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Career Tools: Field Trips Enhance Teamwork

Departmental outings boost morale, provide shared memories

Part of the Career Tools Series
Members of the Department of Immunology's business office took a field trip to the Duke Lemur Center last year.
Members of the Department of Immunology's business office took a field trip to the Duke Lemur Center last year.

Lara Mekeel peered through the wire at a silky sifaka lemur at the Duke Lemur Center as a guide described how Duke scientists protect lemurs in Madagascar."I didn't realize they are doing so much environmental education here," she said.

Mekeel and four co-workers from the Department of Immunology visited the Lemur Center last year as part of a team-building exercise. Todd Leovic, business manager for the Department of Immunology, uses service anniversaries as regular occasions to take his six-member team on tours of Duke-related places and programs about once a quarter.

"These trips get us out of our own little world and teach us more about the university that we are a part of," Leovic said.

Besides being fun and educational, departmental field trips are a powerful tool to enhance the workplace, according to Wendy Hamilton Hoelscher, team leader for Learning & Organization Development at Duke.

"We each create an image of the people we work with -- their strengths, their quirks," Hamilton Hoelscher said. "Seeing them in a different situation can add depth to that image and help with team building."

For Mekeel, field trips to places like the Lemur Center, the Chapel and the Duke immersive Virtual Environment at the Pratt School of Engineering enhance morale and foster teamwork. "They are fun," she said. "But they also give us a shared memory outside of our regular work, and that helps us bond as a team."

The Office of News and Communications' (ONC) annual team-building trips have ranged from cooking classes to improv comedy. Late last year, the team explored downtown Durham.

David Jarmul, associate vice president for ONC, worked with the Museum of Durham History to create a scavenger hunt based on historic photos of downtown Durham. He created four teams and sent staff members along the sidewalks of downtown Durham to identify historic buildings.

"It was fun to work with my teammates, who are reporters, and watch them pull together the clues that revealed some amazing Durham history," said Stuart Wells, administrative assistant for ONC. "I got to see a new side of folks, some of whom I don't always spend a lot of time with in the office."