Nothing says “company holiday party” like locking yourself in a room with your colleagues. Am I right?
Well, we’re not your average kind of company, so we decided to shake things up a bit this year and headed over to Escape the Room Challenge for a team building outing prior to our annual holiday feast.
For those of you not familiar with Escape The Room, you get locked in a large room with 10-12 people and have to solve a puzzle to get out. Think of it as a real life game of Clue, where you have to piece together clues to find out how to unlock the room. Oh, and you have to solve the challenge in 60 minutes or less. No pressure.
I’d say we walked in confident and walked out humbled. We have some amazingly smart people on our staff whose enginnering and analytical skills really shined through during the challenge. But when you’re dealing with The Da Vinci Code level of clues, we just ran out of time. (Ok, maybe it wasn’t quite that hard but the puzzles were way more sophisticated than any of us initially anticipated).
Our team photos really show how much we hate losing to a challenge.
The really cool thing about the activity is that your strength and weaknesses make themselves known very quickly. I’d say that our team quickly fell into their roles by capitalizing on areas where our strengths were needed. We also knew when to step back and let others take the lead. For example, those who have a very high attention to detail were able to find clues and patterns quickly and then handed them off to the analytical minds who were able to do the decoding. It’s interesting to see how appreciative you are for your colleague’s skill sets when they shine in a new context.
After the Escape the Room Challenge we headed to dinner with a new respect for our family-like staff. We kicked off our holiday celebration with a fun team challenge and finished with a cheers for another great year at InfoTrust.
Sending wishes for a wonderful holiday season to all of our friends, partners and clients.
