How 'ethical' is your company?

Does your company use team-building activities? If so, what form do these take and what are their benefits?

Does your company work with charities and employee volunteer schemes?

Does it matter what a company's motives are for running these ethical schemes?

As a consultant, I use to work with companys which use team-building activities. Most of the time, their most important goal is to make people know each others. I heard about very funny team-building. One, for example, was organising by a bank; it gathered people coming from all over the world, japanese, canadians, people from united state, indians, polish, swedish and some others from countries I don't even remember. Those men and women are used to international high standart hotels and they arrive with very big cases, and of course, the whole equipement to play gulf. In fact, they spent three nights sleeping in a camp. They all enjoyed to discover a very different way of life! The ethical programs that I knew are for volunteers people. For example, in some companys in france, some workers spend their holidays working in africa to set communications in small towns or villages. They worked hard to do the job, but they try harder to discuss with african people who disagreed with them the way they did it. The africans were not satisfied by the network because this one was built on french rules that didn't work with african habits. They told the french team they could'nt understand the way people live in an african town. They were very angry against the French and the french were very dissappointed.