10 REASONS AN ESCAPE ROOM IS THE BEST TEAM BUILDING ACTIVITY

Make Great Teams. Make Great Memories

I am sure you will agree that deciding what to do for team building can be very challenging.

 

And we know that team building or team bonding events can be expensive.

Or, they may not be very effective at actually building a team.

 

What if I told you that there is one activity that overshadows the rest for efficiently building a great communicative, collaborative and thriving team? 

 

Some of you may have been set the task by your line manager to find the best team building activity.

You may have a budget and criteria you have to meet for the event.

Both of these can be a lot of pressure. Trust me, I have been there. I know how you are feeling.

Sensory Escape Room For a Birthday Party

At Other World Escapes, we want to make your job of finding the best team building in Southampton a lot simpler, easier and doesn’t break the bank. A happy you is a happy us.

This is why I am going to give you 10 reasons why escape rooms are the best team building activity for any size group.

10 Reasons Why Escape Rooms are The Best Team Building Activity

10. Improves Team Spirit and Motivation

Your employees are your company’s most valuable asset. And, as we such we must have give our employees great job satisfaction.

The happier our employees are, the better they will perform and the better our business will do.

As such, it is very important to provide our employees with activities and tasks that have great rewards and make them feel amazing.

Escape rooms are incredible for motivating employees and providing them with a great sense of achievement.

 

Escape Room Goals Motivate

At the beginning of each game your team is set a goal. This can be to find an ancient elixir of life, sacrifice a teammate, or just escaping the room. Whatever the goal is, your team is given 60 minutes to complete this goal.

This clear objective, and the limited amount of time, helps the team to focus and motivate themselves to work together to complete the goal.

We even see players encourage and motivate each other to get to the main goal quicker and more efficiently.

Alongside this, when a player has figured out how to complete a particularly difficult challenge, the feedback from the rest of the team is amazing.

The congratulations and recognition for completing this task is invaluable for the problem-solver, and helps to reinforce their achievement.

At Other World Escapes, we will also reinforce this further by congratulating the team, and specific players, on where they excelled.

Combining all of these elements together bring an incredible sense of recognition, congratulation and boosts their overall motivation.

 

A Great Sense of Achievement

Overcoming a difficult challenge as a team is one of the best feelings anyone can receive. As a team, you know that have been through and conquered these challenges together.

This gives all the players a great sense of achievement and team cohesion.

Having this feeling, improves relationships, both inside and outside of the workplace, and makes you feel part of a ‘dream team’.

It is no mean feat to escape an escape room. Completing the goal within a very short amount of time can be a very difficult task.

This is because there are mental, logical, physical, sensory and all sorts of other challenges along the way before you are able to complete the goal.

Completing the escape room together, everybody comes out smiling and giving each other high fives. It’s a great sight to see and even more wonderful to be part of.

Stag do in our Mayan Escape Room

9. Improves Communication

There are a number of different reasons why communication is critical.

For example, finding all the parts of a puzzle is critical to completing that particular puzzle. So, should a team member find something hidden away and communicate it to the rest of the team, one other team member may link it to something they are working on.

This means that the particular challenge can be completed more efficiently and the team worked together to complete it.

In Escape Rooms, there can be a lot of puzzles which require collaboration. Our Mayan temple in particular, has many challenges that require more than one team member to be working on it.

This could include providing directions to someone in the team who is controlling something.

It may also bring quieter team members ‘out of their shell’. We all know that the loudest voices don’t always have the best ideas.

In Escape Rooms, it doesn’t matter who has the loudest voice, it matters who is correct. Our game hosts support those who have great ideas and provide a platform to all players to present their great ideas.

 

8. Supports Collaboration

Escape Rooms are built on collaboration. Teams in escape rooms are required to work together to achieve the goals as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Particular puzzles and physical challenges may require one person to direct and another to control, or even more than 1 person to control.

7. Identifies Employee Strengths

We all learn and exceed in different ways. Let’s celebrate that. Through seeing how other team members work in escape rooms, we can see where people’s strengths are.

Once we know their personal strengths we can leverage this for a more efficient team.

As such, Escape Rooms contain many varied types of puzzles and challenges. Whether you are a visual learner, auditory learner, doer or anything in between, escape rooms will present you with something that plays to your strengths.

Leveraging our strengths, as a team, can help us do some amazing things.

As such, our escape rooms contain a huge variety of mental, physical and sensory puzzles. Each of these have a different player in mind, playing to different people’s strengths and rewarding them.

