With a strong background in learning and development and expert facilitation we know exactly how to run fun and engaging company events.
Virtual Reality is quite simply amazing and allows us to transport your teams to new challenges and other worldly locations impossible to replicate in the real world.
Our psychologists and trainers have also devised clever activities that ensure everyone has to be involved, there is no room for passengers!
WHY VR TEAM BUILDING?
Elicit a real response
There are certain challenges we just can’t do with our teams in real life, such as playing balance games at the top of a skyscraper. However, with VR, we’re able to generate the same physiological responses in participants and see how they handle the pressure!
Develop new leaders
With VR, it’s possible to subtly influence which participants are leading during each activity, ensuring that every team member gets the opportunity to develop their leadership skills – not just the usual keen beans.
Create massive engagement
Virtual reality is both engaging and emotive, proven by the big grin on the faces of many a participant during their first VR experience.
Create environments that are more challenging
One of the benefits of virtual reality is that we can place your team into more challenging experiences than are possible in the real world! The virtual environment can transport your team to another part of the planet – or beyond, for that matter! There are very few limits on the exciting and challenging situations that we can pit your team against.
Encourage Engagement and Interaction
Our VR experiences are exciting, which in turn leads to high levels of engagement from participants. By designing our events to be inclusive, we ensure that everyone feels involved, gets a turn and benefits from the engagement and interaction necessary to defeat the challenges they’ll face.
Your team are going to love VR
People love to use VR, whether it’s their first time or they are a seasoned aficionado. The entertainment industry has already clocked onto the popular appeal of the technology, beyond those familiar with gaming. We’re sure your team will have a great time using VR – we often have to (politely) drag participants away from the headsets!
VR Options for Groups of all Sizes
Virtual Reality Experiences have built our own VR exercises that allow us to run team building activities for 3-4 participants, right the way up to very large groups. Regardless of the participant group size you have in mind, we can tailor a bespoke event that works.
It’s different
Teams have often experienced traditional team building many times over, using VR increases engagement straight away as its novel and groups have to get to grips with how this technology works and how they can use it to complete their challenges.
Build Learning Objectives into your Event
Our team of psychologists, with specialisms in learning & development, know when to keep the focus on fun and when to push the team a little further. Having earned their stripes in the corporate world, our psychologists are ready to help you work towards those learning objectives, whatever they may be.
CASE STUDIES
SANTANDER
VRE ran a large VR event for Santander’s head office teams with a total of 70 staff for their annual offsite day. Santander wanted more than just a fun team day so working closely with them we developed materials and activities that captured the values and behaviours they wanted to promote in the business.
The resulting day allowed the VRE Psychologists to evaluate how well these behaviours and values were demonstrated during the day with a quantitative summary at the end of the day presented to the whole group.
We were able to provide useful feedback and insights into team dynamics and raise awareness of individual strengths and development areas and as well as departmental trends.
We also provided on the day some non-VR team building activities which allowed us to examine teams in a more traditional way alongside the VR methodology.
VRE provided Santander with a fully immersive employee engagement exercise using the latest virtual reality technology. By using VR, we were able to strengthen team relationships in a new, engaging and fun way.”
– Keith Moor, Chief Marketing Officer, Santander
EIF EUROPEAN INVESTMENT FUND
The European Investment Fund required a large team building event in Europe for 45 staff. We regularly work in Europe and so our team delivered onsite a VR team building day in Luxembourg.
Using the latest VR technology VRE was able to stretch teams and engage them in ways that traditional training cannot, using VR allowed EIF to see their teams working on new challenges they had not seen before and develop more effective communication as a result.
Our trainers provided multiple sessions on the day including experiential methodologies alongside the VR with the day’s session designs complementing each other and reinforcing learning outcomes.
ZALANDO
Working closely with Zalando’s L&D team in Berlin we developed an engaging and stretching VR team building experience for their head office finance team. This was part of a large departmental development day with groups rotating across three activities. Our team flew to Berlin and delivered the VR sessions to over 50 people on the day with our teams working alongside their internal trainers looking at how teams worked together to help them understand how they can work as a team more effectively.
Teamwerk
Working with a leading EU management consultancy we travelled to Hungary to deliver a VR team building and assessment experience. Delivering a VR team day alongside their consultants we were able to uncover unique insights for their client’s teams. Our unique VR offerings allowed Teamwerk to deliver a completely new experience for their client which was part of a larger 2 day off site development.
JP MORGAN
JP Morgan required a fun and engaging team building day, VRE was able to provide a range of VR experiences that challenged their teams and also provided a very entertaining day for their staff as a reward for their hard work.
CLEARSCORE
VRE were engaged to provide an team building event for their teams, this ranged from group VR activities where team members had to work together through to competitive VR experiences that raised the energy levels further as teams and individuals competed.
