3 Fun Ways to Divide Your Workforce for an Escape Room Outing

Many employers use escape rooms as the perfect venue for a staff outing. In this environment, staff members can get to know each other better, while management may even be able to see previously unnoticed positive traits among certain staff members. If you're headed to an escape room venue with a group from your office, you'll want to give some thought on how to divide the group to compete against one another. Men versus women might be tempting, but this idea is a little archaic. Instead, consider one of these three ideas.

Department Vs. Department

One fun idea to consider is to pit one department against another in a good-natured way to see which department should wear the crown of best escape artists in the office. In most offices, there are different departments, which should make it easy for you to break up the group. For example, a law office that visits an escape room could organize the event so that the attorneys compete against the administrative staff. In some scenarios, you may need to put multiple departments together—for example, sales and customer service against accounting and marketing.

Staff Vs. Management

Another fun way to divide your staff at the escape room is to pit the company's management against its staff. Obviously, this will work best if the numbers are similar, but between the general manager and perhaps a handful of middle managers, you'll ideally have as many people who can compete for the management team as there are other people in the office who will make up the other team. Staff against management can lead to some good-natured competition and even some fun trash talking, which can help to bridge any gaps between staff and management and bring your entire workforce closer together.

Senior Staff Vs. Junior Staff

You may also wish to divide your workforce by its members' tenure, having the senior staff compete against the junior staff in your escape room outing. This can be a fun dynamic—the junior staff members may feel as though they're more energetic, and can thus beat the senior staff, while the senior staff may feel that they're more experienced in life, and will be more adept at solving the clues that will allow them to escape faster. However the outcome, you can expect a fast-paced game with plenty of intense competition—and, ideally, the two sides will come to mutually respect each other a little more through this experience.