Building cohesive corporate teams has historically had little to do with a company’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) efforts. Toronto-based Exit West wants that to change.

Standing at the crossroads of employee retention and corporate consciousness, Exit West helps clients become hands-on participants in humanitarian development efforts around the world. It’s a community-building process that blends teamwork, social contribution and good business sense.

An Exit Strategy that brings Teams Together

Central to the Exit West experience is an excursion that sees employees complete development projects that include schools and medical clinics. The teams live and work as members of the host community. It’s an innovative approach to CSR and team-building while helping non-government organizations (NGOs) reach their goals.

"There’s no shortage of volun-tourism out there," says Benjamin Land, Exit West’s founder and CEO. "Exit West is taking the best parts of that life experience and formatting it in a way that a corporate body can buy into, and be positively affected."

Land and his co-founder, COO Robert Mittelman – an Oxford MBA graduate – started Exit West after years of work and study in the fields of international development and corporate events planning. "I was running these hedonistic party trips for companies that wanted to give employees a sense of fulfillment and motivation so they wouldn’t jump ship," says Land.

"But a few months later a competitor would one-up them by taking staff to Barcelona instead of Whistler. "It ended up doing nothing for anyone." Land and Mittelman were struck by the absence of meaningful human development in those corporate excursions.

"We both have backgrounds in international volunteer work, so we’d seen what a great environment it is for professional skill and capacity building," says Land "And then it hit: corporations had been using wine and ski-trips instead of realizing their people have great capacity and depth as human beings."

Their idea was to leverage that capacity to provide new levels of authenticity to CSR and team-building initiatives. Today Exit West is a for-profit company that sets aside up to 10% of its own profits for reinvestment in aid projects. "Doing that aligns with who we are and where we come from," says Land. Land’s team hit the road to talk to Canada’s top CEOs.

The pitch? That investing thousands of dollars to ship valuable staff off for a week of manual labour in impoverished areas was a smart business move.

Building dreams, building teams: How the plan comes together

The typical Exit West excursion lasts five to 10 days and includes a team of anywhere from 10 to 30 people, according to Land.

"We partner with well-established NGO’s on the ground. They have their finger on the pulse of what’s going on," he says, adding that conducting a proper risk assessment on a given area is the first step in planning an excursion. Team members stay in basic accommodations, eat basic food and work side-by-side with NGO staff and locals on development construction projects, building things like schools, medical clinics and community centres. Exit West fills a significant gap between the non-profit NGO’s and its own corporate partners. "

"NGO’s may have hosted universities or church groups before but never been able to position themselves in a way that big business could understand or see value in," says Land. "We bridge that".

In addition to the demanding physical labour involved in such a project, team members can expect to be confronted with a host of personal challenges. "Even sleeping on a single bed and taking lukewarm showers on a cold concrete floor for a week can be a personal challenge for some," says Land.

It is exactly these challenges faced by both individuals and teams that ultimately probes the depths of human capacity, according to Land. "People who have gone on these type of work excursions tell us their company may have spent thousands to send them on professional development courses," says Land. "But they come back from a work trip thinking, _‘Wow, my company has really invested in me.’_"

The Business Case

The value proposition of a client partner’s investment in an Exit West excursion is based on three spheres of impact: personal, professional and organizational.

On the personal level, imagine a scenario where your V.P. of human resources, say a woman and mother in her mid 40s, works shoulder-to-shoulder for a week with a local woman and mother whose community has been destroyed by a hurricane or drought.

"Just the human experience of going to a developing country and working with someone . . . the conversations you have and the relationships that form. It’s very powerful on a personal level," says Land.

In the professional sphere, Exit West partners with high-level coaching and training organizations to maximize business compentencies. "Partners that have ropes courses in Muskoka tell us [that] the environment created on work party excursions is identical to the mindset they try to create through synthetic scenarios," says Land.

An investment in people

The authenticity of the Exit West experience promotes traditionally-valued business skills like leadership, project management, problem solving and creative thinking. Organizationally, Land feels the benefits of the Exit West experience are self-evident. "You give us 10 or 15 people your company wants to invest in," says Land. "They’ll come back to your office and share stories of fulfillment and motivation that will spread like a virus through your organization."

Getting On Board

Land and Mittelman worked furiously to get the Exit West opportunity in front of some of the most influential companies and executives in Canada. "We’ve already been in [the] boardrooms of many of Canada’s top companies," says Land. "IT, finance, pharmaceuticals . . . Bank of Montreal, Research in Motion, Glaxo Smith Klein . . . there’s a lot of people who are interested to know how they can give their people this experience and become real corporate champions at the same time."

Exit West’s inaugural excursion is planned for February 10 to 16, 2007, to a small community in southern Belize ravaged by 2001’s Hurricane Iris Team members will work with a local NGO to help build a new school. "We’re going to populate this excursion with independent reps from different companies and sectors as a sort of peer group," says Land. "The opportunity is to let participants explore the potential."

In the future, Land expects that work teams will be made up of staff from within a single organization, though the landscape is wide-open. "The Belize trip is filling up but we can add more space if need be," says Land.

"This is a profound experience. Exit West takes personal [contribution] and injects it with a professional development component that applies to the whole corporate body.

"It’s the nexus of human development," he says. "A hard corporate advantage." And a welcome sign at the crossroads of community and opportunity.