Team building activities: how to choose the right one

It’s no secret: games have become a hugely popular medium, especially among companies looking to build collective intelligence and bring teams closer together. For several years now, companies have turned to gamification experts for innovative answers to their needs: training employees, raising awareness of a cause, promoting a product, and more. It has to be said that play brings plenty of benefits. You might even start to believe a corporate game can solve anything. But is that really true?

In reality, while games are used across many fields and for many purposes, they’re no universal cure for every headache faced by HR managers and marketing directors hoping to unite and motivate every employee. At least, not in a generic, one-size-fits-all format.

Endless possibilities for your company

An awareness-raising escape room, an educational board game, an engaging treasure hunt… The options for serious and educational games built around teamwork are countless. What do these team games have in common? They strengthen cohesion and help a message land internally. Provided, of course, the game has been carefully thought through to create genuine cohesion.

Let’s save you some time with a well-worn cliché: a game is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get.
Behind the film reference lies a very specific idea. There are countless ways to approach a game, to design it and to experience it, each more surprising than the last. Because in the beginning, a game is simply a generic term for an entertaining group activity.

Just look at the sheer range of playful activities we all know today: the video game, the escape room, the role-playing game, the card game, the board game, the quiz, the sports game, the fairground ride, sports-based team building… Add to that the dozens of genre variations you can apply to almost any of them: action, horror, adventure, party games, cooperative or competitive games…
There really is something for everyone (just like that box of chocolates — you get the comparison!).

As you’ll have gathered, for a team-bonding offsite it isn’t enough to simply want a game to meet a need. You also have to find the right format, one that strengthens each player’s sense of belonging. So how do you choose the right format for your communication strategy?

List your objectives before designing your corporate game

Having an idea is one thing. Justifying it is another.
First and foremost, a company needs to identify why it wants a game in the first place. What are the objectives of the team building you have in mind? What objections might the team involved raise? How engaged are employees right now? Which collaborative tools are already in place? What shared goal are the teams working towards?

Reviewing past and future initiatives, along with the current mood within your teams, gives you a far clearer picture of your challenges as a manager.

The game designer’s first task is to unpick the client’s needs and the current mood within a team, then propose the most suitable solution — much like an advertiser building a campaign strategy around a brand’s challenges. The shared goal must therefore be clearly identified. As an expert, the game designer will also share recommendations on game-based communication, as the video serious game studio Dowinoexplains, helping the client produce a brief whose objectives match the problem raised.

Team cohesion or internal challenge: which format?

If the goal is to strengthen team cohesion, a team game that encourages mutual support is the better choice. That means designing game actions that require everyone to cooperate, as in an escape room.

To energise teams across different departments, competition works best: timed challenges and a scoring system. That’s exactly the case with our Criminal Questformat, an investigation game in which each team hunts for clues and draws its own conclusions to identify the culprit. At the end of each session, a host ranks the players before crowning the winning team.
To make sure we land on the right format, at Arcane we design our solutions with our clients. That way, our offer fits each project.

Finally, it’s worth remembering that a game is first and foremost there to entertain, and doesn’t claim to replace other ways of getting a message across. In most cases, a training escape room on banking issues will spark learners’ interest, but it won’t turn them into seasoned bankers in an hour. So don’t expect to completely revolutionise your learning processes through the power of play alone. Working with a gamification agency makes the process of getting a message across easier — it never replaces it.

Identify the constraints of your corporate game

Every event comes with its own set of constraints, and the sooner you spot them, the better you can adapt. Just as with communication objectives, the game designer will analyse the project’s limits to define the scope of the game. Here are a few parameters that shape the format.

How much time should you allow for your corporate event?

Time is a crucial factor when designing a corporate game. There’s production time, of course, but above all playing time, which has to fit the schedule set by the company behind the team building.
Should you run a one-hour escape room to raise employee awareness of cybersecurity, or follow up over several weeks through a mobile game?

Depending on the type of message, its complexity and its subject, a game’s duration can vary considerably.
For a training game with a lot of content to absorb, a long experience (spread over several days) split into short sessions often works better. That calls for quick game actions paired with an engaging progression system that keeps players interested and teams active.

Within a single uninterrupted session, attention levels also vary by format. Digital tends to make us lose track of time, whereas a physical sports game can leave a player exhausted within minutes.

But you need the freedom to do it. During a company offsite, time is often tight. So once again, it’s about finding the format that fits best.

Where will your corporate game take place?

Like it or not, a company offsite isn’t organised the same way in a 60m2 room in central Paris as in a five-hectare park at the other end of the country — in terms of logistics or facilitation. That’s why we always ask clients to specify the location of their event in the brief.
For an event taking place across several venues and several dates, where the designer has little control over size or layout, mobile, easily transferable content is the way to go. Likewise, immersion is better achieved through storytelling than through set design. For example, Biotopia: the wild adventure is a treasure hunt built to be deployed anywhere in France thanks to an adaptive game map. 

Adapting corporate games to today’s context

Because of the constraints brought by Covid-19 during lockdown, at Arcane we designed a virtual escape room, playable entirely online and remotely. Several companies were able to offer their people an activity that built group cohesion and brought colleagues closer, despite the distance.

Team building is a genuine asset for energising group dynamics and learning to work better together.

How many people for a corporate team building session?

The question of numbers is closely tied to the question of venue. For a game to run in good spirits, you obviously don’t design the same experience for 5 players as for 500. First in terms of space, then in terms of atmosphere, and finally to keep proper track of players. The time needed also varies with the number of participants. A standard escape room for the general public is designed for small groups, guided by a game master throughout the experience; you simply can’t do the same for thirty teams playing at once. So what’s the answer?

For very large groups, choose a format built around player autonomy, one that doesn’t require constant attention from the facilitators. That means a very clear briefing and simple game mechanics everyone can grasp immediately.

A smooth user journey

The usability of every game element then becomes especially important. At Arcane, we make sure the user journey is as smooth as possible by testing our games regularly throughout production. That guarantees puzzles that are neither too hard nor too easy — and entertainment that delivers. During these tests we analyse each participant’s engagement and overall satisfaction. Want to go further into how to measure a corporate event’s impact on cohesion? We’ve written a full article on it.

In conclusion

As you’ll have understood, there’s no single type of corporate game for a team building session. It depends on many factors specific to each project, and they need to be assessed with the game designer.
So let’s refine our earlier comparison: a game is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get… but talk to the chocolatier and you’re sure to pick the best flavour!

To explore further why cohesion and team spirit matter, and what’s really at stake in a team building activity, head over to our dedicated article. Arcane Experience is always happy to discuss your offsite projects and turn them into genuinely enjoyable moments. Do take a look at our catalogue ofteam-bonding activities available on the site, or get in touch about your incentive plans. Whatever the language of your corporate event, our multilingual team will happily take care of both translation and facilitation.

We’d be delighted to guide you and give every team in your company an unforgettable, collaborative moment. So, ready for a wave of creativity to boost your leadership?