Can I suggest an axe-throwing and akvavit experience.
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Honestly at this point if my coworkers implied I had to go hike in the mountains with them I’d be looking for another job and thinking about all the times I didn’t call a lawyer when I should have.
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I don’t know what kind of workplace this was but, even if they had followed best practices and stuck together, summiting a mountain in the 14,000 ft range is a significant challenge for most people. You really start to notice the effects of high altitude when you’re up that high. Very strange choice for an office retreat.
Fair point, although I might still pick this over the standard indoor team-building exercise. Last time I was subjected to one of those, we had to do a conga line for some reason, and the woman behind me grabbed my ass. I was not amused.
It definitely sounds attempted murdery-ish. Not that I necessarily think that would stick, but damn.
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We did have an axe throwing company event at a nearby farm brewery. (What is a better activity than mixing alcohol and cutting tools?) The coworker everyone wanted to throw axes at, didn’t show up for some strange reason.
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Between 1 January 1984 to 31 December 2019, the Brecon Beacons witnessed the deaths of twenty UK armed forces personnel in training exercises. The Ministry of Defence have stop publishing numbers since then.
Edit: some of these deaths occurred during selection for the SAS, so we’re not talking raw recruits. 
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I was at a team building exercise for my department, arranged by one of my colleagues, who was very openly gay. The person doing the event was a rather handsome chap who my colleague had seen beforehand and specifically ask for to do the training.
The last task was breaking arrows. Staff members each took turns face to the trainer with an arrow trapped, lengthwise, between the bases of their throats, arrow head against the flesh of the staff member and the nock of the arrow against the trainer’s skin; lodged in their suprasternal notchs (I had to look that up). The staff member then was instructed to lunge forward against the arrowhead, with enough force to snap the shaft of the arrow.
Seeing my colleague fulfilling a dream in front of the entire team was a wonderful thing to behold. Like Sebastiane, only fully dressed and with a happy ending.
Maybe even destructive dismissal?
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A lot of those were heat exhaustion rather than hypothermia, but the principle is the same.
One appreciates that war is the province of danger, so preparation for war is likely to involve a degree of danger. That said, the MOD has lost a surprising number of soldiers whose deaths probably could have been avoided with better oversight. (Not just the mountain exercises, also the incidents at bases involving recruits.)
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It’s probably easy to get some losses on just an akvavit experience, never mind the axes
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Yowsers, that’s really messed up. Altitude sickness does weird things – heading up to ~12,500’ on Mount Baldy at Philmont Scout High Adventure we spent four days acclimating and still lost one hiker on the way up to nausea and vomiting, I got a fortunately brief high-altitude nosebleed at the peak, and our adult leaders managed to mistake an overgrown game trail for what the rest of us kept insisting was the actual path, which they later attributed to disorientation and lightheadedness at that altitude. Patty, our ranger, had to take the sick kid down the mountain and assumed we’d be fine since it a clearly marked path and the adults were experienced hikers, but we still ended up scrambling down a few hundred feet of scree and bramble to get back on track when the trail petered out and it became clear we were supposed to be way down there, not still on the ridgeline.
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There’s lots to unpack here, but my take is this: my colleagues are just that - colleagues. I work 12-hour shifts and the last thing I want to do is something like this.
“Team building” on my off-hours is bollocks. I don’t do office happy hours, end-of-shift hang outs, etc. I put in my 12 hours & I go home. If this was “mandatory”, I’d ask if overtime pay was offered; otherwise I’m nopeing-out.
Work to live, not live to work.
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Teambuilding has gotten me sexually assaulted more than once. No thanks to drinking together, being alone in dark places, driving alone in cars, and hiking in remote places with people who know I can’t easily report anything that happens without risking my job and further damage to reputation.
Plus, at one point I saw a person break an ankle at freaking put-put. Most people aren’t built for hiking unless they’ve been doing it a while.
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I am NOT going to do trust falls at their team building exercises…
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Exactly!
I sit in a room for 12 hours with you; why in the hell would I continue this?
I’m “friendly” with you, but we are not friends.
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I want to know what happens with this; whether he sues, and if so, whom.
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