A good, effective workplace is a collaborative workplace where team members have the skills to communicate, utilise each other’s strengths, and work towards a single goal. Having a team like this is the ideal situation for many CEOs and team leaders, but building a work squad like this takes a lot of time and effort.
To build bonds and improve collaboration, many businesses take their teams on many team-building and training exercises, but often these expensive retreats will not get the results you’re looking for.
If a business wants to build and improve the collaboration between its team members, there is another way: escape rooms.
Escape rooms are fantastic for corporate team-building days, as they’re entertaining and enjoyable yet subtly allow workers to build on and improve their communication within the workplace. Here’s a deeper look at how escape rooms can turn your team into one of the most effective in your industry.
Escape Rooms Are An Ice Breaker
If you work in a large team, one thing that can harm collaboration is the lack of familiarity everyone has with each other. If workers are unsure about how others operate and what they’re like, they’ll often be worse at communicating with each other.
Escape rooms are a great way to fix this problem. By being locked into a challenge for a finite period, co-workers who may not know much about each other will be forced to come together and learn more about how they work. Plus, as escape rooms are an active and fun environment, it encourages people to come out of their shell more, aiding collaboration. People who may be a bit more reserved at work could start to show their true selves, making them more susceptible to better communication. When playing an escape room with co-workers, there’s no corporate pressure to succeed or perform well, helping workers to relax and present an authentic version of themselves.
Escape Rooms Require Communication
Communication is one of the fundamental characteristics of a good working team. Knowing how to share instructions, deliver reports and updates, and listen to feedback is the hallmark of a harmonious team. The issue is that many teams struggle with effective communication, and plenty of teams have seen this skill deteriorate during the COVID-19 working-from-home period.
Escape rooms can be a fantastic way to develop teamwork and communication skills in the workplace. To succeed in an escape room, you will have to be effective at sharing ideas, solutions, and thoughts; this requirement will help your team develop this skill and improve.
Can Learn About Co-Workers in An Escape Room
You may think you already have a good idea of what your co-workers are like through the water cooler chat and small talk you do in the office, but playing an escape room can illuminate characteristics and traits that may not have been obvious in the office.
For example, workers may learn that other co-workers are fantastic leaders and collaborators when playing an escape room, as the challenge gives them an opportunity to demonstrate these skills. Also, escape rooms can be a good way to see how others in your team tackle problems.
You may find that one co-worker performs well when structuring tasks to be completed one at a time, while others prefer working on multiple things simultaneously. This information can be invaluable for team leaders and those in senior positions, as you use what you learn about your staff to assign tasks and workloads in a way that’s more effective for the individual.
You Can Succeed Together In An Escape Room
With escape rooms, there are few better feelings than beating the challenge before the time limit as a group. It’s incredibly satisfying and rewarding, making a team of workers feel a collective sense of achievement.
This feeling of group success can be a really powerful thing to take back into your work environment, as it will help the team create a tighter, more significant bond and prove that they can get some great results when they work as a team.
This feeling of success will encourage a team to work hard together and replicate it when at work, and they’ll often utilise the same tactics and methods they used in the escape room to get results.
Plus, when things get stressful at work, or communication breaks down, a team can draw from this experience as proof that they can come together to find a good solution. Allowing a team to build these kinds of wins can make them more equipped to succeed and meet their goals in the office.
Escape Rooms Are Fun
The fun and excitement of an escape room can help your team become better communicators when back in the office. When engaging in a fun and non-work related activity together, your team may stop seeing each other as co-workers and start seeing each other as friends, especially as they have a shared positive experience.
Professionalism is always important in the office, but being more friendly and connected with your team after a fun experience like an escape room can break down some barriers that people put up, helping to build a close team that cares about each other.
This has the benefit of making people more considerate of each other, and you’ll often find that people work harder when doing so for a friend than a co-worker. So, putting teams into fun and exciting situations to build bonds and friendships can help improve collaboration in the future.
Conclusion
Collaboration is an essential aspect of any business team, and it can be challenging for a department to build up this skill, especially if people are new and haven’t been working together for a while.
Escape rooms can be a great way to enhance the communication and togetherness of the team, making them much more effective and efficient when it comes to completing tasks and reaching their work targets. For your next team-building exercise, consider an escape room and reap the rewards of a closer-knit team that better understands each other’s strengths and weaknesses.