The cliché exists for a reason. Teamwork makes the dream work (Unless of course if your dream is to work alone).
Let’s assume that you do work in a team, and one that has a high degree of interdependence in how it operates. Or should.
A project that requires a team requires collaboration. This isn’t a solo operation, or a production line where you do your one bit over and over. The fact that you have been put in a team means your communication skills are about to come into play.
Timed Goals
Many Escape Room puzzles are designed to require two (or more) players to operate away from each other in different parts of the room or other rooms entirely, but in unison to complete a goal. (Sound familiar 2021?)
Coordinating this through a management role or just within the team itself is one of the elements that will be honed in the Escape Room to take away afterwards.
The efficiencies gained from working to a timed schedule within an Escape Room can also have the trickle-down effect of being more succinct in team meetings: getting ideas across more efficiently and having team members ready to act quicker. Surely that alone is worth it?
Time To Call
Better Escape Room companies will have puzzles that are designed to involve multiple players at once, and in tasks more complex than just a big search project. Look for the Rooms that have a minimum number of players of four or more: larger numbers necessary should equate to both more puzzles, more complex and varied puzzles, and individual puzzles that need more people working on solving them. If in doubt, call up the Escape Room company. While they won’t be able to give you too many specifics about the puzzles themselves, once you let them know what you are hoping to achieve, they should be able to tell you which of their rooms will be most appropriate.
Time To Get Out
Taking your team to an Escape Room is going to do more than just give your team a new setting for the same old jazz. I don’t know what your team does (it would be weird if I did, I don’t even know who you are dear reader), but the core aspects are here:
-communication,
-set tasks and objectives,
-roles to be performed,
-sharing knowledge and resources,
-collaboration towards goals,
-feedback and appraisal,
-success dependent on all team members being involved.
An Escape Room is a great situation to get a wide range of skillsets to work in unison, along with a healthy measure of team motivation and creative thinking. Being able to adapt to differing situations in a pressured environment, and drawing on the skills and enthusiasm of each other will help the interdependence across the team back in the workplace.
Timing Not Priming
Solving problems in and as a team allows for sharing of alternative views and approaches, and in the series of peculiar puzzles that wait for you in the Escape Room, the ability of your team to adapt to new situations will be heavily featured.
Bringing in a colleague to work on a problem (puzzle) that you are unable to fix (solve) when you are stuck (puzzled!) in a new situation where the path to a solution is unclear is a great opportunity to actually not tell them anything about your efforts. Bare with me here. So your attempt didn’t work? Why not tell your colleague all about it, priming them to only think about that approach, causing them to anchor to the one method. By asking for help and NOT expanding on where you THINK you went wrong, you can allow them to bring a fresh perspective and their own process to the problem. Obviously they might make the same mistake you made, or totally different ones. In which case, the two of you can then work on it together, or bring in a third [hopefully more successful] teammate in.
Time For Team Building
Using an Escape Room to help build on teamwork gives a microcosm of how team members can function in an intensified situation: carrying out tasks; taking on varying roles; sharing information and help where needed; and working to timelines.
