Why "escape the room games" are the new team building trend?

Go ahead: ask any manager, CEO or business owner how important teamwork and collaboration are in the course of business. You'll most likely hear enthusiastic support for both. From the nation's top bank, Royal Bank, to companies with a global footprint like Deloitte, managers at every level know the importance of getting teams to build their teamwork skills. That's why those companies come to us.

After all, working together and sharing ideas sparks innovation and improves productivity, right?

So if most modern business processes rely on collaboration, why do so many companies often fail at making it happen? What is it that's preventing companies from fostering collaborative environments for their employees?

Is it company culture? Resistant teams? Untrained employees?

Here at A/Maze Montreal we believe it's something else. When teams aren't good at collaborating, it's because they lack enough opportunities to practice collaboration skills in new settings.

To help with that, we've created powerfully innovative, highly engaging, and super-challenging escape games. By participating in these complex, real-life scenarios together, your team gets to practice the all-important skills that lead to collaboration back at work.

Here's why that's important.

You can teach team-building skills like communication, cooperation, and the sharing of ideas. But until your group can put all those skills together and use them in real time, it's all just lip service to collaboration.

You'd be hard-pressed to find many managers who don't agree: collaboration is crucial for success with most projects and initiatives.

Most managers are all about teamwork and they practice what they preach. But, as business experts often point out, that doesn't necessarily lead to collaboration.¹

"…most managers are cooperative, friendly, and willing to share information — but what they lack is the ability and flexibility to align their goals and resources with others in real time."

-Ron Ashkenas, author of "Simply Effective" How to Cut Through Complexity in Your Organization and Get Things Done"

True collaboration means making difficult decisions. It means hearing from everyone in the group. It means equal participation from everyone and not letting just one or two team members dominate every discussion. It means possibly adjusting your views according to fresh insight from your colleagues. It also means being able to do all these things on the fly, live, during collaborative sessions with your co-workers.

Again, that's all well and good. It sounds great in theory but the problem is just that: in too many workplaces today, collaboration is merely a theory. What's needed is more practice.

Just like sports teams need hours and hours of practice each week to learn how to function as a whole and win games, so do your employees. But how can they learn new behaviors that lead to better collaboration when they're stuck in the same old routines at work?

Human nature is to fall back into old habits, and that goes for everything from dieting to the way we communicate and collaborate at work. Bad habits at work can become entrenched, even when you do your best to instill habits that lead to better productivity.

Employees can easily fall back into being siloed, non-cooperative, resistant to sharing information or simply passive when it comes to participating in group decision-making. They may know how to build a team, but until they have lots and lots of practice acting as a team, it's all just theory and no positive change is made.

A collaborative atmosphere can be hard to just order up. As we just pointed out, it takes constant, diligent hard work to overcome old habits. It takes tons of training to teach employees the value of getting everyone to participate. It takes more training to teach good communication skills- the foundation of good collaboration.

Once you have those elements in place, it can still be tough to transform those skills into true workplace collaboration. When employees take on the same roles for every project, at every meeting, and during every brainstorming session, it's hardly a recipe for innovation.

Managers who want to spark creativity and promote out-of-the-box thinking often try and encourage team members to take on new roles. Everyone gets complacent when they slide into the same old easy, routine roles in every collaborative effort.

What happens when you take your team out of the office and plunk them in the middle of a brand new environment? Companies like Imperial Tobacco Canada and Air Transat have invested in team building with us, helping their employees build the skills they need to grow and improve.

These companies found out what happens: during collaborative activities like A/Maze's Escape Games, people begin to break out of the silos they've developed at work.

What happens next, when you present them with an immediate, attention-grabbing problem that needs solving right away? Better yet- a problem that may only be solved when they all work together, 100% participation required.

Finally, what happens when the roles they take on to solve that problem are totally different from the roles they play at work?

Innovation. Sharing. Creativity. Eye-opening insight. The building of trust. Those are only some of the wonderful things that can happen when people try out new roles. They're expanding their capabilities, building their confidence, learning to respect a diversity of thinking styles, and more.

That's what you get when your team joins A/Maze for any one of our unique Escape The Room Games. Groups get to try different roles while solving some of the most challenging and engaging, totally immersive escape games our expert team has come up with to date. It's a trend that's backed by science, promoted by experts… and totally fun to boot.