Category: Blog

Noticed some droopy shoulders and pale-looking faces around the classroom? Maybe it’s about time you bring your students out for some fun team bonding games.

An orchestra would have no significance if the whole ensemble doesn’t play in sync. Similarly, a football team would lose if the goalkeeper fails to show up. What does this mean? Well, when a group works together in unison, great things happen; a no-brainer, right?

Fun team bonding outings are perfect for teaching students the virtues of effectiveness and collaboration, the need for communication, motivation, and productivity. But to determine the right kind of team bonding event, maybe you’ll Google something like “fun team bonding ideas” and stumble upon a post explaining the various types of them. Honestly speaking, students will love any outing that’s thrilling and adventurous and done at an extraordinary place.

There are over a hundred different types of fun outdoor team bonding games. However, for the sake of your students, you could try the following:

Scavenger Hunt
As you may have guessed, Scavenger Hunt is an action-packed team bonding game, often played for 1 hour. It can accommodate as many players as necessary, and all that’s needed is a pen and paper. To play it, however, members will have to be subdivided and each group will be given a task to complete.

Now, the best part is getting the job done. Imagine a group that’s expected to solve a mystery within a limited period, get familiar with strangers and take photos or even take a selfie with them. Whoever finishes the list of tasks first is the winner.

The Perfect Square
Yet another exciting team bonding game that takes about 30 minutes, the Perfect Square game is as its name says – perfect. It is a 5-20 people game that involves having a long piece of rope and blindfolds. All players are blindfolded, and the participants asked to keep quiet before the game starts. For the whole 30 minutes, every player will be expected to walk as furthest from the starting point as possible, before asking them to get back. Once they are back, you will give each person a rope to form a square.

The Egg Drop
You may either know this game or have played it before. The Egg Drop can be played the entire day or for 2 hours. However, there must be 10 or more players, office supplies, including fresh eggs. The whole class will be split into groups of two or three before the ‘Eggpocalypse’ starts. During the next 10-15 minutes, each team will be busy building a contraption around the egg, to hold the egg. Once the time for building the small structures is up, the ‘Eggpocalypse’’ starts. A team whose egg survives wins!

Escape Room Games
Imagine being in a room where you are expected to work your way out by cracking a series of clues and puzzles? Well, it exists! Escape room games are perfect for educating students the virtues of collaboration, intuitive thinking, and communication among other traits. Basically, it entails a team of 8-10, all frantically searching for keys and other items that would help them escape within a limited time. A team that gets out first is the winner.

The Barter Puzzle
This fun team bonding game takes an hour or two and involves four or more small groups, with each team battling a different jigsaw puzzle. Of course, all puzzles ought to be of a similar difficulty. A team that solves the problem faster than the others is the winner. However, it isn’t a small feat – teams work in collaboration by trading, exchanging or hawking off parts of the puzzle.

The real winner after playing these games is the students themselves. Some skills are better taught through such experiences, away from the walls of the classroom.

Escape room games are now a global craze, taking over the world by storm with Australia being the latest entrant to the party. Interestingly, this game is managing to attract people from all walks of life, each looking to enjoy this mind-boggling experience.

If you are going to escape rooms, you should start by forming your strategy so that each escape is executed with little difficulty. Skills like being observant, communicating and reading the area well can fall by the roadside when tension grows. And so, as a beginner trying to conquer this mystery-filled world, you might not make it alone.

To maximise your experience, learn a tip or two before you embark on it!

Form a Team
Each escape room has an approximate capacity of 10 pax and this means you will have to form a team, either with your friends, family, co-workers or even strangers! Remember the primary goal of this game isn’t just to escape, but also to have fun with each member. You will get to better understand your team members through this experience!

Explore! Explore! Explore!
The first thing to do once your group is full is to search for as many clues as possible. Look behind, inside or under everything – open items if they never said don’t open them. Act like a tornado and quickly unearth everything in the room. For first-timers, anything not mentioned is worth touching!

Take Good Care of Those Clues
Game items and clues are figuratively the keys to your win and so manage them well. First, designate a place where you will be storing your loot so that you avoid confusion and wasting time. Dividing it into two positions to accommodate what you may have used and what’s yet to be used is recommended.

