Even Before The COVID-19 Pandemic, Many Companies Began Sampling Remote Work, Experimenting With How It Could Benefit Their Business And Affect Company Culture.
Remote working, thanks to the global pandemic, has now become a staple for many businesses over the past year. What started as a slow process by a few companies, has evolved into a world-wide corporate model.
According to this Gallup survey, 56% of people in the U.S. are working remotely. Statistics show this is unlikely to change soon. In a recent Buffer survey, 98% of 3,500 sampled remote workers, agreed that they want to continue to work remotely (at least some of the time) for the rest of their careers. This comes as no surprise. There are quite a few wonderful aspects of remote working!
Benefits Of Working Remotely
- Flexible Hours. According to a Gallup survey, 54% of office workers say they’d leave their job for one that offers flexible time. Having flexible hours enhance productivity, allows families more time together, and enables employees to prioritize their physical fitness. When a person is holistically well, their work naturally improves.
- Hire the Right People. Remote working allows companies to hire the best person, rather than the most convenient person, for a job. Organizations can broaden their searches and find just the right fit for their company.
- Environmental Impact. Between saving paper, lower fuel emissions, and decreased use of electricity in the office, remote working is environmentally friendly! This is a priority for millennials in particular.
All that to say, it seems we’ve entered a new age of workplace moving forward. While remote working has many advantages, it also comes with its fair share of never before seen challenges.
It’s important for businesses to combat low morale and address these issues proactively. According to Gallup, “a strong company culture is a competitive advantage.” It’s worthwhile to learn the warning signs of low team morale and have a strategy to reengage your team and keep your employees fulfilled and happy with the company culture. The bottom line is, if you want your company’s bottom line to be healthy, take care of your team. A happy employee is a productive employee.
Warning Signs Of Lowering Team Morale
With everyone working from home, feelings of isolation and loneliness can easily creep in. It’s important for company leaders and managers to step in and create the environments necessary for develop relationships when coworkers aren’t surrounded by each other day-after-day.
Workers no longer have the easy connections that come from eating lunch together or taking a quick coffee break. Are you wondering if your team is struggling with engagement and morale? There are a few warning signs you can be looking out for!
- Missed Deadlines. Don’t always assume your employee is just lazy. If one of your employees begins to miss deadlines, it may be time to step in and reengage. They may be having a difficult time performing tasks in a timely manner because of some hidden issues.
- Rise of Conflicts. When your team gets to the point where conflicts keep coming up more often, something’s up. No one wants to continue to work in an environment full of conflict. It may be uncomfortable to face these issues head on, but having tools like The Escape Game can really help.
- Lack of Communication. If your team isn’t communicating well, they may need an extra boost. Not all teams easily learn intercommunication and click quickly. The good news is that this is a skill that can be worked on and improved. Communication is essential to succeed in a virtual escape room.
- Increase in Errors. When a team member isn’t focused and engaged in work, they are sure to produce more errors. Sometimes getting employees to engage in the work at hand is to get them to engage with the company culture as a whole.
- High Turnover. If you’ve been experiencing high turnover rates, your team’s morale has probably been off course for quite some time. It’s never too late to make a change! Show them that the company as a whole cares about the individuals who make it all happen.
- Silence. Have team meetings turned into high school English class, desperately trying to get someone, anyone, to talk? That probably means you need to provide an avenue for building relationships. There’s nothing like having fun together to foster relationship.
The Danger Of Low Team Morale
Disengagement from team members is the beginning of the end for a healthy workplace environment. When employees check out, the work excellence level drops faster than you can imagine. Communication between team members also lowers, making a cohesive product or service increasingly difficult to obtain.
There are many reasons for a drop in team morale; workplace conflict, a lack of cohesion, inadequate understanding of the company values, and even personal circumstances.
