Escape rooms are a new and exciting developing trend that’s becoming a lot more popular among corporate circles.

More and more companies are starting to realize just how effective the concept of trapping a group together and asking them to escape as a team is when it comes to team building and creating a more cohesive workspace.

But, you can’t really just get everyone to go to an escape room in Singapore and be done with it. There’s an actual process behind making sure that your team gets the most out of their experience in escape rooms.

Here’s how:

1. Make sure that the focus is on collaboration – not on competition

People love to compete – it’s in our nature.

Unfortunately, it’s not unusual for office workers to take things a bit more seriously when winning is the priority. The result? They don’t really learn anything from the activity other than “winning is good”.

Winning as an incentive is nice, but the goal of the activity is to get the entire team to collaborate. Make sure that everyone understands that.

2. Encourage the entire team to work together

It’s not unusual for activities like escape rooms to cause the entire office to group up with people that they know and are more comfortable with.

That’s great if you’re with friends and family, but the goal of the activity is to bring the entire office together. Excluding people that you don’t really know from your team is counterproductive and deviates away from the main purpose of the exercise.

Though it might lead to some discord, since not everyone might like how you grouped them together, at the end of the day, they’ll be forced to work together and that’s what’s important.

3. Schedule it during work hours

As fun as going to an escape room might be, it’s not fun doing something work-related outside of the typical work hours. Even if you get paid, you probably would have already made plans for what to do after work, either with your family or your loved ones.

For everyone to start the activity with a positive mindset, schedule it during work hours.

You don’t even need to vacate the entire office day for it. You can just try ending the typical work hours earlier and have the entire office spend the remainder of it in the escape room. This way, they can still go on with their initial plans, and still be able to bond together with the rest of the team.

It’s a win-win situation for all parties involved.

Perhaps the best part about the entire escape room experience is that the rooms are often changed. This means that if you plan on making it the go-to annual team building activity for your team, they’ll always have new and exciting themes to explore and test their skills with, even if you end up going to the same place every year.