 

6. Fosters Creativity and Problem-Solving

Problem-solving is central to any escape room. All throughout an escape room experience you are faced with many challenges which encourage your employees to think creatively around the problems.

Adding the extra time pressure boosts this creative process and supports the development of innovation and problem-solving skills. Whilst the time pressure adds to the creative process, it does not increase the level of stress.

Instead it encourages creativity through collaborating with their fellow team members.

A creative team that is great at problem-solving is a force to be reckoned with.

Escape room players in the Vermilion escape room

 

5. Develops Task and Time Management Skills

In almost every workplace we are required to complete certain tasks by a certain time or deadline. We all know that it’s part of everyday life. Some of us will even create task lists to break down larger tasks.

This can help us to divide the tasks into smaller, more manageable tasks that are easier to complete. Some call these milestones.

As I have mentioned before in this post, escape rooms give the team one overarching goal to complete.

Although this can provide great team work, there are many other tasks and milestone that stand in the way between your team and completing the main goal.

As such, our escape rooms are designed to break down the tasks in such a way that it makes them challenging, but approachable. They are also supported by what we call ‘signposts’.

These are milestone markers which show you how far you have gone through the game and what you have left to open.

In addition, our escape rooms provide very little time to do a large amount of tasks. Having a lot to do within a short period of time helps to develop task and time management skills.

It can also help the team leaders to delegate tasks out to the group to become more efficient as a team.

 

4. Helps to Realise Natural Team Leaders

In any great team, we need a great leader. As a manager, you may be looking for someone to help you lead a team. But, how do you go about picking the right person? Interviews work very well, but does not help you as a manager to see who is a natural team leader.

Escape Rooms provide managers with the opportunity to see and hear who the natural team leaders are. When placed in a high-pressure, timed environment, those with an innate ability to lead teams will become evident.

An escape room can also provide the team leaders with a naturally-challenging environment to build upon their leadership and management skills.

 

3. Affordable, But Effective

I am sure you will agree that team building can be very expensive. I want to tell you that it doesn’t have to be. Escape Rooms are a very cost-effective way to build your great teams.

We provide great, affordable team building in Southampton from as a little as £18 per person. We can also cater to groups as large as 20 people, making for a great, affordable team building activity.

2. Improves Decision-Making Capabilities

Quick and efficient decision-making is one of the most useful attributes of any team leader in a workplace.

We need to rely on people who have the confidence to make (sometimes) difficult decisions quickly, sometimes with limited information. However, it can be very difficult to practice this particular attribute.

This is because it can be very difficult to emulate a situation where a decision has to be made quickly. Some may consider scenario-based interviews questions. But, I have something even better…

Rather than simply providing a hypothetical scenario, escape rooms provide a realistic scenario to make that decision. Not only are they making the decisions for themselves, they may also be making decisions that will affect the rest of the team.

 

Who will we need to sacrifice to progress through the game? When should we receive a clue for this particular puzzle?.

 

In our Vermilion escape room 2 teams can race against each other to achieve the same goal. In a vs mode, teams are given a limited amount of hints and every time they take a hint, 3 minutes is added to the time.

Therefore the players have to make a decision based upon whether they take a clue receive this time penalty, or continue and try to persevere by themselves.

This makes a great team dynamic when deciding to take clues, and really supports the building of great decision-making in the workplace.

Escape room players in the Mayan escape room

 

1. Makes Great Memories

If our employees have great memories together, they can work very well as a team. Having fond memories with colleagues and coworkers strengthens relationships between team members and boosts morale.

Taking everything from this blog post into account, team members in escape rooms are encourages to play to their strengths, overcome challenges, work together, communicate and make decisions, all of which contribute to making great memories.

The positive memories we can make as a team, the longer we want to be part of that team. All the reasons why escape rooms are the best team building activity.

Let’s make great teams. Let’s make great memories.

 

Want to Know More About The Best Team Building Activity?

Our friendly and knowledgable game hosts can provide you with loads more information about why escape rooms are the best team building activity. Even the wider world for that matter. Contact us if you wish to find out more.

 

Pay It Forward

If you found this post on team building useful, please be a kind soul and link this blog post from your website or blog. It will help others to make the right decision in picking the best team building activity.

 

Come Play Our Escape Rooms

You may want to come and check out our escape rooms in Southampton and Portsmouth. We have some great games at both venues and we would love for you to come and play.

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