Chris Burfield, Co-founder & Tina Burfield President & Co-FounderTimed Out Escape, an entertainment company, creates immersive escape room experiences specifically designed to enhance relations within corporate teams. Its game rooms provide a variety of challenging puzzles and fun activities that teams can use to have a good time as well as identify the capabilities of each team member.
“The idea of getting together in an escape room and working their way through the challenges to come out as a team is inherently collaborative. How each individual performs under pressure during the challenge can be related back to their performance in the office space,” says Chris Burfield, co-founder and leader of talent and team building services at Timed Out Escape.
The team at Timed Out Escape offers thematically designed rooms, each presenting a series of challenges that require a group of people to race against time and apply logic, observation, and collaboration skills to successfully complete.
In addition to creating fun and collaborative client events, the Timed Out team often uses Gallup’s Clifton Strengths assessment as the basis of team workshops, where the escape rooms transform into team performance labs. Clients’ team members complete the assessment, which provides highly personalized results to each individual, and are also used to appreciate the team’s strengths. These tools, overlaid with detailed discussions with sponsors to understand key opportunities and pain points, lead to a customized agenda of exercises and discussions that fosters lasting impact to team culture and performance. Client focus has included areas such as cultural alignment between long-term and new employees, leadership transitions, and growth phases.
Workshops typically begin with a focus on self-awareness and self-appreciation of each member’s individual strengths. Timed Out Escape enables them to ascertain how their colleagues perceive their strengths and analyzes their communication, commonalities, and differences. It celebrates differences, believing that people approach problems differently and diversity within the team can be beneficial.
The workshops also cover partnership models and how an individual can collaborate with others similar to them and with those who are different. This cross-sectional view of all team members is analyzed, simplified, and communicated to the team to show them where they stand and what they can do to strengthen themselves.
The idea of getting together in an escape room and working their way through the challenges to come out as a team is inherently collaborative. How each individual performs under pressure during the challenge can be related back to their performance in the office space
Timed Out Escape employs a debrief methodology called CLIC—collaboration, leadership, impact, and communication—to help teams self-assess their behavior and performance in the escape room. The CLIC analysis studies the team’s performance inside the room and presents them with an idea of how effective they were and where there could have been an improvement.
Since the corporate world is still catching up with the post-pandemic era, the major challenge it is trying to deal with is understanding the remote versus in-person work culture. Many employees work from home, and communication within teams is harder than ever. Timed Out Escape’s escape rooms act as a medium to re-establish relationships between team members. It has worked with many organizations during and after the pandemic to nurture informal relationships among people of diverse value sets and perspectives.
The firm helps corporate teams understand how each member is wired with fun escape room challenges, revealing their individual qualities, like assertiveness, communication, and how they step up when the situation calls for it.
Timed Out Escape stands strong as the best-rated partner in the industry for its unique and fun approach to team building, equipping corporate teams to better handle the challenges of the modern workplace.
