Team-building @TGV Indulge

Our judo club was turning four years old. We had never had an annual dinner before and I felt our fourth anniversary would be a good occasion to have one for the first time.

I toyed around with a few different ideas. I initially thought of booking a Japanese restaurant. I even thought of catering food. In the end, we decided to try something a little bit different. How about giving our players a nice buffet dinner and a movie afterwards?

Everybody loves a buffet cos they can eat to their hearts' delight and who doesn't love a movie?

When I inquired about it, I was surprised to find that it was actually affordable. Indulge, which is TGV's in-house restaurant (available at TGV 1 Utama and Sunway Velocity), had several different buffet options, the cheapest of which was around RM40 per head. You'd need to have a group of around 30 people though. We did have that so the dinner part was very viable for us. It would have been pretty costly to buy everyone an Indulge movie ticket but a regular cinema ticket, at RM19 each, was doable.

Of course when you have a team-building event, you need to have some team-building activities. That's not the easiest thing to do in a dinner setting. But I researched online and found an interesting game which I adapted for my judo club members. It's called "2 truths and 1 lie". We had everyone post on our Whatsapp Group two truths about themselves and one lie -- relating to their judo experiences. Then the group would have to try to figure out which one was the lie. It actually worked out quite well. We got to know each other better through that game. And there were a lot of laughs too.

We also gave away special judo keychain souveniers and had a lucky draw for four Indulge cinema tickets. Everybody liked that too.

We had set aside two hours for the dinner so that people could relax and not be in a rush. By the time the movie was about to start, we were done with the food and talking and were ready for the show.

Overall it was a great experience for our members. We normally just meet each other on the judo mat and for the first time we had an activity outside of the mat. It was the right choice to do this.