Juda Engelmayer's Blog

By Cloey Callahan

This article first appeared in Digiday‘s newsletter WorkLife on May 16, 2024

Excerpt — Phil Shawe, CEO of TransPerfect who just did offsites in Barcelona and Amsterdam, and specifically designed the company’s San Juan office to facilitate offsites, said when you build trust at an offsite, it often seamlessly goes back to the workplace.

“That’s the magic of successful team-building activities, it automatically returns to the office,” said Shawe. “Teams that know each other, accept their individual strengths and weaknesses, and trust each other, tend to perform better. Culture is a key ingredient of success, and team-building activities can be a valuable tool in establishing management’s culture and vision.”

He admitted that the success of offsites, or even traditional training, can be difficult to tangibly measure with a number or objective criteria. Instead, success can be measured anecdotally.

“It is usually a subject evaluation of, ‘How well does the team work together?’” said Shawe. “When something goes wrong, do they point the finger at each other and try to assign blame, or step up to the challenge and work together to come through for the client and for the company? All things being equal, people tend to work better with those who they respect, understand, know and trust. If your team-building efforts have accomplished this, they have hit the mark.” —

To read the full article, click here