Communicate
Apart from taking care of the clues, another vital trick needed to beat escape rooms is communication. Whenever you have a problem, don’t shy away from seeking assistance. Again, whenever you have or find a clue, do say it.

Communication helps coordinate your actions and enhances teamwork, which in turn makes everything easier. Insist on cooperation so that everyone does something they are skilled at. More importantly, don’t ignore seeking advice from the game master since it is him or her whose hits can get you out when you are stuck.

Solve Puzzles Effectively
Guesses are useful only when they are harmless, and you should be willing to divide yourselves to conquer each problem. You may skip smaller puzzles and larger ones in larger rooms, but be very careful about it. Common ways of solving puzzles involve examining everything and everywhere, combining items that appear related and recalling puzzles that haven’t been solved so that you can gauge how far you might have progressed. Remember, it is better to have an individual working on a simpler puzzle and five others tackling a bigger one than all doing a simple one before embarking on the largest mystery.

• Organise items neatly
• Listen to everyone
• Ask for hints
• Know what to ignore
• Skip the last digit or letter
• Don’t use excessive force
• Be innovating and think outside the box
• Bring a wristwatch

Don’t hurry – don’t look at the clock because you will start to panic. Just stay calm and keep going. Remember, it is only a game and success and failure go hand in hand with it.

During the holidays when schools are closed and everyone is at home, it is undoubtedly a fantastic time for family activities. The idea of a crazy family reunion, a get-together, barbequing or playing cards is what many undoubtedly derive pleasure from. Yes – the holiday is a favourite owing to the pleasant weather and the carefree nature of everyone involved.

There are a lot of family bonding activities that can foster closeness and unity. Some of these can be done with close family members and lighten the mood while allowing everyone to catch up with each other. Most of them can be done over a weekend, maybe indoors or out at a family excursion.

If you would like to plan a memorable family bonding event, here are some fun bonding ideas for your entire family.

Egg and Spoon Race
If you’ve never known this remarkably messy and exhilarating game, you should try it. The whole family is divided into groups, and each team selects a representative who of will take the pitch for the race. Whoever doesn’t drop the egg and runs to the finishing line first wins!

Bringing together every member of your extended family, the Egg and Spoon Race is worth every moment spent playing it. However, a few obstacles on the course can add further to the thrill and fun of running around with an egg.

Escape games
Beat the ticking clock to break out of a locked room. The objective when playing an escape room game is simple; you have an hour to work together with your family members to crack codes and solve puzzles to break out. Your team will need to look keenly at your surroundings, communicate possible ideas, and think critically to escape.

Sack Races
This game will be loved your entire family. After the whole group assembles, let the group leader split the family into different age groups. Every team will be needed to appoint a participant who will then wear a burlap sack. Racing with the sack on is the name of the game and whoever makes it to the finishing line first wins!

Fun Family Interviews
Older members of your extended family, including your great aunts and uncles, and grandparents often have fascinating stories about their experiences and adventures while growing up. In the past, they would assemble their families and explain their tales amidst the fun. Today, you can make it a bit more exciting by using a digital camera as a way of recording the stories, voices, and expressions of the narrator.

It doesn’t have to be a tale that is told at night or in the evening to be interesting. You can buy your kids a camera and ask them to behave like a journalist and interview whoever they would love to at that family gathering. It is beautiful since it makes everyone happy and relaxed!

Backyard Camping
Family camping doesn’t have to be at a faraway location, perhaps in the woods, to be fun and enjoyable. Camping for a night in your backyard or at the beach can be just as eventful if you decide to do it as a family.

The best escape room games are some of the most mentally taxing games that you can play. Often regarded as a fantastic solution for encouraging teamwork between employees. Typically, the game session lasts for 60 minutes, during which employees work intimately and collaboratively with each other. More companies should enlist the help of escape room games to encourage creative and innovative thinking, increase productivity and improve communication between employees.

