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Singapore has become a hotspot for one of the hottest trends to sweep the world: Escape Rooms.

Escape Rooms are a high adrenaline team building game that involves locking players into a room and forcing them to solve challenging puzzles, identify abstract clues, and race against the clock as they attempt to escape. Once the timer runs out, it’s game over.

Attention to detail is essential. Even the tiniest clue could mean the difference between winning and losing.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a tourist or a local, if you’re looking to engage in a team building activity while in Singapore, you should pay LOST SG, or a similar escape room, a visit. Here are 5 reasons why escape rooms are the best for team building.

1. Alternative Source of Entertainment

An escape room isn’t your average activity.

Typically, traditional games such as bowling or miniature golf provide more of a passive experience for its participants. Simple tasks such as rolling a ball down a lane or swinging a club in the hopes of accumulating as many points as possible are all you need to play these games successfully.

Escape rooms, however, offers an immersive alternative to the usual activities you’d engage in with a group.

In today’s world, people are more interested than ever in making unique memories with their friends. Escape rooms provide an experience that will create memories that you and a group can bond over at a later time.

Nothing beats working together with a group to escape from a prison cell while a clock counts down in the background!

2. Promotes Communication

It doesn’t matter the situation, those who communicate well tend to accomplish goals faster and more efficiently. This is as true for escape rooms as it is in a real life setting.

It’s essential that you communicate effectively with your group to beat the clock. It’s tough to identify all of the clues, solve every puzzle, and ultimately escape if you’re working by yourself. As they say, two heads are better than one.

Better yet is a team full of individuals sharing information with one another to solve a common problem. Once you’ve given your input to the group, you can discuss possible solutions on how to solve the puzzles and escape.

Ultimately, escape rooms help team members to express themselves clearly with an added bonus of learning how to listen to others better.

3. Your team will learn how to collaborate

There’s no “I” in team. There’s no exception to this rule. It doesn’t matter if you consider yourself to be a smart individual who doesn’t need the help of others to accomplish the obstacles standing in your way, escape rooms are unforgiving to those who act on their own. To get away, you’ll need to distribute the workload amongst the team members. This concept can be applied to any area of your life. Teams generally accomplish tasks faster and more efficiently than individuals. That’s a fact. The sooner you realize that, the faster you’ll begin working together to escape the horrors of the escape room.

4. You’ll boost Team Morale

When it comes to teamwork morale is everything. If your morale is low, your performance will suffer. If it’s high, then nothing can stop you.

As your group solve clues and draws closer and closer to defeating the challenges of the escape room the little high fives and compliments you give one another will have a boosting effect on your team spirit.

You’ll want to continue to experience that feeling and work harder. Soon, if your team spirit is high enough, perhaps you’ll become victorious in your efforts. Every little victory, no matter how small, will make you want to achieve more.

Taking this lesson with you outside of the escape room will allow your team to work better as a unit. You’ll want to win and accomplish your goals, whatever they may be, to experience that same euphoria of conquering the challenges of an escape room.

Of course, if you do end up escaping, that provides an excuse for your group to go out and celebrate.

Rewarding yourself after accomplishing a goal is a great motivator to keep striving for victory. Even if you don’t win, you can still push to do your part and support the team.

5. You will learn from others as you identify your strengths and weaknesses

It gets easy to develop old thought patterns that become outdated and ineffective over time. However, escape rooms force individuals to abandon such thinking as they’re compelled to use their creativity to solve puzzles.

You may be pleasantly surprised at how some of your teammates may rise to the occasion by displaying uncanny problem-solving skills.

If you pay close enough attention, you may learn a thing or two. Also, an escape room may expose strengths and weaknesses that you may not have known that you possessed. Having a group present allows you to delegate the tasks where you are weak, such as leading, to someone else as you focus on the areas where you are strong, such as problem-solving.

Everyone has had their own experiences in life that has molded the way they perceive the world. That unique perception is what truly differentiates an individual from the rest of the group.

As you encounter the difficulties of an escape room, you’ll learn how your teammates handle certain problems and situations. Working together to solve challenges may teach you how to approach the problems in your own life differently.

Escape Rooms are one of the best team building exercises that you can engage in with a group. It doesn’t matter if you’re with your family, a study group, or coworkers from your office, an escape room will teach you invaluable lessons about what it means to work together as a team.

