Good employees need hard skills to perform their work tasks, but they also need a range of soft skills to navigate the inevitable teamwork any workplace demands. That second need drives many of the much-loathed team building events that companies put on.

Rather than falling back on those team building activities employees hate, here are five reasons to consider the alternative of escape room team building.

1. Improve Problem-Solving

Most businesses need people who understand how to solve unexpected problems, individually and collectively. Escape rooms are a literal series of unexpected problems a team must solve. The entire exercise hones problem-solving skills in your employees.

2. Relationship Building

Large organizations often suffer from a silo mentality in different departments or divisions. Employees from different parts of the business don't share or hesitate to information, even when they should and is important for the growth of the business. Part of this problem stems from the fact that we build relationships with people we work with regularly.

An escape room serves as a perfect opportunity to put together people from different parts of the business which don't interact frequently. They get an opportunity to start building new relationships, which can ease silo problems.

3. Sharpens Communication Skills

Solving problems as a team requires communication. After all, no insight or idea gains traction if you don't share it with others in a coherent way.

Escape rooms routinely require team members to share knowledge and coordinate action to facilitate the escape. In essence, it forces your employees to dust off those communication skills.

4. Let's You Evaluate Employee Strengths

As your employees work through the various challenges in the escape room, it's a golden opportunity for you to evaluate their strengths. For example, you can see who emerges as a natural leader or who does the best job smoothing over communication.

You also see where employees struggle. For example, you might discover that a supervisor has terrible delegation skills.

These insights can help you groom employees for new roles or offer training that shores up weaknesses in an employee's soft skills.

5. Build Trust

One of the most crucial aspects of teamwork in the workplace is trust. You must trust the other members of the team to contribute ideas and complete their work in a timely fashion. Traditional team building exercises like trust fall tell you nothing about how a person will actually behave in a work scenario. 

An escape room offers a much better analog to the work environment because one person can't typically do all the work. If everyone helps, it builds a foundation of trust that will often carry over into the workplace.

Parting Thought on Escape Room Team Building

Escape room team building events offer many benefits you don't see with more traditional team-building exercises.

They bolster problem-solving and communication skills. The event also fosters relationship building and trust building. As an added bonus, you get an excellent opportunity to evaluate employee strengths and weaknesses.

Looking for other ways you can up your business game? Check out our post on getting high-level team performance.