In the business world, teams can often get hung up on mental snags, unproductive ideas such as “that’s not my job” or “not my department”. There can be office drama, gossip, and passive-aggressive behavior that doesn’t do anyone any good, especially the team!
Colleagues and team members, over time, or simply due to a clash of personalities, can develop hurt feelings, and behavior that is not effective in achieving team goals, workplace harmony, and harbor long-lasting relationships.
Even less effective are the times when colleagues withhold valuable information from one another or are unwilling to hear each other out, convinced that “their way” is the best way. When teams close themselves off to communication, the results are never as productive as when teams are open, helpful, and trusting of each other.
How Do Teams Learn to Improve Collaboration?
While seminars and workshops can provide important intellectual tools for improving communication, they fall far short of experiential exercises when it comes to cementing new ways of thinking into the minds of employees. There is just too much ingrained thinking, for a few hours of lecture to have much impact.
That is where escape room, team collaboration games, can provide an invaluable service. During the game, teams will have no choice but to leave their prejudices at the door and form entirely new mental paradigms focused on clear communication, communal knowledge sharing, responsible delegation, and holding one another capable and accountable.
How Does It Work?
With their adrenaline pumping as they race against the clock, ineffective leadership styles and poor people skills will quickly be jettisoned in favor of consensus building, rapid-fire sharing of intuitive insights, and loyalty to team success.
The science behind this phenomena is similar in any high-pressure environment. Human beings are hardwired to form trusting relationships, and when adrenaline and dopamine overwhelm the nervous system, the usual intellectual blocks that make individuals reticent to form new friendships, and trust one another, evaporate in moments, as nature takes over to make a group of humans into a sum greater than its parts.
How Is Escape Room like the Workplace?
Experiences such as escape rooms are directly translatable to the workplace. The time limit mimics an important deadline, the puzzles that teams encounter simulate big projects that defy easy resolution, and the attendant chaos of the scenario, along with the fact that different personalities shine in different roles, is analogous to workplace strengths and weaknesses.
Having no choice but to work together towards a common goal, teams that have a shared experience in escape rooms can never again proclaim that “things are just not clicking”, or they never would have made it out of the room. A collaboration such as a successful escape will remind them of how well they work together.
It Pays to Have Fun Every Once and a While!
Instead of sitting in a cold meeting room and going over a PowerPoint presentation on team building, office behavior, strategic thinking, and more choose a fun, fast-paced atmosphere where your team or office will have the chance to experience something different and fun! No one likes being locked up in the office all day, get out and enjoy one another!
For more ideas on why your corporate event, or team-building event, should be held at Escape The Room, read some of our other blogs and articles. To book or reserve a room for your next event, give us a call, and get going on your productive workplace!