Here are the different ways in which escape room games assist employees in team building:

Encourages employee to participate
It is necessary for every player to actively contribute to the game to overcome challenges and complete different tasks. This way, every employee will participate in the game. Overcoming challenges together can be fertile grounds for developing respect and tolerance for fellow employees.

Helps in Improving Communication
Communication is an essential facet of any business and it is very important to have good communication between employees to make your business successful. For better communication, it is necessary to encourage and cultivate both sharing and listening. Employees will often face difficult tasks which require them to work together. Employers should always aim to improve communication between employees and escape rooms are a fun way to accomplish this.

Make strategies together
When a group of people are working together to complete a difficult task, they learn to use each other’s strengths to complete the task. Some challenges take more time than others. To complete the allocated tasks, employees must work and strategise together to maximise their individual abilities. This will reduce the time needed to complete each task. Escape room games simulate this process in situations divorced from work, which will encourage similar behaviour at work, optimising the collective capabilities of your employees.

To Lead or Follow
Another common trait found in most groups is that there is no leader, or there are too many. Some will be more enthusiastic to be leaders in the game. If no one is ready to become a follower, it will become a difficult situation and the probability of the group splitting into further subgroups increases. Furthermore, if no one is there to lead, the group will not get anything accomplished. Escape room games provide environments that encourage people to become leaders and followers at the appropriate times, instilling a cohesive team spirit.

Be Creative
Running a business is a challenging task. For it to be successful, it is necessary to think differently than your competitors. Escape rooms encourage more dynamic thinking habits. Your team is provided with hints and clues that are not easy to solve and use. This kind of tasks and challenges need a mixture of creativity and logic to complete in the given time. Creative ideas and thinking can be utilised and flourish during the game.

Escape room games are one of the best ways of conducting fun, effective and result oriented team building activities. Employees learn to work in a team setting. It also helps increase innovation, productivity and building healthy relationships among the employees.

Teambuilding can facilitate a strong team spirit as it helps the people to see each other differently and enable them to connect in a different setting. It helps in performance evaluation and creating a more fun ambience within the workforce. It will bring employees together to accomplish common goals. Employees should know that despite the different improvements that everyone needs to individually make, the main growth in a company is within the team as a whole.

Through continuous exciting and motivational teambuilding sessions, employees will get to hone their communication, planning, conflict resolution and problem-solving skills. Teambuilding also helps in fostering genuine connections, processing, and deeper understanding amongst their peers. For this reason, we introduce escape game rooms as a great method to build a team spirit among your workforce. An escape room game involves having a group of people ‘trapped’ in a room. What the players have to do is to escape the room by solving puzzles and tasks together. Here are the reasons why you should take your employees for an escape room game as part of your team building activities.

Socializing
Socializing and networking are some of the incredible ways of improving the efficiency in an office. Through teambuilding with an escape room game, employees can get to know each other better in a fun setting outside of work. Their morale will be enhanced and they will learn how to work together to solve day-to-day workplace-related issues with their other colleagues together.

Positive Competition
Teambuilding among the employees will help to encourage some healthy competition among them. The games will help to improve productivity as teams have to find out how to complete their tasks in an efficient way. The employees would then transfer what they have learnt in these activities into the workplace and increase their productivity through positive competition with their colleagues.

Boosting Teamwork and Performance
Teambuilding activities help in improving workplace teamwork as employees understand each other better. They understand each other’s weaknesses, strengths and interests after completing the activities. The best escape room games will help employees foster teamwork while solving the puzzles. For them to complete the games within the stipulated time, they must work together. Therefore, teambuilding will enable them to work together better and increase the productivity of the company.

Motivates the team
Cheering, fun, and celebration that comes with every team building session can motivate employees and increase their morale. For instance, when a team successfully manages to escape a game room, they have fun and celebrate. This motivates them to work harder and strive for better results be it in their next team bonding or at the workplace. In this case, employees would strive to get better results for the company.

Working Together and Communicating
The top reason why team members choose to go for teambuilding is to foster communication and efficiency. Every employee desires to have a favourable working environment where people are happy, able to work comfortably and talk freely with everyone. Through team building activities like escape room games, people get to work together by talking to everyone and getting to know their strengths and weaknesses. From there, they understand each other better and may discover that they have common interests with each other. This would thus increase communication be it in work-related issues or personal issues.

