Creating Office-Wide Away Day Activities
Tasked with creating activities for two consecutive company away days – as much because I’m on the design team as because colleagues know I love games, puzzles and treasure hunts outside of work – I moved from concept to full delivery for two very different formats.
Taskmaster
The brief was to engage all client handlers (up to 350), incorporate our company strategy, keep it fun, and hold it indoors. An early idea of a treasure hunt evolved into an oversized game board concept – each meeting room became a 'square', which eventually ended up as our own spin on Taskmaster with teams entering to pick up an envelope and complete a Taskmaster-style challenge.
I pitched the concept to senior stakeholders to secure sign-off before delivery, see some selected slides below.
To kick-off the activity I decided to make an intro video, mimicking the Taskmaster titles. I storyboarded it and my team made it, shown below.
Event launch video, created by my team from my storyboard.
The event itself was so manic we sadly didn’t get any pictures of it happening!
I designed and assembled the printed collateral which included envelopes, tasks, vinyls, booklets and custom made ‘wax’ seals.
Each team had a custom booklet with their specific route in it, and materials for each task were in each room, with a vinyl sign outside to say which task was inside.
The winning teams and their prizes!
Treasure hunt
Taskmaster’s success raised the bar for the following year – this time outdoors, incorporating photo and video challenges, and open to visiting European colleagues alongside business services teams, bringing numbers up to 450. When an England match fell on the same day, the whole schedule was reworked so everyone could take part and still catch the game.
Below are a selection of slides from my pitch to senior leadership.
For ease, I chose to use a ready-made app called Goosechase that we could brand up and I could enter all the ‘missions’ and content ready for the day.
This is my mission plan spreadsheet that I created together with a small group of colleagues. It covers geographical spread, different types of clues (making sure to accommodate for different personalities) and ways to make sure that teams spread out in the vicinity of our office.
I was busy monitoring the missions as the hunt was happening, but here are a selection of photos taken by people taking part!
I went through all the entries, selected winners and awarded the prizes at the London weekly team meeting.
Here’s the slides that went with the prizegiving, I made a template using the Goosechase brand to make it more fun!
