The hell of corporate retreats

Sure, team retreats can help create a more collaborative workforce. But they can also go off the rails fast

IF YOU’RE ANYTHING like me (which is to say, you have a professional interest in workplace culture writ large, and a personal interest in television), then the new series from the makers of last year’s hit show Jury Duty was always going to be appointment viewing. (For the uninitiated, the show’s premise was to take a single unsuspecting non-actor and surround them with actors in a simulated tour of jury duty, only revealing the orchestration at the end.)

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This year, with Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat, the Amazon-created show swapped the fake jury room for a fake, and very outlandish, corporate retreat for a fake business, a hot sauce company called Rockin’ Grandma’s. We’ll leave the TV viewing to you, but for anyone who’s ever been on a corporate retreat, the show is definitely worth a watch.

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Everything in the show is fairly outlandish, sometimes straining credulity — although, it appears the writers and producers didn’t have to stretch too far. The interest in the show prompted the Wall Street Journal to unearth a story about just how wrong a corporate retreat can actually go. In 2017, the tech company Plex hosted Plexcon 2017 — a $500,000, Survivor-themed company retreat where anything that could go wrong did, according to company execs.

The company founder, Scott Olechowski, and its CEO, Keith Valory, told WSJ the trip started with E. coli sickness for Valory, which caused him to lose “eight or 10 pounds.” It got worse from there. One of the first challenges was a Survivor classic — eat something gross. “When I opened up the cover, it was a dead tarantula,” Plex’s head of business development, Shawn Eldridge, recalled. “I just grabbed it and did it. Pretty horrible, not going to lie.”

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Then came the drill sergeant Plex had hired, which Valory said was “one of our biggest mistakes,” He had staff doing Army crawls on the beach in 100-degree weather. “It’s hot and humid and people are passing out,” Olechowski recalls. “I don’t think he’d ever seen quite such an unfit group.” Worse still, said one senior product manager, is the were crawling on top of a fire ant nest. (The whole thing was caught on tape — you can actually watch the promotional video for the event, although much of the calamity has been scrubbed clean.)

So, next time you’re forced to endure a corporate cooking class or escape room session, just remember it could be much worse. Although, as bad as Plex story seems, those interviewed about seem to remember it fondly. “You get really close bonds on these trips; it’s like the life-sustaining force of the company,” said E. coli-stricken Valory. Heck, even the fire ants weren’t enough to ruin the memory for the senior product manager, who said it was “still one of the most fun trips ever.” Kieran Delamont