Yibaling Power Supply's "May Day" Team Building: Put Down the Transformer, Pick Up the Skewers

The just-passed May Day Labor Festival saw a group of people from Yibaling Power Supply, who have been dealing with electricity for over a decade, decide to temporarily bid farewell to the familiar "buzzing" sound in the workshop and head to the greenery on the outskirts of the city to enjoy the breeze, have a good meal and take a proper break.

They didn't debug equipment but tuned their moods instead.

On ordinary days, colleagues from the assembly workshop, winding group, quality inspection department and foreign trade department each handle their own tasks. Ideas for new projects might come up during a meal that took just as long as a few hours of work on the production line. This time, the company deliberately brought everyone together for a picnic, not to talk about production capacity or urge for reports, but to see whose skewers were the best and whose watermelon was the most evenly sliced.

Some set up the grill and started a fire, some skewered meat and washed vegetables, and others even brought their lounge chairs from home, saying, "We need to give the engineers a demonstration of how to take a proper lunch break." Hands that usually held soldering irons and wound coils were just as capable at grilling; eyes that usually stared at computers and drew blueprints found the shade quickly.

What was being grilled was meat, but what was being gathered was hearts.

"Transformers require proper insulation coordination, and so does a team - there can be no short circuits, and even less can there be disconnections," an old employee said while flipping chicken wings. A new colleague remarked that after two weeks of joining the company, this was the first time he saw his colleagues outside their workstations, "I didn't know our quality inspection department head was so talkative in private."

Under the green shade by the lake, with a few folding chairs and bottles of soda, facing a pool of spring water, this picnic had no fancy decorations, only the most simple reunion. The company didn't arrange any motivational speeches, but as they ate, order messages kept popping up in the business group; as they laughed, someone asked, "Has the address for the next batch of export containers been sent to me yet?"

The best team-building is not about shouting slogans, but making everyone feel that "this is a company worth grilling with and also worth working overtime for."

Spring will pass, but the warmth of collaboration will not.

Next week, the equipment in the workshop will start up on time again. But this time, everyone has an extra bit of energy in their hearts - that's the skewer of grilled meat passed by a colleague and the afternoon of laughter without having to talk about work.