I once worked at a company that liked to do charitable team building. They'd take about 40 engineers and IT people out and do things like serve food or unpackage toys for little kids (remove matchbox cars from the package for example). While I enjoyed the day out of the office I think it was a waste of money (our salaries). If 40 people make $80k/yr on average with 240 working days per year that's $333 per person * 40 = $13,333. You could've hired a minimum wage worker full time for the whole year for that kind of money. All for the novelty of "my department did charity work."
Well, I guess the gain for your team was not the donation - as you admit by saying "I enjoyed the time". The case here is quite different though: The engineers did not package toys or serve food. They brought in expertise to make the whole process of packaging boxes and serving food faster - and with quite impressive results: Cutting down the packaging to ~ 1/20th of the original time is an efficiency gain, even if you hire minimum wage workers to do the job. Cutting the waiting time to 1/5th is a gain for everyone involved, the person waiting and the servers.
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I once worked at a company that liked to do charitable team building. They'd take about 40 engineers and IT people out and do things like serve food or unpackage toys for little kids (remove matchbox cars from the package for example). While I enjoyed the day out of the office I think it was a waste of money (our salaries). If 40 people make $80k/yr on average with 240 working days per year that's $333 per person * 40 = $13,333. You could've hired a minimum wage worker full time for the whole year for that kind of money. All for the novelty of "my department did charity work."
Well, I guess the gain for your team was not the donation - as you admit by saying "I enjoyed the time". The case here is quite different though: The engineers did not package toys or serve food. They brought in expertise to make the whole process of packaging boxes and serving food faster - and with quite impressive results: Cutting down the packaging to ~ 1/20th of the original time is an efficiency gain, even if you hire minimum wage workers to do the job. Cutting the waiting time to 1/5th is a gain for everyone involved, the person waiting and the servers.