Corporate team-building, new expectations
Team-building activities are now a staple of corporate seminars. Whether it's developing collective intelligence, building team cohesion, generating positive emotions or boosting motivation, the benefits for companies are many and proven. At Les Fontaines, their impact is all the more significant as they are always chosen to meet the challenges of the event.
These activities are constantly evolving in line with corporate strategic orientations, and are regularly reinvented. They now reflect the eco-responsible, humanitarian and solidarity-based aspirations of companies and their employees.
With its threefold expertise in Transformation, Hospitality and Events, and 15 years' experience in designing and staging professional events, Campus Serge Kampf les Fontaines is always on the lookout for innovations and new trends in entertainment to meet the objectives identified by or with its customers.
Spotlight on 2020 trends with Guillaume Devraigne, Campus Production and Innovation Director.
Sustainable development in the spotlight
"The Les Fontaines site is characterized by its Sustainable Development approach, which naturally extends to our team-buildings. For example, each of our events is designed to minimize its environmental impact, in line with our ethical charter," explains Guillaume.
We'll also be developing cooking workshop projects, the produce from which will be delivered to local charities. Our team-building event "La Fresque du Climat", meanwhile, raises participants' awareness of the mechanisms of climate change and its consequences. This activity is in itself a concentrate of what companies are looking for at the moment: team-building, yes, but above all a playful discovery of a complex theme that everyone talks about without really measuring its causes and consequences; potentially echoing the company's ethics."
All these sustainable activities are a perfect response to the new quest for meaning and authenticity on the part of organizers and participants alike. "Following on from the success of our e-waste exhibition, we plan to invite artists - most of them local - who create works of art exclusively from recycled objects or materials. In this way, we're bringing art to the Fountains and raising our participants' awareness of the environmental cause. Art is a voice that carries, and echoes our commitments to the planet."
Enhanced well-being and personal skills
Professional fulfillment now depends on a healthy, serene working atmosphere within companies. Team-building and incentive activities follow this general trend, with the emphasis on collective and individual well-being.
"The Les Fontaines site is characterized by its Sustainable Development approach, which has been part of its DNA from the outset," insists Guillaume. "Internally, as with our customers, we are more than ever committed to caring and listening. Our soft skills workshops are part of a dual approach: improving the quality of life at work and individual well-being - with workshops on stress management, mindfulness, breathing exercises, yoga, postural exercises - but not only. With the trend towards people-oriented management, we also offer workshops to develop participants' social, human and emotional qualities, which today go hand in hand with technical skills. Developing and reinforcing empathy, the ability to solve complex problems, creativity or initiative is now a must, whatever the objective for which a company comes to organize a seminar at Les Fontaines. Our role is clearly to offer organizers the opportunity to enhance participants' skills base during their stay."
More emotions than ever
Ultra-stimulated and ultra-connected, our age can sometimes reach digital saturation. To find the right balance between the extraordinary power of digital and the connection with reality and encounters, it's sometimes necessary to disconnect!
"This is an increasingly frequent request from our customers," Guillaume notes. "In a setting like Les Fontaines, it's easy to carry out a mini Digital Detox lasting a few hours.
Provoking encounters, exchanges, is one of our spearheads. Our "Experience Day" event concept - which won the Best Animation Heavent Paris 2018 award - is based on emotions via immersive encounters with actors: a far cry from the cold relationship with screens!
The Sonorium animation offered at Les Fontaines (also winner of the Best Animation Heavent Paris 2019 award) also takes up the principle of emotions, via a musical immersion in a meeting room, in the Auditorium or in one of the Château's lounges.
Settle down. To listen. Regaining control of your imagination and concentration has become a necessity in today's fast-paced world.
Our 52-hectare park, a haven of peace and greenery, is also of course the ideal setting for other immersive experiences, such as our Fauna & Flora trail, guided by our master gardener."
A goal in sight
"But if there's one constant at the Campus, it's that the events should serve the goal set by the Business Sponsor when he/she decided to bring his/her employees together. In a professional context, the aim is always to create moments shared as a team to meet business challenges, whether to build, develop, federate or thank," concludes Guillaume.
At the dawn of a new decade, our society is turning a new corner: in search of meaning and balance, it wants to focus on what's essential.
Companies, too, have a duty to initiate a general awareness. So, through their professional events, they are now seeking to transform behavior... while committing themselves to a more environmentally-friendly and caring approach.