Cooking team building events in Italy

Team building can have a variety of goals. Sometimes it’s about supporting a team in developing internal harmony and improving group dynamics to aid day-to-day productivity. Sometimes it’s about improving leadership. And sometimes it’s about helping different teams from the same firm as they meet for the first time. The widespread internationalisation of large companies has resulted in this last type of team building becoming particularly popular. Smart Eventi was involved in a team building project for Canadian Solar, a leading firm in solar panel production. Canadian Solar has offices in several Countries, which means their employees, while doing the same job, rarely get to interact with their counterparts from other nations. We were tasked with planning a day’s activities for international teams to meet in a non-working environment, get to know one another and create positive synergies that could have a positive impact on the company as a whole.

BBQ Team Building

Years of team building experience have taught us thatdifferent activities produce different results. Specifically, team building activities that involve food have proved to be excellent socialising tools. We are hard-wired to perceive meals as the perfect context in which to build and strengthen relationships. Shared meals are times of truce, used to learn about others, engage and explore interactions and hierarchies. We therefore decided to plan a BBQ Team Building for our client.

We need challenges

Of course we needed to offer something more complex than a barbecue. It is a known fact that social occasions per se, with no planned activities, do not encourage mingling, but rather result in the same groups reforming and strengthening, negating the point of the whole exercise. Inspired by the proliferation of cooking shows, we had our guest challenge each other for the title of Grill Master.

Local value

When planning social activities, knowledge of the local territory and its resources is paramount. When an international firm decides to offer their team an incentive travel or team building experience in Italy, we want them to get the best the Country has to offer in terms of natural resources, culture and culinary traditions. We took our contestant to the beautiful region of Lake Iseo and set up a local market on the shore, so that our aspiring chefs could purchase local ingredients for their grill. Our market was incredibly realistic and contestants needed to haggle, in order to obtain the best ingredients for the lowest price. We hired real chefs to judge the results, taking into account team spirits and creativity. After a delicious meal our team members started to mingle on their own, relaxing in the shade of the trees, staging impromptu beach volley tournaments and venturing onto the lake on pedal boats.