Taking a team down to the water, and what stays with them

An HR director asked me on the phone last week whether what I run is 'an activity'. Fair question, and I answer it plainly: yes, a morning at Pointe Rouge works perfectly well as an activity, plenty of companies stop there and go home pleased. The teams who ring me a second time usually saw something else happen that morning. I live in Marseille and I run breathing, movement and paddle yoga sessions on beaches that sit twenty minutes from the offices of most of the people I work with. Hardly anyone makes use of that.

The place does the work for me

In a meeting room, freshly painted or not, coloured sticky notes or not, everyone turns up wearing their role. The manager is still the manager. The colleague who says little goes on saying little, and the cohesion exercise plays out on ground where the places were handed out long ago. On sand that ground comes apart by itself: everyone is barefoot, everyone is cold at the start, everyone hears the same waves. I could not tell you the mechanism, and I am wary of the tidy explanations people give for it from a stage. I only know that they interrupt each other less. After twenty minutes of guided breathing facing the water the pace shifts, questions get blunter, and I have watched a team settle in a quarter of an hour something it had been walking around since the autumn.

Silence bothers nobody when the waves are filling it. Somebody ends up saying the thing they had been keeping to themselves.

Hooking the session onto what you already do

A one-off session stays an event, and I now say so to companies before they get round to asking. What makes it useful is the way it attaches to an objective you have already written down: psychosocial risk prevention, settling a team after a reorganisation, rebuilding a group after six months of overload, the wellbeing strand of a sustainability policy. The environmental side arrives on its own, since I talk about the coastline during the session, about what you can see from the beach and what is spoiling it. Several teams have followed the morning with a beach clean out at Les Goudes. It counts: people still bring it up months afterwards, which nobody has ever done for the organic fruit basket on a Monday morning.

• Guided breathing on the beach, one hour, up to twenty-five people. No kit, no special clothing.
• Half day: breathing, gentle movement, then a seated circle facing the sea for open discussion, running as long as it needs to.
• Paddle yoga taster, in groups of eight to twelve, supervised on the water.
• Blue Therapy talk indoors, with the hands-on session at the shore the following morning.
• Opening session for an offsite, early, before the working workshops start.
• Short format before a strategy meeting: thirty minutes of breathing.

What goes wrong, and always surfaces too late

I raise all of this at booking stage, because everything can still be sorted out then, and the day before nothing can. Weather: in Marseille rain is almost never the problem, the mistral is, it makes a session on the water impossible and a session on the sand miserable for everybody. Travel: count door-to-door time, the mileage lies, and remember that the southern beaches are badly served once you step outside peak hours. That leaves numbers: past twenty-five people my voice stops carrying without amplification, so I split the group rather than shout over the surf.

1. 01Agree the objective with HR: what you want to see change, before choosing what you are going to have people do.
2. 02Choose the site around the real accessibility needs of the group, including anyone with reduced mobility.
3. 03Check changing rooms, toilets and drinking water, and say so plainly when there are none.
4. 04Write to the participants: clothing, a towel, and the fact that nobody is put in the water against their will.
5. 05Hold a fallback date, and announce it at the same time as the main one.
6. 06Keep twenty minutes of debrief on site, before everyone heads back to the cars.

A week later

I always ask, sometimes by email a month afterwards, and the answers are not the ones I hoped for when I started out. The novelty fades fast, so does the physical sensation. What remains is a very simple breath, four counts in and six counts out, that people go on doing alone in the car before a conversation they are dreading. It took me years to accept that this is the useful part, ahead of all the beautiful moments. And a shared story remains, a slightly daft one: a team that got cold together, that laughed because a fifty-year-old manager fell off his board attempting warrior pose, holds a reference three indoor offsites will never manufacture. I will not promise you that a morning by the water repairs what is broken inside an organisation, and be suspicious of anyone who does. If you are unsure, take one hour, a group of volunteers and a beach near the office. A Tuesday in November, ideally, when nobody feels like going.