Escape

What an Escape Room can do for you.

By Tom Nault, CEO, Hudson Cloud Systems

Photo by Marina Reich on Unsplash

This is not the escape room we escaped from with only seventy seconds to spare. Ours was smaller and very clever. It was a lot more fun than I was expecting.

Eight of us from Hudson Cloud Systems decided to do an escape room team bonding experience and it was a wonderful experience for all of us. I don’t know what I loved more, watching the team work together, or the complexity of it all. It will become a memory I won’t soon forget and it felt great to be a part of the escape solution.

Take eight smart independent coworkers and place them in a room where they have just one hour to escape. What happened was magic. I got to see the team work together and independently as we all worked various clues. It would take me months of working together to see the same results.

I also learned something about myself and had to give it a lot of thought afterwards. When we first began to find clues, I came across one that required a combination to enter. We had one group looking for the clues to the lock and I was attempting to pick the lock from prior experience with such things. What I noticed about myself was when a group was working on one solution, I’d go off and work on something else to solve and it reminded me of my management style.

I tend to give people working parameters and let them do their best work. I was doing the same thing. If five people are solving a problem, they don’t need a sixth from me. Instead, I’d work on a problem others were not solving, just as I do with work. It was such a fascinating observation. My brain was racing to not just find our own clues but to also listen to the others and how they were all interacting.

This is a group that holds each other in high regard and ultimately it was brute force teamwork in play. I had a hard time wiping the grin off my face as I watched all seven work on escape solutions. Nobody took a back seat to anyone and all contributed to our escape. It was a company pride moment for me and I couldn’t stop thinking about it for days. I wish we could have recorded the whole thing and watched it back as a group. We would have learned so much.

It got me thinking about the usefulness of an escape room as a way of watching a team in action. If a company doesn’t know who the influential players are, it’s a way to find out, even if they don’t solve the problems and escape. You still get to see raw thinking and leadership at its core. I left the room with greater confidence in everyone who participated and I’d love to do another. It made me proud to work with such smart people.

When you enter an escape room, you have no idea how the room is put together or what to expect, so it took a while to get into the thinking of the room designers. I’m guessing the first thirty minutes were slow when compared to the last thirty. Once we understood how it worked, it felt like each clue was moving faster than the others.

Some of it was also the team itself establishing a working rhythm, just as they do in the workplace. When a company has very high-quality people in the right roles, it’s a thing of beauty watching them work together. This is what naturally occurs when you hire only the very best people you can find for the right roles. It’s the right people in the right seat on the bobsled.

And here’s what makes it even more interesting. Escape rooms aren’t easy. The average success rate is somewhere between 20% and 40%. That makes our team’s win, with just over a minute to spare, a pretty big deal. The escape room industry itself is thriving too. In the U.S. there are around 2,000 facilities and growing, and globally the industry is expected to almost double in the next five years, hitting nearly $20 billion by 2030. Companies are catching on to their value. One study found that groups who played games together for just 45 minutes were about 20% more productive than groups that did traditional team-building activities.

If you wonder how good you really are as a team, take them to an escape room and watch them in action. You’ll see leadership, problem solving, and teamwork in its rawest form, and you’ll have a lot of fun in the process.