Team Bonding vs Team Building

Are you a business-owner, manager, supervisor, or team leader who’s looking for something to do in Victoria to strengthen the relationships within your team?  Escape rooms are a fantastic activity to help achieve this goal.  Why? Because they help with both team bonding and team building!  

While team bonding and team building may seem like two phrases for the same activity, the two are extremely different. Knowing the differences between them will help you better plan your events. Both are integral to developing a group of tight-knit coworkers who work effectively and efficiently together in order to achieve your company’s goals. Once the differences between team bonding and team building are understood, your team will be able to grow and connect in ways that they were previously could not, which will allow your team to function together in a more effective and cohesive way—and everyone knowing each other and getting along a little better will help ensue you’ll all have a little bit more fun as well! 

Team Bonding    

Team bonding is primarily about bringing the group closer together through some type of fun activity. 

“Hey!  Did you see that door open when we figured out which lever to pull!?”

“Cool!  Let’s check out what’s on the other side, everyone!”

The fun activity—especially if it’s a directed activity with some form of competition or goals, will allow bonds to form between coworkers, and even between supervisors or management and staff. Once formed, those bonds will improve the team’s communication, teamwork, and productivity. 

Team bonding activities also allow for management to see each team member’s strengths and weaknesses, which, in turn, will allow them to organize staff in a way that allows for each individual to bring something special to the team.

You’ll often see some workers who tend to be wall flowers come out of their shells and demonstrate traits you’ve never seen before.  Or two colleagues who don’t often have occasion to collaborate pull together with some exciting results.  You can then leverage those discoveries back in the workplace to help drive teamwork, productivity—and results!

Team Building

Team building, on the other hand, focuses on long-term results, and builds skills, such as problem-solving, which can help the team on a day-to-day basis. 

“Alright, everyone, we’ve got a cipher here and the cipher key, we need to work together to crack this code!”

Whereas team bonding is primarily focused on fun, team-building works to actively cultivate your team in order to produce more positive results at work. This may include rearranging the structure of staff, defining roles within your team, and improving efficiency. While team bonding activities are nice every once in a while, team building activities are essential in order to develop and maintain a strong team of coworkers.  And what better activity than an escape room!?

Finding an activity that achieves both the interpersonal relationship goals of team bonding, and the improvements in efficiency from team building may seem impossible, but doing an escape room satisfies both, because they’re a team building activity disguised as a fun team bonding experience! 

Although escape rooms may appear simply as a fun activity, having your team locked in a room solving puzzles for an hour holds many benefits for team building andteam bonding. Our Game Masters at Quest Reality Games love to host corporate events, and enjoy helping create new bonds in your team! Here are a few ways our escape games are both a great team bonding and team building activity:

Friendly Competition

Most people enjoy a little friendly competition.  Our four themes allow you to break your team into smaller groups for some team bonding fun! Pit two departments against each other to see who can escape with the best time, or mix things up to build new relationships between coworkers! 

With a selection of rooms for your team to play, you can divide your group up to work on team building by grouping individuals who work together at the office often. This allows managers to see how their employees interact, and to discover the team’s strengths and weaknesses to better work toward efficiency. Or, if you would rather focus on team bonding, you can split coworkers into groups with people they don’t often see around the office in order to develop new bonds!

Common Goals

Everyone is working towards a common goal. Just like in the office, when your team enters one of our escape rooms, they are all working towards the same common objective. Whether your group is uncovering what led to a Zombie Apocalypse, rescuing an old friend from the Great Pyramid, attempting to escape from an evil Sorcerer, or exploring the Rosewood Manor, your team will be setting common goals and working together to move through the room. This is a fun way to practice the communication and teamwork that is required day-to-day at the office. 

Improving Communication

Working through puzzles will improve your team’s communication. In escape rooms, communication is always key – just like it is at the office! Groups that play our rooms learn very quickly that communication is the biggest tool to escaping, because there’s nothing more frustrating than wasting precious time looking for something you need to open a padlock only to find out that one of your teammates had the code all along but didn’t even mention it! Making your way through an escape room requires team members to all be on the same page, which can’t be done without communication, so your team will learn the easiest ways to communicate in a short period of time!

Exercise Your Brain

Escape rooms exercise every part of your brain. In a workplace that has many individuals, each with varying skills, it can be difficult to identify each person’s unique strengths. But, once you step into an escape room and start working on puzzles, strengths will become apparent quickly! Maybe your top IT employee also has a knack for solving ciphers, or your Human Resources team is surprisingly good at puzzles involving visuals! Working through escape rooms allows for management to identify skills within their team that they didn’t even know they had!

Practice Problem-Solving

Your problem-solving tactics will be tested. As you enter a room with a series of puzzles which you have to solve in a short period of time, creativity and teamwork will inevitably be tested. Interacting with other members of your team in order to escape will force your team to work through puzzles in ways that they would not commonly do in your workplace. The puzzles in the escape room will not only give your team a topic of discussion with each other in the future, but will also develop important skills that can be applied back at the office.

Booking a corporate event with Quest Reality is simple and easy, which takes a lot of the stress out of planning a team event! In order to get the ball rolling for booking your next corporate event, or if you have questions about pricing or want to book outside of our normal operating hours, just email us at info@questrealitygames.com. If you want to order in food, or to debrief after your time in the room, consider booking our event room for a private space for you and your team at no additional cost!