Whether you win or lose, your experiences will allow your team to become a more cohesive and efficient unit.

It’s no secret that a motivated, coordinated team gets more done than a highly individuated one. A business is, at its heart, a team activity.
In the past, when managers took inspiration from Darwin, they emphasized competition within the workplace.

The theory was the more the staff resented each other, the harder they would work to prove they were better employees at work.

This was way back when doctors were prescribing cigarettes and a good stiff drink as remedies for stress, and you’ll have some idea of how that management theory worked out (it did not work well at all). So today, managers work to foster team spirit and cooperation. The theory goes that with “inspirational leadership,” one can bring together a “real” team. The problem is that there’s a distinct difference between these theoretical teams and the people that work in offices in the real world.

On one hand, we see a well-oiled machine made up of dedicated professionals.
On the other hand, we see a group of people, each trying to get through their own busy workload as quickly as possible.
These people may happen to work under the same roof, but nobody could describe them of being a tightly bonded team.

And so we get team building exercises.
The idea is that, by getting the team involved in some kind of a rugged outdoor experience, you can force them to work together and realize that it is possible.

Sometimes the activities are fun. But do they work? Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. It really depends on the activity.

Where Team Building Goes Wrong..

A surprisingly large number of employees hate team building. If you mention it, you’ll see reactions ranging from eye-rolling to full-blown panic attacks. There’s a reason for this – past experience with bad team building exercises.

Here are a couple reasons why employees dread team building activities:

• The exercise does not relate to the problems they face in their real work.
• It’s too demanding or scary – we’re not all extreme sports enthusiasts!
• Too much physical contact (especially with games like “Human Knot”)
• Weather related – the humid weather in Singapore may put off some participants and let’s be honest, no one enjoys rubbing sticky shoulders.

Qualities of an Ideal Team Building Activity in Singapore

An ideal team building activity should:

• Confront your team with a real challenge that requires teamwork to solve
• Be fun and rewarding
• Exercise and improve skills that will be used at work – e.g. problem solving and communication
• Be suitable for everyone, not just the extremely fit or those with special skills
• Preferably held indoors

Team members shouldn’t be made to suffer discomfort, exhaustion or peril. Assault, fitness courses are an effective tool for training hardened soldiers to face the horrors of war. But they’re not so good at helping senior accountants become better employees or team players.

Why You Should Lock Your Employees Together in a Room

Real-life room escape experiences are a special type of physical adventure game (no special skills required) that puts a team of people together in a closed environment and gets them to solve puzzles in order to successfully escape. The team has to solve the puzzles within a time limit, which means that if they want to win, they must work together.

The different puzzles require a combination of different skills, such as analytical thought, observation, timing, and creative thinking. This means that everyone will have something to contribute, regardless of age or work experience level.
If the concept of escape rooms are entirely new to you, check out the blog entry “My experience escaping an escape room” – Sal, HardwareZone.com.sg.

The people playing the game are part of the story. They may be paranormal investigators, moving forward to discover the unknown. Or maybe they are prisoners, working together to escape. Whatever the situation, the setting and experience creates a narrative context that draws the players in and creates strong engagement; allowing participants to forge strong bonds through play.

The skills that participants will exercise in an escape challenge translate well to their everyday tasks and challenges.

Working together to solve a problem against a deadline (in this case, to a successful escape), however, does. Communicating clearly and breaking down a problem into a series of tasks that everyone can work on, is almost the definition of collaboration in the workplace.
There’s a lot to be said for training your employees to work together more effectively as a team. On the other hand, it’s all too easy to make the situation worse by forcing staff to participate in an activity that isn’t relevant or is too tough. It’s important to find a fun activity that’s suitable for the whole team.

Our escape rooms fit that description perfectly.
Contact us today to team build at LOST SG!

The team at Asiaone came down to LOST SG to have a go at our Next Generation Real Escape Game in February. Comprising mostly of first-time players, the team remain unfazed and went ahead to try out 3 of our rooms. Use the button below to continue to read about their Singapore Escape Game experience at LOST SG!

In the article, they have penned their experiences and how they found the LOST SG experience. LOST SG was also featured in MyPaper, 到 “LOST SG” “体验密室逃脱”.

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