Career advice, insights & tips for HR professionals

Launch into space - teambuilding mission accomplished 07/06/2010

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Personal impact & influence

Teresa Maguire explains how teambuilding event days can help organisations draw parallels between everyday work Challenges and the Challenges of unusual situations such as space missions. These experiences can be applied in the workplace and help motivate and engage employees.

Launch into space - teambuilding mission accomplished

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What can be learned through teambuilding?
Case study: National Space Centre
Using space themes to work towards common goals
Bringing teams together in new environments
Improving team dynamic & motivation

What can be learned through teambuilding?

There are many important issues that can be tackled using team building and development techniques:

Increasing team cohesion, inter-personal trust, communication and understanding
Developing understanding of complementary team roles
Improving team morale
Making the team function more effectively
Revitalising an existing team
Integration of a new team with others around them.

Case study: National Space Centre

Organisations are now discovering the parallels between normal working environments and space missions.

At the Challenger Learning Centre in Leicester, participants take on the roles of astronauts and mission controllers in two highly realistic environments, working together in small teams and communicating across the void in order to accomplish the goals of the mission. Communication, teamwork, decision making and problem-solving are the skills required here.

Challenger Learning Centres were conceived by the bereaved families of the 1986 Challenger shuttle crew as a memorial to their loved ones. Originally designed to inspire school students to learn maths and science, the centres have been so successful that there are now over 50 and more are being built every year to accommodate demand.

Using space themes to work towards common goals

As many as 30 people can take part in a ‘voyager package’, where a mission control team is required to look after a space station crew who carry out their orders, or there can be as few as 8 participants in a ‘pioneer package', where all the crew are launched together into space for their experience. Both types of mission last between two and two and a half hours, with up to three trained mission commanders facilitating.

The mission requires participants to take on specific roles such as medical officer or probe engineer.

Bringing teams together in new environments

So why have corporate teams come to the Challenger centre, and how have training managers used missions to achieve learning outcomes?

For some, the teambuilding aspect is the strongest pull. Companies such as HMV chose an away day package as part of the induction of graduate student recruits. The aim is to help bring a temporary team together for the period of their learning, a team that had little or no previous knowledge of each other or experience together.

Improving team dynamic & motivation

Teambuilding can deepen team communication or relationships in a well-functioning group or help to develop answers to the Challenges facing a particular team, such as morale, personality clashes, conflict, stress, or other problems.

“Mission Control, this is the Space Station, we now have five minutes of oxygen left, please advise!” ...

Astronauts hurry to point cameras towards the oxygen supply while Mission Control life support officers urgently try to discover a solution. Meanwhile the Navigation Team must find a comet and then there’s a probe to be built…is your team up for a new teambuilding Challenge?