Escape Room is the shiny new Team Building activity which seems to blow up in popularity over the past 3 years.
I find the Escape Room concept just amazing: smart, strategic, challenging, adventurous, creative, interactive, fun, BUT not necessarily suited for your team bonding goals.
This is a wonderful experience to share with family, close friends but not necessarily with workmates. But if your team needs to improve the communication, don’t go for an escape room! At first glance, you will think this is THE innovative idea to enhance the corporate spirit: why wouldn’t your team be excited to try out a more and more popular activity created specifically for the smart people they are? Because it could kill the vibe in the group.
What is the main idea of Escape Rooms? A group of persons is locked into a room and they have to find clues leading them to escape the room.
This is an immersive game made of mind-bending puzzles and riddles that the group should work and solve together by making arbitrary connections. The game starts with a host hustling the group into a room and rushing through the instructions in a high-speed way: I had the feeling to hear the accelerated speech of the side-effects list of drug commercials.
Then you have to find the first clues, but how? This is the first real difficulty: you have to start from nothing! In general you have to look if there are numbers hidden in the paintings or you’ll have to use the blacklight to find invisible words on the wall or figure out what a design on the wall is supposed to be telling.
Some of the players could feel confused and even lose confidence in their intellectual powers. Just like in the work place, communication is key as you better don’t waste time by retrying strategies that have already not worked for other team players.
But will everybody work out the kinks by solving the fun and interactive trivias? Forget about it! Some players, more familiar than others with this type of game, will find alone all the answers leaving the rest of the group feel miserable.
The clock ticking down creates stress and some of the participants will be more into it than others. Actually, one of the problem is collaboration because everybody tries to figure out a hint individually and not working as a team.
As soon as somebody solves a riddle, the others stress out not to have come up to the
same conclusion. This creates frustration more than collaboration in the group. An other thing: approaching to the solution is not really rewarding if you can’t connect the dots in the speed. Seeing other players going a step further makes you feel uncomfortable: either you disengage from the game or you feel the pressure to find some kind of solution to save face.
I think that the Escape Room is an excellent idea if your team feels already as a a solid block where participants will be engaged in the same direction and will have fun. But if you mix up people who don’t know each other well, this is not going to get the expected bonding result. Strangers will remain strangers because the challenge to solve the puzzles will be perceived as competition and will build a barrier.
It is also a matter of age and sex: young people, especially men, who are familiar with playing video games will have a blast. But mixing older and younger people or men and women could create frustration and split the group.
After all, what an escape room will achieve is to let you find out how good (or poor) the communication is in your team and it will definitely give you an opportunity to develop those skills through an other type of Team Building activity.
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