Team-Building – What Do You Do in an Escape Room That Improves Your Work Team? Let’s Talk About It
Team-Building happens when you… Communicate Wins and Finds
Practice makes perfect, and practice is exactly what you get in an escape room adventure. While you and your team are powering through the game, you’re collecting puzzles and searching for any possible clues or hints. This gets your team talking about what they find and any possible solution they come up with, in the most fun way possible!
Michael Harding of Let’s Roam Team Building Atlanta states, “keeping a team organized in and out of the office is one of the hardest challenges facing a company. That is why implementing a strategy to stay organized is key.”
Escape rooms make this challenge feasible and even entertaining. The skills you practice together in an escape room team-building event spill over into everyday life – all of which help you guys grow as a team. Organizing a team has never been more fun!
Put your heads together
“Team synergy has an extraordinary impact on business results.” – Patrick Lencioni
Synergy is a state in which two or more things work together in a particularly fruitful way that produces an effect greater than the sum of their individual effects. Expressed also as “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”, according to Business Dictionary.
What does this have to do with escape rooms? Well, you don’t really have a choice but to work together in an escape room. You’re locked in with nothing better to do! Team-building it is!
Escape Rooms are a high energy experience in which you guys will be on a time crunch and faced with the realization that only about 19-50% of people escape from the mission you are faced with. In fact, your team could be formulating a cure for the zombie apocalypse or even escaping from a crazy Clown’s funhouse. Either way, working together in this situation is a no-brainer.
Look to each other for answer/solutions
Seeking guidance in your teammates goes back to practice communicating with your team. When you are on your way to saving the world from an ancient curse, your teammates will be your only solace!
According to Leadership choice (read more below), there are 4 ways communication “helps foster a more productive and talented workforce”:
- Understanding team talents & skills.
- Achieving more buy-in.
- Innovation and creative thought
- More strategic team building
Opportunities to celebrate wins (each puzzle solved is a little celebration!)
Of course, celebrating is always fun, but is it also beneficial for team-building?
Research has shown that after completing a task or solving a problem the human brain releases positive feeling hormones like dopamine and serotonin. With every puzzle solved the entire team will get a neurological boost and naturally become unified through teamwork! Solving puzzles together as a tribe is how we evolved after all.
Laugh/Have a good time outside of work
Relax together, enjoy life together! Team-building doesn’t have to suck.
Even though feeling like you have to escape yet another enclosed space can seem daunting, the freedom and fun one feels working through puzzles in one of our escape rooms can feel like an hour-long party! We like to make sure everyone is in on the fun by offering other accommodations such as
- “Happy Hour” Catering
- Event/Dance Space large enough for around 150
- Meeting rooms with projectors
Compete against each other in a friendly competition
Build up a little heat, shall we?
If you’re feeling competitive, we can create a scoreboard with the fastest escape times and compare them with the teams. Solving escape rooms is fun but also challenging. Indecision and confusion must be met with confidence and initiative. Compete in a friendly competition and assess just how well your teams can collaborate and problem solve. Turns out a little competition can motivate teams to excel in their previous limits.
Requires planning and coordination
Get it together and plan an escape room event!
Have you ever planned a wedding or coordinated a dinner party? While the latter is by far the easiest to plan, they both can cause stress if the host is not experienced in planning and coordinating with others. To take it a step further, while it indeed takes a good deal of planning to plan an escape room event – the real need for planning happens inside the escape room. Some more complicated puzzles can require careful coordination and are best solved with a “to-do-list type” method. Things you can do to help include:
- Lists
- Basic Math
- Writing down clues and helpful information
Using these techniques will get you farthest in the heat of the moment. With this in mind, escape rooms are the most enjoyable method out there for practicing these techniques.
Encouraged Cooperation
Locked in a goal with a deadline that you can’t seem to progress on? That’s how you feel when you’re put against the clock and tasked with escaping our rooms. Our escape rooms can be done with a single person but the chances are very low of success.
Indeed, two or more brains are almost a requirement to succeed. Careful coordination skills will get you far. Teams of two or more naturally seek cooperation and planning in order to have the best chances of escape! Can you beat the clock?
You share a common goal with your team
Yep. Cheesy as it sounds, it’s true.
All businesses share the common goal of fulfilling their intended obligation. While the core values of a business can be sacred you may also need a little reminder to emphasize the importance of the common goal. Bringing people together and creating an environment where they must work together to complete a common goal can recreate a sense of camaraderie and remind people why they are working together.
Nothing is more motivating than the WHY for any action. When the “why” is escaping a killer clown or preventing a zombie apocalypse the stakes are clearer than ever and the synergy seems to flow with ease. (All of our games are family-friendly by the way)
Different identifiers really shine through and help you understand each other better
Team-building reports are the key to longevity. As a matter of fact, you can have a custom team-building report made up for your team at some escape rooms like Big Escape Rooms. These reports consist of a summary of your overall team performance and individual analyses of each player along with their own unique identifiers like “team leader”,” problem solver”, etc.
Everyone in the escape room brings a little something to the problem-solving aspect of our games. Whether its logic, organization skills, creativity, or just plain old common sense, everyone can make an impact. To put it another way, by identifying their respective characteristics, everyone can be reminded of what makes the other special and a crucial part of the team. The leaders will lead through inspired action and the thinkers will think their way out with logic and practicality. BOTH will be needed to escape!
Spend quality time with your team
Didn’t I say this already? If so, it’s because it’s so dang important for team-building efforts.
The best part of building a strong team is getting the team together in one place for some fun! This is so important to do from time to time. Since conference calls and emails have no place in the escape room, it’s a great chance to decompress. Spend some quality time with your friends and colleagues and have fun completing one or all of our rooms.
While escape rooms are no doubt great for team efficiency, we believe the fun the teams have working together to escape the room will have the most vital impact. All things considered, we’re the best in Atlanta at creating memorable experiences for businesses, friends, and families alike, offering a variety of different rooms and escape puzzles. Come share in the fun today and book online: https://www.bigescaperooms.com/
Sources:
http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/synergy.html
