Can Escape Rooms Be A Good Team Building Venue?
Is your team feeling a little exhausted and under-valued? Morale is low, and focus seems blurry? Even communication and relationships between members are breaking down? Never fear – it happens and we’ve all been there. The good news is that there is a solution – and we’re here to help you with it!
What’s that, we hear you ask? Well – a team-building activity, of course.
Team-building activities are designed to help your team find purpose in work again, communicate better and bond over common goals. They help to boost the overall productivity levels of your team and, while they make for a happier team, which is always a good thing – they also help your profit margins improve as your team performs better. It’s win-win.
And we’ve got a brand-new way to help your team get there – our escape rooms!
As people have become used to the usual team-building activities, they’ve started to fall flat. So instead of spending an hour cooped up in a meeting room with everyone yawning – why not head out of the office and towards some adventure?
What is an escape room?
Just in case you’ve never tried one of the many options out there, an escape room is a safe and supervised locked room environment which can be both physical or virtual. They are often themed. Physical rooms are essentially staged sets with props, physical questions cards and puzzles and even materials like sand and sound effects to really set the scene. Virtual escape rooms, on the other hand, are usually created on giant screens or with VR headsets.
The objective is for your team to be able to find their way out of the room within a set time limit, by finding clues, solving puzzles and completing challenges. This means they must think quickly, communicate effectively and collaborate to reach a common goal – all very desirable qualities in a team!
This is why an escape room makes a very effective 0ffline or online team building activity. It’s a challenge that is tailor-made for big groups of people; it’s complex and immersive so your players can put their thinking caps on while being transported to another world away from corporate offices; and it encourages healthy competition among players.
What could be better for an organization than a team that trusts each other, and knows how to work together, sharing common burdens?
Team Building with Entermission Sydney
We love holding team building activities at our Entermission Sydney virtual reality escape room game! We use state- of-the-art technology and VR headsets to curate virtual escape rooms with extremely cool storylines and challenges, if we do say so ourselves. Your team can fight aliens in space or supernatural creatures in creepy old temples or a super villain inside his own brain (yes, you heard that right).
And while doing all this, they can become stronger as a team and bond as colleagues!
So book your slots for our escape room games today. Take a look at all our exciting missions here. And visit here to book your slot.
Why Choose An Escape Room?
Now onto the reasons – why are escape rooms such a good team building venue? Here are 19 very compelling ones!
1. Affordable
Unlike a lot of team-building activities – *cough* looking at you, team retreats *cough* – escape rooms are very affordable. In one neat package, you get a venue, food, activities, a facilitator to help you through them, as well as a short outing outside the confines of the office. No more time-consuming calls with a dozen different stakeholders to arrange for each different part of a team outing – from catering, to venues, to activities, to emcees. And, of course, they’re shorter than many other outings – but pack a serious punch.
2. Adaptable
Escape room experiences are very malleable – they can be adapted for your team’s needs. Have a team that spans across a large geographical distance? You can migrate the experience online. Have a large in-person team? You can break them into smaller groups and have staggered participation.
You can even include or exclude certain activities, without taking away from the full experience, if your team has allergy or accessibility issues for parts of it. That way, no one needs to be excluded.
3. Versatile
We mentioned before that escape rooms are themed – this means that there’s a huge range of storylines and scenarios that your team can take part in, with all of them delivering the same benefits at the end of the day.
You can all have a vote and see what the majority is interested in, and opt for that. Or you could choose based on your team’s specific needs. You can opt for a room with a lot of physical challenges if you think your team really needs to step away from the screen; you can choose one with a lot of riddles and puzzles to if they’ve been struggling with problem-solving and ideating; or you could choose one with that requires a lot of cross-team collaboration if you think their communication needs to improve. You’re the boss of your experience.
4. Illuminating
Need to shine a light on your team’s problems? (Haha – see what we did there?) Escape room games are great at that.
Is there a lack of communication among your team? Lack of coordination? Lack of trust? You bet all of these issues will surface once you start taking part in a game together – and that’s exactly what team building activities are supposed to do.
Once you find the weak spots, you can work on strengthening them – and thus help your team overcome them.
5. Invigorating
Need to shake things up a bit, get people out of a stupor of complacency? Time to bring in a game full of activities and healthy competition – such as an escape room!
Let’s be honest – as leaders and managers, we’re all worried about the bottom line. And if your team has settled in too comfortably and have started putting in their bare minimum, instead of their best – the bottom line can suffer.
A great way to get your team to start hitting their targets again is to shake them up a bit with a fun but intense activity like an escape room. As they solve problems with their colleagues, while utilizing their own special skills and picking up new skills along the way, they’ll be reminded of the potential within themselves. They will also rediscover their relationship with the workplace and with each other, bringing a renewed sense of belonging and purpose.
We think that’s the best way to get them to start putting in their very best once again – as they remember what they’re capable of. And as their productivity sky-rockets, so does the company’s profitability.
6. Solution-based
Need to motivate your team to think critically about problems to provide effective solutions? Bring them to an escape room!
Every escape room has riddles, puzzles and challenges designed to make people figure out how to solve them on a time limit. If your team is to ‘escape’, they have to figure out how to think innovatively about problems, and look at them with a new outlook to solve them. It’s the sort of skill that is transferred to the workplace very easily.
