Is Your Team In A Rut? Energize Them And Grow Team Productivity At An Escape Room
We’ve all been there. A once high-performing team gradually finds itself in a rut. Team productivity plateaus, its collective passion goes missing in action and the team becomes very, very quiet. That is never a good sign.
Ruts are insidious things. They seem to just creep up on you without any warning. One minute the team productivity is fine, the next it’s taken a steep plunge into mediocrity. While it usually takes time for a rut to set in, you may not notice it taking shape until the first few symptoms begin to manifest.
Generally, emotional lows are the leading indicator that your team is in danger of becoming stuck in a rut. Signs of low energy, poor motivation, and complacency or worse, indifference, indicate your team may be in dire need of a fun wake up call. One solution to those team woes is team building activities which help them rediscover their mojo.
5 Signs Your Team Productivity Is In A Rut (And Desperately Needs An Escape Room Experience)
- Your team’s cycle time has slowed to a trickle and issues or complaints are on the rise.
- Those once lively, animated discussions your team used to have in meetings have been replaced with grumbles or extended periods of silence and apathy.
- Your team looks more productive because they’re quiet and they are always at their computers working diligently. Yet they don’t talk much.
- No one volunteers to try different things or to take on a challenge.
- You overhear your team discussing how great things used to be more than you hear them discussing how things are or will be. Pride in a collective past is great as long as your team stays positive about their future.
Left unchecked, any one of these issues could fester and propel your team into a serious slide in morale. That does not bode well for your team’s productivity or ability to adapt and innovate. So, how best do you get things back on track?
Shake Things Up
Every team likes its familiar routines. However, sometimes those very same routines get in the way of being active participants in our jobs. Good business owners or team leaders find ways to shake up the routine, just a little, to reenergize the team and get people to re-engage and actively participating once more.
Why Every Company Can Benefit From An Escape Room
Team-building activities have long been part of office life. They nurture better working relationships between employees and their teams, encourage open communication, and help forge bonds that might not otherwise flower during employees’ day-to-day routines.
Increasingly, more and more companies are emphasising the importance of team building. This is creating a demand for more immersive and engaging team building experiences. Enter the escape room. Escape rooms can provide benefits by enhancing communication, problem-solving, and time management skills.
Most escape rooms demand participants solve set puzzles or discover clues to gain access to information to help the team escape. This problem-solving activity is conducted under a set time constraint, typically escaping the room in 60 minutes or less.
Using the concept contained in the escape room for developing your organization’s teamwork and team productivity is based on developing and honing three core skills areas; clear communications, problem-solving, and time management skills.
In a team development environment, these elements of an escape room force team members to clearly communicate, work as a team to solve problems and complete their activities in a timely manner to escape the room within the given time frame.
Enhancing Clear Communications
The time-constrained yet fun setting of an escape room could bring out the communication strengths and weaknesses of team members, identifying those for future development. These team building games also provide useful indicators of ingrained communication behaviours, which emerge under stress.
Another common outcome of escape room-based team building activities is the emergence of natural leadership behaviours during this simulated communication environment. These soft communication skills surely provide a basis for further development effort and refinement.
Conceptual Problem-Solving
By slightly customizing your escape room activities and environment, you can enhance its relevance to your business setting. Branding, customer service, accounting, and engineering problem-solving activities have all been folded into an escape room environment to support the focus on your core business experience.
This approach allows your employees to practice, learn, and apply distinctive ways to deal with business-related problems. Furthermore, it also allows them to discover a creative approach to dealing with some of the everyday issues. Creativity is in essence problem solving brought to life.
Time Management
A time constraint imposed on an active learning environment is a meaningful way to fine-tune a team’s time management skills. Yes, it’s always fun to be plagued with hypothetical zombies or have your escape room filling with toxic waste if you fail to escape in time, however, including a threat or reward parallels real life in a team environment and you can always integrate many forms of reward to motivate a team for success.
Trophies, dinners, or gift cards are simple rewards, which in the fun, engaging context of an escape room has the potential to become a bragging point for team members. If the team fails, then alternatively provide a lighthearted consolation prize, such as branded T-shirt saying: “I was slimed by ghosts in our escape room.”
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Final Word
Formal presentations, training workshops, and employee handbooks all have their place in an organization. However, the escape room concept is proving itself as an essential and fun complement to team building activities. Additionally, it is working wonders for team productivity. Employees are an organization’s most valuable resource and team building games that demonstrate their ability to dial up professional development in today’s fast-paced workplaces are proving their worth. Escape rooms are bringing new life and vitality to the concept of lifelong learning and continuous professional development. Moreover, their outcomes are proving to be a difference-maker in driving team performances.
