Corporate World Discovers The Wilderness Companies Use Challenging Outdoors Experiences To Build Trust And Bonds Among Workers

Pat Burns, the 35-year-old chief executive at San Bruno, Calif., startup demandline.com, had a management-bonding trip up his sleeve. But it wasn’t the cushy, martini-soaked kind that happens at a wine country spa, Aspen ski resort or Monterey beach chalet.

“I didn’t tell them where we were going, but that they might want to think about getting into shape,” he said. “I said they ought to be able to run six miles in less than 10-minute intervals. They ought to be comfortable wearing backpacks.”

And they ought to trust their leader even after climbing out of a plane in Anchorage, Alaska, and greeting a van full of 70-pound backpacks and two grinning mountaineer instructors.

There were ice axes and crampons waiting in the van, too, for ice and snowclimbing.

Four unshaven, endurance-testing days later, the demandline.com management team had climbed 4,500 vertical feet to summit ice-packed Matanuska Peak, waded through snow up to their waists, eaten dehydrated chicken and dug ice pits for shelter and hygienic uses.

This CEO’s style is a bit more on the daredevil side. He saw no reason why an extreme outdoor challenge - ice-climbing in Alaska - shouldn’t apply to corporate team building.

While Burns’ approach is more extreme than most, it reflects the growing practice of companies to send employees out to bond and blend in the wilderness.

Excursion veterans say the experiences build upon the togetherness of the office holiday party and toss in a healthy mix of sweat, physical exhaustion and the kind of cooperation only a mountain or fast-moving river can promote.

Even adventure outfitters are noticing more customers coming in to shop for gear they need for the next company outing.

“I think once the dotcom companies (arrived en masse) in the last couple of years, they were hiring younger and younger, and the suit-and-tie IBM days are over,” said Kevin De Palmer, an outdoor equipment buyer at San Francisco’s Lombardi Sports.

Lombardi sells rope-climbing harnesses and caribeeners by the dozens - plus piles of bicycling accessories such as helmets and gloves - to people going on climbing and biking trips or doing a ropes course with co-workers.

There are more mellow ways to massage a physical challenge into a team-building experience.

Outward Bound, the venerable nonprofit that has been teaching outdoor adventure since 1941, has seen a sharp increase in enrollment in its adult classes targeting working professionals, said Roni Richey, West Coast program director.

This year on the West Coast alone, the program has served 150 firms, shepherding their employees on one to five-day trips with activities ranging from rock-climbing to mountaineering and river-rafting, sometimes including sit-down sessions at a conference center.

“In high tech, the rate of hire is steep, and the turnover rate can also be steep,” Richey said. “I can walk across the street to that dotcom and potentially earn more. There’s an underside to this rapid growth, which is retention. There’s less employee loyalty. We found a growing demand for programs that increase relationship-building in the company.”

An ideal group size is eight to 12 employees, she said.

A typical California trip would be three days of backpacking and rock-climbing in Joshua Tree National Monument.

At $200 to $400 per person per day, including equipment, safety training, guides and often food, a company would spend about $9,000 to send 10 employees on such a trip.

“It could be senior VPs to the receptionist,” Richey said. “One of the things these active days can do is level the playing field.”