7. Collaboration-oriented
Every escape room is a team challenge, just like most workplace problems are team challenges. If the team wants to leave the room, they have to work effectively together to solve problems, which means improved communication and better coordination. And they get to have fun while doing this! It’s win-win.
8. Goal-oriented
One of the greatest advantages of a team-building activity is that people get to see the results of their choices immediately – and this is especially obvious in an activity with a clear goal, like an escape room.
This is great practice for making real-time decisions under pressure in a workplace environment, keeping a common goal in mind. Your team will thank you for giving them the opportunity to test this out in a lower-stakes environment!
9. Role-oriented
Teams need space for growth and development, and one of the best ways to do this is to allow members to explore their talents and see what sort of role suits them the best.
Some members may be able to very easily take on certain roles – such as one of a leader who keeps an eye on the overall picture and directs the whole team, or of a problem-solver. Your team could also come together to vote people into roles, because sooner or later, they will realise they need to do this to organise their efforts properly.
Once this role-assigning happens, teams can work harmoniously together in the workplace, trusting each other to perform their roles, and knowing they’ll have space to discover their own.
10. Strongly participatory
Have quieter members of the team who prefer to hide? Bring them to an escape room!
All escape rooms require participation from all members – you can’t just coast on others.
This level of participation could reveal new talents- which can only be a good thing for the team! Once they’re comfortable showing them off, you’ll have a much more well-rounded team on your hands that is aware of its strengths.
11. Time-bound
A very important part of being productive is learning how to manage your time and meet deadlines, and every team that hopes to succeed must have every team member that knows how to do this. What better practice for this than an escape room? They have fixed time limits, so your team knows that to win, they have to work both fast and smoothly.
They can then transfer this new skill to create an efficient workflow in the office, so everyone can meet their goals on time!
12. Helps in Upskilling
Soft skills like leadership, communication, decision-making and problem-solving are just as important in a job as technical skills – but not everyone has them. It’s often the job of team leaders to teach these skills to their team members.
Due to the collaborative nature of the activity, escape rooms are great for learning these, as we’ve seen.
This is good news for career development for your team members, and to help you have a team with diverse skills.
13. Simulates Work-place Pressures
What’s the point of a skilled team if they can’t apply their skills in real-life situations? Escape rooms are the perfect way to take people out of the hypothetical and into the real. As people divide the work among themselves, they get a chance to practice the skills they already know, in a situation that has some of the real-life pressure of a workplace but is much more safe and friendly.
This means they can experiment with ideas and methods more freely, and see what works. In turn, they will know the pros and cons of decisions in the workplace.
14. Teaches Resilience
In today’s competitive world, it’s easy to get demoralised when we fail. But failure is a vital step to success. A critical thinking team building activity such as an escape room, which has a clear winner or loser based on objective rules, teaches you to accept failure with grace, learn from it and move on.
Even better – it’s an activity outside work, which means your team will be able to laugh it off without worrying too much and becoming sour. This skill is essential to build a friendly, healthy work environment.
15. Encourages Bonding
What’s the point of having a team if it doesn’t know how to work together? Your team members may not be best friends, but they do need to be on cordial enough terms that can be good colleagues.
An escape room is an excellent bonding opportunity to form such connections. As teams learn to play together, they learn to trust each other, which will also reflect in their workplace relationships.
16. Builds Peer Support Networks
We all know the importance of having a ‘work bestie’ – or a mentor, if not that! Studies show that having at least one close friend in the workplace improves morale drastically, and having mentors dramatically increases a person’s chances at achieving career success. Both of these are central to employee satisfaction and attrition.
As we’ve seen, team-building activities like escape rooms, can help to create such bonds of mutual support, respect and mentorship.
A united team such as this will support each other through both failure and success.
17. Renews Belief in Job
An easy path to burnout is to make an employee feel like their work has no value. Research has shown again and again that in order to feel satisfied, employees need to feel like their efforts matter.
Escape rooms are ideal opportunities to show your employees that every individual’s contribution plays a part in working towards a bigger, common goal. They have the results right there – as soon as the final whistle blows, they’ll know immediately how they contributed to their team’s result.
It’s a helpful reminder of appreciation, and their purpose to their workplace.
18. Competitive Fun
What’s a great way to get some healthy competition going in an environment free of on-the-job anxieties? An escape room, of course! Your employees may be competing, but don’t forget – the primary aim of an escape room is just to have some fun.
They allow your team members to step into different worlds and become anything – from astronauts to pirates to ninjas to detectives to zombies. Which other team activity lets you become so immersed in your favourite works of fiction?
Instead of the cynicism that people usually show towards mandated corporate training exercises, your team will volunteer to participate. We call that the true test of a successful team-building exercise!
19. Create Fun Memories!
And last but certainly not least – your employees get to associate the workplace with something other than stressful emotions!
This kind of memory-linking can transform attitudes towards work. The camaraderie helps in both bonding and in making sure work is something your employees look forward to, rather than seeing it as a chore. It makes a huge difference to team morale.
And there you have it: a comprehensive list of 19 reasons why you should definitely book an escape room as a team building activity. We hope we see you and your employees at our Entermission Sydney virtual escape room soon!
Happy team-building!
