Why an Escape Room Experience is Good for Team Building

By 4th October 2019 No Comments

Escape Rooms are one of the fastest-growing trends of experiences that have sprung up over the last few years.

If you don’t know about them, then they are immersive role-playing experiences where a team is ‘locked’ inside a room or series of rooms and has to work together to solve problems to escape and be free from the room against a strict time limit.

These rooms are normally themed around a particular story or setting such as haunted houses, apocalypse bunkers, tombs, murder scenes and the like.

Sending a corporate group on one of these experiences is one of the latest trends in team building and we take a look at what it could do for your company and team.


Team Members Set A Common Goal

In an escape room, all of the participants have a common goal and they need to work together to achieve it. This being the idea of escaping the room.

This is similar to how departments in an organisation have a common goal that they need to achieve in working together.

Goal setting works similarly in both scenarios. Team members individually decide what they think the common goal is.

Team members then discuss with each other what they think the common goal is and identify areas that may have been overlooked or are in conflict, they then revise their definition of the common goal based on this new information.

They repeat the cycle of discussion and revision until all are agreed on a common goal.


Teams Can Assess Members

In the workplace, it can sometimes be hard to see how certain members of the team deal with conflict. Team members are often trusted to do their part and then left alone, so conflict resolution is not easily monitored.

In an escape room scenario, all team members are face-to-face and therefore can each see how the others deal with conflict.

This allows team members to get an accurate judge of strengths and weaknesses of each team member which is vital when it comes to problem-solving.

It can also identify team members that need to be watched for potential problems in the future.


Everyone Gets Into The Mindset

When it comes to a group working, there are two types of mindsets and these can be easily identified in an escape room setting and applied to the workplace.

There is the ‘Growth mindset’ which can be summarised as an attitude of ‘I don’t currently have the skills to do this yet’.

This is in direct contrast to the ‘Fixed mindset’ which is summarised as ‘I don’t know how to do this, so there is no point in trying’.

Escape rooms can help identify who has what mindset and more easily facilitate transition into growth mindsets.


Identify Disruptors

The other thing that escape rooms are great for, is identifying team members who are going to negatively impact the performance of the team.

There are several types of these such as the quiet ones, the jokers, the whiners and the ‘I just don’t understand’ ones.

They all make themselves known easily in an escape room environment.


Bottom Line

There’s no doubt that an escape room experience can help strengthen your team. It will also help team members know each other better and ultimately improve the way they work together.