Treasure hunts have been around since the beginning of time. Alright, I’m exaggerating here but we’ve all participated in treasure hunts since a long, long time ago and some people have the idea that änergy synergy race is another treasure hunt. To set the record straight, änergy synergy race is NOT a treasure hunt, it’s more like the “amazing race” that we’ve seen on tv, with teambuilding elements included.
So are treasure hunts good team building games? Yes and no.
In this post, we will attempt to show you why änergy Synergy Race is one of our flagship team building programme that we have run for more than 100 times (for corporate clients only and we’re still counting) since early 2003, and why it is different from other treasure hunts that we are so familiar with.
Treasure hunts are good team bonding games (there is no typo error here) they ARE good team bonding games, if and provided if, your main objectives are to get your staff out to have some form of outdoor activity, have fun, spend some time together and to get to know one another. Treasure hunts basically get teams of people to solve clues to go to a list of places to find out information.
They will then return to the end point where the organiser will go through the list of answers that they have found (to verify that they did go to those places) and based on the number of correct answers that they have, a winning team will be selected.
Now allow us to help identify elements that lead to a well run treasure hunt. A well organised treasure hunt should have a mixture of easy to find and tougher checkpoints. To minimise cheating, the stations should also have encrypted answers so that different teams that reach the check point will have to find out different answers. There should also be a helpline to guide participants should they get lost or have any doubts.
At this point, if you are one of those participants that are highly competitive, you will realise that this system is not foolproof; you can actually split up, send some of your team mates to one location, while the rest of you go to other locations. In this way, your team will likely finish the treasure hunt much faster than the other teams.
However, from a team building aspect, the participants will probably end up interacting with that 1 or 2 other team mates that they eventually travel together to the 1 or 2 stations that they were assigned to.
The only way to eliminate this form of “cheating”, or creative problem solving, is to station a facilitator at each station to take a head count or to initial on their score sheet. This is exactly what we do for our synergy race. There is also another important difference between synergy race and treasure hunts - participants do not find out information at the checkpoints, they have to complete teambuilding tasks as well, and depending on how well they complete the tasks, they will be awarded points, which will accumulate to determine the winning team.
Treasure hunts also has its limitations as team building games as we cannot share about team values to participants other than “sharing of workload” and “working together”. Synergy race on the other hand, can be easily customised as teams complete different stations tasks at each station. We can incorporate learning values like “communication”, “coordination”, “leadership”, “support” and even values that are traditionally difficult to bring across, like “integrity”, “trust” and “sharing of resources”. Then again we must emphasise that änergy synergy race is a very useful program to create awareness of the importance of such values (it is not a 2-day course in those topics).
Having run änergy synergy race in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Hong Kong since 2003, we have also included systems to ensure that at every station it will be different individuals playing an active role to ensure maximum participation.
We will also make observations while the teams are participating at the stations to pick out positive behaviours and reinforce them during debrief.
If you will like to know more about our synergy race, please feel free to contact us.