The good news is, having an engagement strategy can help to prevent all of these things, or fix them if you’re already in the midst of a dip in team morale. While the definition of team building varies from company to company, meta-analysis shows that people who participate in team building feel more positively about their team! In general, they also have overall better communication and conflict management.
What Is A Virtual Escape Room?
You’ve probably heard of escape rooms by now. Escape game companies have been popping up all over the world over the last few years! Like many other companies during COVID-19, The Escape Game had to think fast and create new ways for people to experience our escape rooms. Cue the virtual escape room!
Our virtual escape rooms are the perfect solution for boosting team morale. Our games are fun, challenging, and inclusive for everyone on the team. With a virtual escape room, your team will take on one of our actual, in-person rooms by using a Game Guide and live camera feed. One of the best things about our virtual escape room it that it works for teams of all sizes! From small business groups to corporations with hundreds of team members, we can accommodate them all!
Most events last 60–75 minutes, with 60 minutes of game play. Virtual escape rooms (https://theescapegame.com/remote-adventures/) are more cost effective than other virtual events for businesses, and we make it super easy to plan as we handle the technical side of things. Your team will be able to work together to solve puzzles and unlock hidden clues to make the daring escape, even when apart!
You’ll start with your host! They’ll set the stage for the challenge and offer helpful clues and laughs along the way. Whether you’re stepping into a cabin, you’re searching for hidden gold, or going back to 1955 attempting a prison escape, your host will make you feel like you’re there in person!
Wondering how you can walk around the room? The Game Guide will be your team’s eyes, ears, hands, and feet in the room. You want to look up, your Game Guide will look up! You want a closer look at that item on the wall, your Game Guide will go check it out!
What about the clues? We’ve made it easy and simple to keep track of your progress throughout the game with the digital dashboard. The dashboard includes 360 room scans and an inventory system, so you can keep track of all those clues!
We’ve carefully crafted the virtual escape room to feel just as exciting as an in-person adventure! By paying attention to all the little details, we set out to make the most epic experience possible for your team.
Benefits Of Virtual Escape Rooms
Why choose The Escape Game’s virtual escape room over other, more traditional team building activities to boost team morale? Well, I’m sure we’ve all experienced team building activities at some point, right? It’s pretty safe to say not all team building experiences are created the same.
Ice breaker questions are a different kind of team builder than the high-stakes energy of a group racing against the clock to uncover hidden clues and solve puzzles. Your team will unleash skills that may have gone dormant for quite some time, or maybe haven’t been tapped into at all.
1. Creating Bonds. There’s nothing like working together with someone to achieve a goal. During your team’s time in a virtual escape room, they won’t just be solving clues. They’ll be forming bonds that will translate into a healthy and enjoyable workplace culture.
Teams finish up with virtual high-fives and even schedule virtual happy hours after to rehash those clutch moments that either won or lost the game. Because the truth is, in a virtual escape game and in work, we don’t always succeed. Sometimes we don’t escape with the stolen masterpiece. Sometimes we don’t get the client. What keeps teams going is creating a bond, because they won or lost together.
So whether your team escapes in 60 minutes or not, they’re forming relationships that will help them take on any task at work together. No matter the outcome, it’s a win!
2. Fostering Creativity. When you do a Google search on “creativity in business,” you’ll find 433,000,000 results. Those numbers speak loud and clear. Creativity is key in any successful business and for team members to feel fulfilled.
Sadly, according to a Gallup survey, only 29% of workers agree that they’re expected to be creative or think of new ways to do things at work. It’s time to change that!
Your team may be struggling to get things done or have a good attitude because they don’t feel like they have the space to be creative and tap into that exciting side of life.
According to Psychology Today, “creativity is the thinking that fuels innovation.”
They also cite that “creativity is or is related to 9 of the top 10 skills that global executives say is essential for 2020 and beyond.”
Now, more than ever, we need to allow our team members to think outside of the box as so many of us are reinventing the way we do business.
Don’t underestimate the power of creative thinking. More than any other skill, this benefits both the company and the team member.
