GE Unit Builds Teamwork by Helping Others : Plastics Firm’s Outings Are Spent Fixing Shelter for Homeless, Other Projects

Golf, conferences and--perhaps most of all--a desert adventure designed to foster teamwork and competitiveness kept the sales force of General Electric Plastics busy during the staff’s meeting last year in Phoenix.

“We built little houses and spent the night out there,” recalled Chuck Hatstat, an Albany, N.Y.-based transportation manager for GE Plastics.

During this year’s recent meeting in San Diego, GE Plastics, a unit of General Electric Co., once again treated Hatstat to a round of golf and a healthy dose of conferences. But instead of building desert lean-tos, GE Plastics tried a new twist on the outdoors Outward Bound-style programs that many companies use to inspire employees: Among other things, its sales staff helped renovate a downtown San Diego warehouse into an overnight shelter for more than 100 homeless men.

Brings Employees Together

To build esprit de corps, GE Plastics personnel also have worked on other community projects. In early January, 500 members of GE Plastics’ marketing staff spent a day refurbishing the Copley Family YMCA building in San Diego. And in April, GE Plastics employees will return to San Diego to fix up a building that will house Vietnam veterans taking part in a jobs-training program.

“This has been much more fulfilling” than the company’s past teamwork-building programs, Hatstat said. “This has been a real change for us.”

GE Plastics decided on the rehabilitation projects to help bring together its longtime employees with those from the old Borg Warner chemicals division, which GE acquired in September.

“We were trying to figure out the fastest way to integrate our Borg Warner acquisition, and we thought ‘why not put the whole group to work on some constructive project,’ ” said GE Plastics spokesman Joel Hutt. “Suddenly, everyone from the top on down got excited about it, and it took off like a rocket.

“We’ve done the traditional corporate sporting events and the Outward Bound-type programs, and they were all tremendously successful,” Hutt said. “But this harnessed their energy and creativity in a team-building activity that left something constructive.”

“This doesn’t sound as artificial as Outward Bound,” said Joseph Conlin, executive director of Successful Meetings, a New York-based publication for corporate meeting planners. “I’d bet that a lot of the ‘thirtysomething generation’ could better relate to (building an overnight shelter for the homeless) than spending a night out in the desert.”

In many ways, the projects still resembled Outward Bound sessions. Teams of GE Plastics employees had to race against the clock to paint rooms of a 100-room family shelter. And one team named “Partitions R Us” competed fiercely to produce more wall dividers than “Maloney’s Studs.”

The rehabilitation projects didn’t add to the cost of GE Plastics’ meetings in San Diego, said Fabienne Hanks, a meeting planner who helped GE Plastics arrange its San Diego programs.

“We easily could have spent as much or more,” she said, by sending the sales and marketing staffs to an all-day golf outing at one of San Diego’s country clubs. (Although GE Plastics has no operations in San Diego, the community projects were performed there because the company wanted to tie in the work with meetings it already planned at resorts in the area.)

Father Joe Carroll, director of the St. Vincent de Paul/Joan Kroc homeless shelter in San Diego, said his facility wouldn’t have been able to afford the painting and landscaping performed by GE Plastics employees.

“For the first time, one of these massive (corporate meetings) left an indelible mark behind,” he said. “I’d hope that we might see it as the start of a growing trend.”

GE Plastics employees, who built partitions, painted rooms, laid carpet and installed floor tiles at the homeless shelter seemed to share that sentiment.

“This has value,” said Bob Hess, a Borg Warner communications manager who is moving to GE Plastics’ corporate office in Pittsfield, Mass. “This is going to last.”