The Escape Room Challenge

60 minutes for redemption. Clues, codes, mysteries, you need to solve them all

Do you have an exit strategy?

“I’m not yelling at you, I’m just excited!”

Few experiences inspire the kind of excitement in team members as Escape Rooms do. Just as in physical escape rooms, these are time bound experiences with one ultimate goal for all the teams: To escape!

Teams are broken up into smaller groups of 3-8 people each. The scenario they are stepping into is explained along with the different rules of the virtual game. All doubts are clarified and then the game begins! The smaller groups are assigned (or are rather locked into) separate virtual breakout rooms. Each team while racing against time is also competing with other teams. The task for all teams is the same: To find the ultimate four-digit code in the shortest possible time, so that they can escape!

The next 60 minutes passes by in a whirr of nerve racking excitement as the clock ticks down – participants decipher codes, solve clues, interact with objects to unravel the hidden mysteries. As in the real world escape games there are options for hints and even lifelines – but everything comes at a cost that participants need to balance against their chances of succeeding on time.

The Escape Room Challenge is a super exciting activity that engages participants by getting them to flex their thinking in various ways to solve problems, handle ambiguity, balance risk & reward and collaborate between team members. It is a wonderful gamified way to also land the message that “we are in this together” and we “sink or swim together.”
The activity can be run purely as an engagement activity or as an activity with a purposeful debrief at the end. When debriefed, the activity is brought to a close with participants sharing their different thoughts, experiences and insights from the activity and connecting the experience back to their different workplace situations. As a finale, we unveil the top 3 teams – to loud cheers from one and all.

A few key parameters:

1.5 – 2 hrs

Time Limit

Virtual (any platform)

Where this can be run

Upto 200

Group sizes

Debrief can be customised

Customisation

Is this workshop right for my team?

Escape rooms have a thrill and pace of their own. Being together with team-mates in an escape room and figuring out how to together escape gets people to quickly drop any inhibitions they may have in reaching out to others in the team and collaborating.

When debriefed, a few themes this activity always throws up are:
• Handling ambiguity
• Displaying situational leadership
• Observation skills
• Flexing our thinking for problem solving
• Balancing risk and reward
If you are looking for a virtual engagement activity that is high on excitement, FocusU invites you to take The Escape Room Challenge!