What kinds of social and team building events does your firm/practice run?Weekly drinks? Annual black tie dinner? Brown bag lunches? Anything special, or that you just find effective for getting to know your colleagues?My firm has monthly drinks/Christmas dinner open to the whole office (ca. 1500 ppl). The practice (ca. 50 ppl) has a social event every 12-18 months (chocolate making workshop, picnic at the horse races, go-karting, wine-tasting at Vinopolis, etc.)I've just been put on the social committee and I'm really interested in good ideas so I can get something a bit better organised.

When working for ACN, we used to have:- Monthly drinks & buffet, funded by ACN- Quaterly group events e.g. Progress meeting then evening ball- Xmas party and Summer party.All either fully funded or heavily subsidised.Good times ...

ACN, I agree it feels like it's turning into some cheapo place when they decide to stop those things. Why did they stop them there?

Oooh I remember the fun days when IBM took over PwC.They used to advertise "self-funded" drinks evenings !!Given that the atmosphere in Southwark was as cold and hostile as Siberia, they didn't get many takers.Most of the partners have since left to join EY - hope they're having fun sweating their staff there too !!!

I used to work for a top strategy house that would wheel out the drinks trolley each Friday evening. In principle, this sounds like quite a nice gesture. However the reality was very different. It was effectively a ploy to keep people in the office for a few hours longer. "Great", I would think to myself every Friday at 6pm, "after 80 hours in the office that's just what I need - feeling obliged to spend another 3-4 hours 'socialising' in this place". And just to clarify, slipping out early wasn't an option - this place had a 'collegiate' atmosphere and to do so would have been career suicide.The other type I used to love were the events they would organise on Saturdays. I'd be thinking, "this is my personal time, guys - why are you organising work events on a Saturday??". I could have been out mowing the lawn, taking my kids to a theme park, doing a bit of sport, catching up with friends and relatives, but no - I'd be pretending to enjoy some kind of 'business game' in a sterile air-conditioned conference room or similar. Other people thought the same as me, but we were all too afraid to speak out back them - there was a bit of an 'anxiety' culture thing going on.So, my advice? Simple - organise the event during work hours!

Works hours (or mid week evening), works money.Simple as that. Anything else will be shot down.I recently took a team on a paint balling and team activity day and was genuinly surprised by how much everyone enjoyed it. Perhaps the most surprising thing was that it was the team activities that everyone got into most.Then we hit the bar, and had a thirty minute business update session before drinking away the evening.I think the key is to understand that just getting your people together outside work adds value, trying to get them to complete too much work is often a negative.