How to Choose Your Corporate Treasure Hunt

How to Choose Your Corporate Treasure Hunt

Corporate treasure hunts are increasingly marketed and used as team building events, quite rightly so as they combine the best of traditional team building with an enjoyable day. A treasure hunt, properly set up, can develop inter-departmental communi

cation and co-operation, planning skills and problem solving skills. Thus it can improve staff motivation and efficiency. A poorly set up treasure hunt on the other hand, will have little real value, your employees will enjoy it but they will come out of it having practiced few of the skills normally associated with team building.

Your treasure hunt could easily be set up by Beryl and Sid from Accounts, nice and cheap in-house team building, but remember, they are not team building professionals and will not have the bigger skills-development picture in their mind when planning the hunt. It will be more like a club or church treasure hunt. For a real benefit, you will need to use an external provider, but that will be expensive so naturally you want to make sure you get value for money. So what should you look for in a good corporate treasure hunt?

Not everyone can answer cryptic clues, not everyone is a keen observer. So good corporate treasure hunt geared

to team building will be inclusive, that is, there will be a selection of different types of clue, easy, hard, cryptic. This enables everyone to make a contribution for some of the time. Not only will a good provider offer this range of clues, they will have treasure hunts set up in a wide range of venues too . Check with the providers about this before deciding whose services to use.

The clues address the communication aspect of team building, and to a degree, develop the lateral thinking skills needed for problem solving. To further develop these skills, each treasure hunt should include extra tasks, such as scavenging items or producing photographic evidence to show a task was completed.

Planning is essential to every organisation, team building exercises should always include this element. A good corporate treasure hunt should facilitate this. A poor corporate hunt or church/club treasure hunt will be linear, everyone follows the same route, a few minutes apart. Soon there is no need to think because the group in front are writing excitedly. You see this and you know where the next answer is! What use is that for skills development? A good provider will address this by supplying more clues than could possibly be answered in the time available. At the start of the hunt, each team should spend time considering their route, which clues they intend to answer and what contingency plan they will have if they are running behind or ahead of schedule.

One of the big complaints that employees have about team building exercises is the standing around with nothing to do. A good corporate treasure hunt provider will not let this happen, there will always be at least one activity that is not dependent on location, often in the form of logic puzzles or a quiz. Make sure that this is the case with the provider that you choose.

Business is about competition, getting your share of the market, keeping that share, expanding that share. But competitiveness within a business can be very destructive so it is important that you as the consumer does your part first. Make sure that the teams comprise members of different departments so that they can get to know one-another. After the hunt, they will have something in common and be more likely to co-operate in the workplace.

At the end of a team building exercise comes the dreaded feedback. This can either be one-to-one or small group 'what-did-you-get-from-the-day' session or by form filling. Either way, most people really do not enjoy this. With a treasure hunt, there is no need for this, in fact it would probably spoil it. Your staff will be buzzing for days if not weeks after the event, you will hear them discussing clues, strategies, if only, and so on.
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Kevin Woodward of chevinside.com designs, builds and optimises many team building web sites, such as Treasure Hunts and Spy Games Team Building and Corporate Events Ltd, both of whom deliver innovative team building solutions for businesses of all sizes.

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