academic trajectory to work as a staff scientist (the rather fancy title of my position is research specialist). Most days, I sit with post-docs and other staff scientists over lunch or coffee, and discussion topics range from the inane to career goals and options, our research, new techniques and technology and the like. I would like to share some of those topics with you in this blog. Want to join in? Grab yourself a cup of your favorite caffeinated beverage, read along, and leave comments. You can read my other blog posts here.