Playing a virtual escape room requires creativity. Your team won’t escape if they can’t think outside the box. We keep it interesting and keep you guessing. Your team can take the freedom of thinking creatively straight from the game to their professional work!
3. Encouraging Collaboration. Some team leads find it challenging to get their teams collaborating well. But the truth is, we’re better together. The beauty of a team is that we all bring different skills and strengths to the team that are needed to create the best product or provide the best service.
Without collaboration, your company won’t feel cohesive and no one will be able to reach their full potential. In TEG virtual escape room, you either win as a team or you lose as a team. Each person is vital to the mission. Delegation is going to be key when getting into the flow of the game. Everyone will be working together, but thinking separately.
One team member may have the ability to split up tasks and delegate well while another team member has the can’t-stop-won’t-stop attitude to solve the seemingly impossible puzzle You’ll see what your team is truly capable of as a whole when everyone collaborates together.
4. Increasing Communication. Communication is vital to the success of a team—both in a virtual escape room and the workplace. You need to be able to count on your team to communicate clearly and effectively when you’re pushing up against a looming deadline.
You don’t want to get stuck in a place where progress gets held up because your team isn’t communicating well. When you step through the virtual door of the escape room, everything goes so fast. It’s vital for the team to communicate in order to make progress.
When your team is rushing to figure out that final clue to help them get to the next set of puzzles, they’ll learn how to communicate like never before!
They’ll know when they’re working on their next project together that they can count on each other to communicate to provide the best product or service.
Bonus: Want to add a little something extra to your virtual escape room? Pair the event with a coffee break! You can use services like CoffeePals! It integrates with Microsoft Teams to match people to meet over a cup of coffee, helping you start new conversations and build deeper relationships within your organization.
5. Building Trust. Most people understand the importance of trust in their personal relationships, but many don’t realize the importance of trust in the workplace. Whether between colleagues or even in the employee/employer relationship. Employees need to trust that they can step out and take risks, and employers need to trust that they can allow their employees to do their jobs with excellence.
Unfortunately, according to a Gallup survey, only 18% of employees strongly agree that they can take risks at work that could lead to important new products, services, or solutions. If that trust isn’t there, your team can only go so far. And if team members can’t trust each other to do their jobs well and listen to one another, you can only go so far.
It’s even harder to build that trust in a remote work environment. In our virtual escape rooms, there has to be trust to move the ball forward. At TEG, we help create the environment to build the relational trust—even virtually. Better than a trust fall? We think so.
6. Having Fun! Don’t underestimate the power of fun for boosting team morale and creating a company culture that any employee would be thrilled to be part!
Whether your team just scored the big client or you’re trying to get a new team comfortable with each other, virtual escape rooms are the perfect opportunity to do something fun together. There’s nothing like immersing yourself in a prestigious art museum to recover a stolen masterpiece to make some memories to last a lifetime.
Make memories your team can enjoy for a lifetime. In this new world of remote work, we have to keep offering ways to connect and have fun together.
Let’s Go!
According to research by Gartner, “By 2030, the demand for remote work will increase by 30% due to Generation Z fully entering the workforce.” Working remotely isn’t a trend that’s going anywhere, so we should be prepared to support our teams the best we possibly can.
In a recent survey, 90% of companies that played at The Escape Game told us that their team building event at The Escape Game strengthened team communication and 100% said that the outing boosted morale. Your team will be immersed in an action-packed, epic 60 minutes adventure the second they step into the virtual escape room. The intensity is high. The fun is even higher.
Team building activities are going to become more important than ever in this post-pandemic world. Care for your team and set them up for success by boosting team morale with a virtual escape room at The Escape Game!
Virtual Escape Rooms Are A Great Option That You Can Keep Coming Back To As We Build More Immersive Worlds To Get Lost In.
What are you waiting for? Let’s go! Sign up for a virtual escape room today!
