TEAM BUILDING ACTIVITIES: WHY THEY ARE IMPORTANT AND THE ROLE ESCAPE ROOMS CAN PLAY IN TAKING YOUR PROFESSIONAL DYNAMIC TO THE NEXT LEVEL

In the modern workplace, fostering effective and efficient teamwork is paramount to a successful business structure. Team building activities can play a pivotal role in strengthening professional bonds, enhancing core communication, and enriching productive collaboration amongst your team members. There are a number of great options for team building activities, but escape room games have always excelled above all others in many ways, offering core focuses on team building, while presenting the activity in a unique and immersive space unlike any others. Escape room games have well-structured gameplay, clear ground rules, and a group objective that throws personal agenda out the window, helping your team develop trust with each other, as well as with leadership. Allow us to dive deeper into the many reasons why team building activities are essential, and why escape room games can act as an exceptional tool for cultivating a cohesive and high-performing team.

1. Well-Structured Gameplay

For a team building activity to be successful it requires careful planning and excellent execution to ensure they serve the intended purpose of equality, unity, and trust. If the activity is not planned appropriately, it can instead have an opposite effect, and lead to confusion and disillusionment in the team if they sense a lack of organizational effort.

Escape room games excel with this objective, since they are always meticulously thought out through the planning, designing and execution phases. Theme, difficulty, and intended player base all have to be considered before the game can even come fully to fruition. Escape room games present the playing team with unique challenges according to a particular theme, each challenge requiring collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity from every player involved in order to achieve the end goal. Whether you’re deciphering clues to solve riddles or puzzles, or working together to complete a task that requires multiple sets of hands, every element within an escape room game is intricately designed to encourage teamwork and problem-solving skills. 

This structured nature of escape room games will ensure that all participants are fully engaged in the activity, and encouraged to work together towards their common goal of escaping. This approach to gameplay means that escape room games are perfect for developing the core foundations of effective team dynamics.

2. Clear Ground Rules

Established guidelines and clearly communication rules are essential for the success of any team building activity. Lacking these structural necessities can lead to your team wasting valuable time on clarifications for the objectives and their responsibilities, and can cause stress if directions are misunderstood or lack appropriate detail. 

Escape room games operate within a simple framework of clear rules and a shared objective. The goal of an escape room is always to escape! And this can be achieved by following the clues within the room to solve various challenges and puzzles. Often when starting the escape room, you will be greeted by a Game Master who will help outline these rules, and who can be referred to for guidance and hints during your gameplay. Even with this help, the only way to succeed is through balancing your teams’ strengths and weaknesses in communication, problem-solving, as well as creative and critical thinking. 

This uniquely structured activity provides the team with a one-of-a-kind, controlled environment where every player knows the expectations, and their roles and responsibilities towards the end goal. Having clear rules promotes accountability, unity, and a sense of purpose, and while adhering to the established guidelines, your team can navigate challenges more effectively, maximizing their collective potential and avoiding hang-ups caused by miscommunication and unclear direction. 

3. Team Objective

A unified objective is an important factor in team building that some activities fail to fully capitalize on. Without a group objective that everyone can work towards, you run the risk of some members’ personal motivations guiding their actions instead and potentially interfering with the end goal, or others might sense that they have not received the full value of the activity and could leave unsatisfied with the experience.

With escape room games, the singular objective is to escape, and with escape rooms either everyone escapes, or no one does. There is no in between solution and no way to game the system for the desired outcome. Only collective collaboration will bring you and your team to the desired objective. This objective serves to unify the team towards a common achievement, and gives a sense of purpose and direction, as your team will want to succeed not only for themselves, but the sake of their fellow team members as well.

Through this collaborative objective, teams learn more about their group dynamic, the things they are strong at and what they could work on, and how to overcome obstacles as a unit. Then, when they do succeed, they get to celebrate their victories together, which always fosters a strong sense of camaraderie and achievement. 

4. No Personal Agendas

For team building activities it is vital to provide an environment that encourages a collaborative effort, where ego is checked at the door by everyone involved. You should only be able to achieve success through teamwork and collaborative effort, and attempts to solve problems individually can, at times, simply delay or obstruct your team’s overall success. 

This lack of personal agenda is a defining characteristic of escape room games. In many situations the puzzles and riddles are specifically designed to be not solvable by only a single person. Maybe one person has to hold a switch while another reads a code. Maybe you are in separate rooms entirely and can only speak to each other to figure out how to unlock a door or open a secret entrance. Escape room games often take every opportunity possible to encourage teamwork and collaboration over individual successes. An individualistic mindset will do you no favors in an escape room.

By abandoning your own personal agenda, you will have the privilege of learning more about your team members, and this will help in the future on how to better make use of each person’s individual strengths and weaknesses. In an escape room game, no one person is more or less valuable than the others on the team, and that is the point!

5. Equality Between Team Members and Leadership

One of the fundamentals of effective team building activities is its focus on promoting equality among team members and leadership. Hierarchical barriers in the workplace can often hinder open communication, stifle creativity, and impede the flow of valuable ideas. Team building activities should provide an opportunity for the breakdown of these invisible barriers, in a space that fosters inclusion and teamwork where the ultimate goal is having fun.

Escape room games are great for highlighting the contributions of all team members, and helps participants to feel equally valuable to the end goal. They can empower otherwise less-vocal team members to voice their opinions, share expertise, and contribute equally to the team’s success, regardless of their hierarchical position within the business.  

And when leadership is involved in the activity, rather than just being observers, it sends a powerful message of solidarity and partnership to the group. Engaging with your team on equal footing shows that a leader is dedicated to collaboration, transparency and the common goal, which strengthens the trust and conviction of leadership for the team as a whole.

6. Trust

Arguably the most important factor of team building activities is the trust they foster amongst team members. When collaboration is necessary for success, the activity itself should aid in making individuals feel safe to take risks, be vulnerable, and work together openly with their team.

Unlike some traditional team building exercises that focus on surface-level interactions like ice breakers and trust falls, escape room games are designed to delve deeper into interpersonal dynamics and individual intelligence as well as group cooperation. Through solving puzzles and facing challenges in a uniquely designed, imaginative environment, team members develop a deeper understanding of each other’s individual strengths, weaknesses and communication styles, and how these best fit into the greater whole of the team.

This environment can help cultivate a culture of authenticity and integrity. When individuals feel they can prioritize collective success over personal gain, it builds relationships and trust between team members. This trust is vital to teamwork, and results in challenges being approached with confidence and solidarity. 

As you can see, team building activities such as escape rooms offer a multifaceted role in shaping the core of your individual workplace dynamic. Through the presentation of a well-structured group objective, which promotes equality between team members and leadership, and nurturing trust through lack of personal agenda, your team can work together to build the vital foundations of a cohesive collaboration. Empowered individuals lead to sustainable success, and with collective contributions being the cornerstone of innovation and growth, investing in meaningful team building activities like escape room games, benefits all on your team, and will help facilitate long term success for your business.