"We are here in front of Casa Moretta, a family known for their windy business, counterfeit money, extortion, tax evasion, even trafficking in human beings." You, a group of highly trained special police, now need incriminating evidence to finally get the Morettas to put you behind bars, but you have one hour left! "
What sounds like a TV crime is told every day in a darkened room in Hamburg's Speicherstadt. Escape Rooms have been trendy for years. There are around 420 companies in Germany, which together generate 110 million euros a year. From world rescue to laboratory explosions to time travel, there is no story, no task that has not been used for escape-room storytelling.
What has hitherto mainly attracted amateur detectives and Knobel fans to the closed four walls is now discovering companies for themselves: solving a common puzzle as a team-building measure.
Many companies book the rooms during the Christmas party or as a pure event. However, they already use about five to ten percent as a team building measure, estimates Max Giesen, Escape Room operator and board member of the professional association of the Live Escape & Adventure Games. Ascending trend. In the meantime, in addition to the stationary Escape Rooms, there are also providers who use mobile variants to drive to the respective company and carry out the game on site.
Only when the team cooperates will it continue
In everyday life, Renate, Tristan, Lena, Tanja and Antje work together for an IT group. Today they are the "special police" - and face the first puzzle: the door to Casa Moretta. While Tristan inspects the documents handed over, Lena scans the door frame, turns the lamp, but the dim light only diminishes. Tanya feels under the mailbox for unusual notches, moves at each brick, moves stones as the heavy wooden door swings open with a squeak. The entrance is open.
"In classic Escape Rooms, logic and creativity are addressed, it's about thinking out of the box and around the corner, getting rid of ordinary patterns of thinking," explains René Wittek, a graduate psychologist and managing director of Spielgestalter. The agency offers team building and training, also mobile.
"Skills such as listening and talking each other out will be trained, and you have to be willing to respond to other suggestions, always keeping an eye on the time, so that you can not do it on your own but communicate with the group got to." That's why it's such a great way to bring a team of colleagues closer together.
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Team Building: We want to get out of here!In the fireplace room of the Morettas arrived Renate looks further, she opens boxes and cabinets, drawers and chests, finds a combination lock. Books are turned over, chairs are lifted, candles go crazy. Everything can have meaning - but it does not have to be. Irrelevant decoration or important clue?
While Antje searches the left corner of the room, Lena struggles with the shelf in the right corner and finds another lock, this time with letters. More and more clues find their way to the table in the middle of the room, where gradually all come together again. What happens now? Tristan takes the combination lock in his hand and speaks a word of power: "We start now, then we can continue with the other." All nod.
Playing is a universal language
When playing Escape Rooms, it does not matter which sectors the players come from. Rather, it is even more beneficial when many different characters from different departments work together.
"It's not just about pure analytical thinking or intelligence, and it's not just about manual tasks," says Wittek. "The exchange between each other is crucial." The different strengths of different people is one of the success factors. In the long run, this essentially promotes understanding and working together.
Back at the Morettas. The chessboard raises more questions than it answers. "Is this a correct set of players? Farmer? Lady? Runner?" - "Maybe the lineup means something?" What does the reference "A3 to B2, C3 to C8, G1 to G8" mean on one of the notes? A soft "Can not we just start another puzzle?" is acknowledged with unanimous "NO". So again from the front: A3 to B2. C3 to C8. G1 to G8.
Even children learn social behavior playfully, Wittek explains. "Games build on a universal language, they are cultural, gender and age independent." If an escape room is to be played as a team building measure, a meaningful debriefing is indispensable, according to Wittek. "What went well, what was bad, what can we learn from it and what consequences does this have for our everyday work? Such questions must be summed up and discussed with each other in order to be able to transfer the experience reflected into the working world."
Why the game master is so important
In Casa Moretta the telephone rings. Game leader Fatma gives a little tip on the tricky chess problem. The game masters perform a special task: they monitor the room via a monitor and help the players if necessary to guide them to their destination. If you use the puzzle rooms as teambuilding, you have to take on other tasks and be specially trained so that the participants can reflect the whole thing professionally.
The industry has evolved since Max Giesen opened his first escape room in 2014. At that time there were just three rooms in Germany. He observed a strong growing trend, especially at the beginning: "At the beginning there were still very low market entry barriers, so quite a lot of people started out on their own. Nowadays the requirements are more stringent, especially in terms of fire protection, escape routes, and the like . " A misfortune as in Poland, when five girls died in a fire in January, is impossible in Germany because of the high safety standards.
Satisfied employees are less common
The fact that Escape Rooms are now being used to strengthen teams is part of a bigger trend. Various research has shown that employees who are satisfied with their work situation are psychologically and physically healthier. "The added value of team-building measures is immense: If employees feel comfortable in their company, this means less fluctuation, as well as cost and time savings with long-term employee loyalty," says Wittek.
This development is reinforced by the fact that the Millennials (birth cohorts 1982-1996) are pushing the labor market. Next year, they will provide more than one third of the world's working population - redefining the whole relationship between employer and employee.
In a recent study by the Manpower Group, 80 percent of the 19,000 young people interviewed stated that "good colleagues" was one of the top five job-search priorities. In addition, they are focused on developing their individual skills: on the one hand the technical skills, but also their communication skills, their adaptability and teamwork.
Success experience welds team together
Renate, Tristan, Lena, Tanja and Antje have meanwhile taken it out of the Casa. Together they also have the last puzzle, the vault, open and find the way out. "You have to be curious, able to combine, think analytically, for example at a chessboard, collect ideas and try things out", Tristan summarizes.
Antje adds, "It really took a lot to communicate with each other and to coordinate and you depend on each other." "It's nice to have done something together," says Lena. "The sense of achievement is definitely important here."
As for the secret of success, however, tells a game master: "When people come to us privately, we are more likely to hold back and let them puzzle more alone, but that also means that sometimes they do not manage in the given time to solve all the puzzles In corporate groups, we are more likely to pay more attention to one or the other tip, so that they do not go out completely frustrated here. "