Inside a corporate retreat that went very badly wrong

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/inside-a-corporate-retreat-that-went-very-badly-wrong/ar-AA20gPzT

Senior executives at the tech company Plex were eager to treat their 120 fully remote staffers to a weeklong corporate getaway in a tropical paradise.

The plan for the Honduras trip was simple: Company meetings and team building by powdery soft beaches during the day and island fun at night, at a cost of roughly $500,000 to the company. They’d build the trip around a “Survivor” theme, with teams and challenges. But it’d be fun, not too physically grueling. The CEO of Plex, a free streaming platform, would play a role similar to that of “Survivor” host Jeff Probst.

Perhaps the executives should have taken it as a sign that just as the first bus of staffers pulled up to the resort, the chief executive was already in his hotel bathroom experiencing the initial waves of a violent stomach infection. What followed was a comedy of errors including military drills that outpaced anything this group of office workers had in mind, a rogue porcupine, stranded airplanes and one syringe to the butt of an employee.

Corporate retreats are generally assumed to be torture, or at least a semi-stressful chore, what with their forced-fun activities and hybrid work-play environments that leave workers confused about boundaries. It’s no wonder the new season of “Jury Duty,” a comedy series that tricks an unsuspecting non-actor into believing his off-the-wall fictional circumstances are actually happening, is set at a corporate off-site.

But in real life, Plexcon 2017 beats anything on TV. Here’s the story of an all-staff company getaway told by six people who were there, a trip where most everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. Nearly a decade later, they’re still working together—and still talking about it.

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