Enhancing Innovation and Creativity
A successful teambuilding event does not only unite people, but they also facilitate creativity and innovation as they would be able to think out-of-the-box. Activities like escape room games will force people to think creatively as they need to escape using limited resources. The result from this session is that people would be able to think creatively, flexibly and innovatively when faced with a challenge.

Team building is very crucial if a manager or boss wants to get the best out of his employees. The workforce is encouraged to work not just harder but also smarter to achieve the desired results. Although each individual effort contributes significantly to the organization, the effort from the entire workforce is the real game-changer. If you have not taken your colleagues out yet, now is the time to treat them to an excellent team building session such as an escape room game in Singapore and let them have fun while learning something.

Is your team taking a slow approach to simple exercises? Are you seeing more rolled eyes and hearing more sighs than usual? Is there a decrease in happiness and energy among your team members? Well, your team may be experiencing low morale. Low morale leads to bad moods and is a warning sign of job dissatisfaction. Low morale can lead to miserable clients, organization laying off employees and pressure from the management among others.

In the corporate world, no man is an island. Active cooperation among various members of an organization for the ultimate product to merge is mandatory even in the highly individualized jobs like publishing and graphic design. A company’s success depends on great teamwork. Therefore, no matter the cause of low morale, a manager must take a proactive response towards it. Even though the manager may not be able to change what’s going on in the whole organization, you can create a rewarding and productive environment for your team. Get started with these amazingly true and tried ways of strengthening your team’s spirits right here in Singapore.

Lead by Example
Your outlook can set your entire team’s attitude. It is important to come to work with the right attitude each day and reduce complains emanating from team members. Your employees often look up to you to approach whatever is going on in the organization.

Keep Communication Lines Open
Open communication strengthens your team’s spirit. Initiate a free and open communication among management and the team members. Acquire suggestions and ideas from team members to achieve team goals.

Maintain High Morale
Keeping your team’s morale high helps in strengthening their spirit. Team members function well when the managers recognize their contributions to the team.

Involve Employees in the Planning Process
Letting everyone on the same page is important in an organization. Making employees participate in the strategic planning process and making sure they understand the details is critical in strengthening the team’s spirits. You should ensure that every team member buys into the plan.

Establish Individual Expectations
Hold the team accountable for the results by setting up a clear personal target. Ensure everyone understands that each of their roles is critical in delivering the expected results. You can achieve this by rewarding the team members based on the team’s ability to meet targets. Reward the members based on their contributions to team efforts.

Recruit Employees Who Fit in the Companies’ Team Culture
Start at the beginning by hiring people who fit in the culture of the team. With the multi-ethnical culture in Singapore, you have to make sure you can bond people together easily to reduce conflict. You can determine a person’s traits and personalities by the use of pre-employment assessment and interviews. Determine whether an individual can work well in a team environment by looking at cooperation and willingness to listen.

Don’t Disrupt Schedules
Team members may sometimes suffer low spirits at work when they cannot meet their personal, family or social obligations. As a manager, apart from setting up your team for professional success, you should also help them achieve goals in their social, family, and personal lives.

Recreational Activities
As a manager, it is important to plan for activities that encourage a healthy lifestyle to strengthen team spirit within the company. Engage them in cognitive activities such as games that can stimulate their thinking. For instance, many organizations go for team bonding sessions by playing escape games in Singapore. Your employees will have a great way of bonding, interaction and can unleash their talents as they solve puzzles. Rewarding them with a fun experience will definitely bring you more positive responses.

As a manager, your teams’ morale should be your top priority. Therefore, you need to make consistent and strategic efforts. Actively responding to feedback, recognition of employees’ accomplishments and regular communication are the ticket to good morale and will go a long way as compared to one-off pizza parties.

Don’t forget to enjoy the process of strengthening your team’s spirits. Moreover, it will help you create a challenging and fulfilling environment not only for your staff but also for yourself.

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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