You may have seen a series of recent adverts for Vodafone that show groups of employees taking part in ludicrous ‘team building activities’. This was supported by research which implied, that more than half of the people they asked didn’t feel that the team build they had taken part in would ever help them work better with their colleagues.

We do some teambuilding activity – if that is even the right name for it – and I agree with Vodafone’s premise – there are some ridiculous activities on the market. Even the term Teambuilding has, over the years become a meaningless catch-all for any activity that more than three people do together in the aim of creating corporate harmony!

Real value is only garnered from this sort of activity when there is a very clear objective set by the clients, which should be aligned to their own internal values and needs. Here-by hangs the problem. Many clients don’t actually know what they want to achieve from this section of their event, and almost feel obliged to fill the time with anything!

This is where our role comes in, as event experts we should be able to challenge clients and work back from their objectives to design a bespoke activity that answers all of the needs of their brief, rather than take something off the shelf and paint it a different colour!

So in terms of how we approach things…Match the objective with the activity, have a clear desired outcome, facilitate it exceptionally well, make the client think its unique for them, use a different name rather than team build and have some fun as well. Achieve all those and chances are people will respond appropriately and the activity will deliver a great result.

As a vaguely creative person I am regularly mesmerised by the choice of a font within documents, artwork, pitches, proposals – even CV’s.

Fonts are all around us of course, but it’s the good ones as well as the bad that get noticed. How many websites have you seen that just look horrible because of the font chosen, or conversely the reward you feel visually when reading a book, magazine or document that has really chosen the right one!

If all this is sounding a bit geeky (people who design them are actually called font geeks!) then you haven’t heard anything yet, because now things have reached a whole new level, with the launch of the worlds first Font Shop – not an online retail space, but an actual ‘walk-in-off-the-street-and-buy-a-font-from-the-ones-on-display’ type shop, on a real High Street (or whatever that translates to in Danish – the shop is in Copenhagen) The font menu reads like a veritable who’s who of lettering, but with some great new additions such as The Wave, Berling or Scirocco (move over Gil Sans!)

So the next time you settle down to write a document, don’t just think about what you are saying, but also how it is going to look on the page. One top tip – never do your CV in Comic Sans – it will end up in the bin, unless of course you are applying to join a circus!

Many years ago I was Campaign Manager for a guy who changed his name to Mr Blobby to contest the Littleborough and Saddleworth by-election in 1995 as a candidate for the Noel’s House Party Party, – a publicity stunt for the TV show of the same name. A totally bizarre experience from beginning to end, but in writing the party manifesto, I stumbled on what one observer described as “a brilliant political strategy’” at the time, when we took to the streets campaigning.

It was 24/7 working. Every business open all the time. Achieved by giving every unemployed person (at that time 2.6m) and part-timers, an existing job allowing everyone else to work a four day week without a loss of pay, as the increased 24/7 productivity would mean no need to cut wages. Brilliant – the NHPP were the ONLY party offering voters a three day weekend! 105 voters thought it was nothing short of genius, but alas, not enough to protect our deposit – game over.

However, was my one and only political foray actually a look into the future as all of us running businesses now look at ways to deliver more work to more clients by trying to find more hours in the day/week/month/year! Here at mcm we already use Story board artists based in California who can work on creative briefs during their day and our night, and pitches are sometimes proof read overnight by writers in Australia. When you find an extra 10 working hours before a pitch deadline you feel like a genius – try it!

So how far are we from outputting 24/7 (as opposed to all of us working even longer hours ourselves)? Not far I would suggest. Blackberries, laptops and multi-tasking mean WE already pack far more into a working day, but conversely for all the talk of ‘flexi-time’ the majority of the world’s working population still follows a theoretical nine-to-five formula.

In Japan workers regularly sleep under their office desks when its too late to go home, and its bad form to leave before the boss anyway! However, maybe we should all take a leaf out of the work manuals in Finland, where you are considered ‘inefficient’ if you work past 5pm!

So the pressure is on globally, as the 24/7 work ethic creeps up on us, maybe my ‘workforce, workload transfer strategy’ from 1995, taking the unemployed and part-timers into established businesses could just be the right way forward to increase output, AND give the rest of us a longer weekend.

It gets my vote!

Neil Crespin – Chairman & Creative Director, mcm