Spanking During Team Building Session Costs A Company $1.7M In Lawsuit

updated 5/2/06

Modern team-building programs evolved from indoors to outdoors. Games and activities nowadays are closely being associated to extreme games. All in the spirit of fun but still with the intent of forging closer ties among team members.

But what is funny to program organizers may not be funny for the participants. A female employee sued her company for alleged sexual harassment, sexual battering and sexual assault, for being “spanked” in front of her peers in one of the company’s team-building session.

George’s Employment Blawg, blogged that the jury awarded her additonal $1.2M. This is on top of $10,000 for economic loss, $40,000 for future medical costs and $450,000 for emotional distress, pain and suffering.

The company claimed that the employees agreed to the activities but soon abandoned the program when sued by one of its employees.

This is an example of a creative juice that went sour… at the expense of $ 1.7 M and negative publicity.

Read the news article here or here.

Incidents like this, becomes a liability rather than value adding.