CHOOSE YOUR VR TEAM BUILDING DAY
VR Team Building With Learning Outcomes
If your company is looking for a fun and engaging event, but would also like some learning to take place then we can expand the activities described above and add an additional layer of reflection and learning. Often we use some of the same activities as the fun day above, but our trainers will observe the teams and then discuss after each VR activity any learning points from the teams experience.
We can also incorporate or focus on specific company competencies or values and help the teams discover how well they demonstrate these during the day. For past events we have run live evaluations and compiled the results at the end of the day to give an summary of departmental strengths and development areas across the different departments attending.
Our business psychologists work with clients to plan your day and identify key learning objectives, e.g. how their leadership skills could be developed, how their communication style affects interactions and other important soft skills.
VR Team Building Using Multiplayer VR
Virtual reality is often lauded for how immersive and engaging the experience is – but multiplayer VR takes this to a whole new level.
We have built our own novel and engaging multiplayer VR experiences that allow groups to work together simultaneously, working together to overcome difficult challenges.
Throw your whole team into an unknown world, an unusual situation or pit them against a new challenge and see how they come up with creative ideas for solutions, how they solve problems and how they interact as a team while they do so.
Multiplayer VR team building experiences allow us to gather a lot of information for developmental feedback while being enjoyed by team members as an incredibly engaging session that your team is sure to
enjoy.
VR for Team Building Fun
Having led the way when it comes to VR team building events since our inception, we’ve become skilled in making our events engaging, enjoyable and stimulating.
When clients ask us to host a VR team building event for staff to have some fun, we know what works and how to rotate groups and ensure everyone is involved. To ensure this our psychologists have created clever activities that force the whole team to work together, so we ensure VR team building is precisely that and not just people waiting for their turn.
For larger groups we can provide activities that force the teams to work together, for smaller teams the multiplayer options become viable and you can choose from our own platform or one of our VR escape rooms.
VR Team Building Articles
Is my team really a team?
Here we look at the theory behind team building, why it is important and what can be done about teams that are not functioning well. Teams can think they are working well together, but in fact are often working independently and not as a team at all, this pseudo team working can be very ineffective and can produce disharmony and poor outcomes in terms of team output. Check out our article below to see if your team exhibits elements of pseudo team working.
The first (and toughest) Team Building question: is my Team really a Team?
Here at VRE we are able to diagnose your team using VR to identify how well they work together and improve their understanding of their preferences and strengths when working in teams. Our unique activities in VR allow us to help your teams understand how they work and bridge that gap from a pseudo team to potential team to a high performing team.
Team Building the VRE way.
High Performance Teams – A Team Building Blueprint
Here we look at what actually distinguishes a high performing team (HPT), what are their characteristics and what underpins this high performing capability. It seems there is a hierarchy of requirements for a HPT involving three key areas, team culture, team processes and team structure. We explore each of these in turn and identify how they can be strengthened in a team to help them move towards better performance.
High Performance Teams: A Team – Building Blueprint
We integrate these findings into our VR team building services allowing us to develop teams with sessions designed around these key requirements for high performing teams.
Building high performing teams the VRE way.
FINDING THE RIGHT MIX: DIVERSITY IN TEAM ROLES
There has been a strong focus in recent years on the impact of diversity in teams and with good reason when it comes to team performance. In this article we explore traditional and new theories regarding team roles and diversity and how they can be used to help select and build teams that function well. This article also helps us understand why VR can play an important part in helping teams develop across a range of important competencies crucial for high team performance.
Finding the right mix: diversity in team roles
Selecting and building the right teams the VRE way.
Virtual Reality Supporting Effective Team Diversity
There are number of advantages to using VR for building teams, in this article we explore team diversity and what role VR can play to improve this. VR has been shown to be particularly effective in this domain, helping reduce peoples unconscious biases such as ageism, thus allowing teams to develop and work together with less of these biases in place.
If you would like to explore how you can assess and develop your teams and improve their effectiveness using VR then contact us now and we will be happy to work with you to improve your organisations team working culture.
Team working and diversity development with VRE assessment and development.
Team Transparency: A Delicate But Winning Formula
Here we review one of the key factors for high performing teams, that of team transparency. This is an important factor as it facilities a number of important outcomes ranging from better person-task fit to preventing failures and misses, with this in mind an important part of increasing team transparency is the opportunity for clear and objective feedback and being able to provide this feedback promptly. Here the advantages of VR really come into play and our VR Team Assessment platform provides instant and detailed feedback to teams enabling them to gain valuable insights into their team dynamics to improve their understanding and develop a clearer (more transparent) view of their team and how it currently performs in a range of key areas.
VIRTUAL REALITY ESCAPE ROOM TEAM BUILDING
Room
Escape
Challenge your teams in ways they will not have been challenged before. VR building with escape rooms allows you to stretch your teams in new ways, using a range of fun and engaging environments that draw out key competencies and team critical behaviours.
Virtual Reality Escape Rooms can be run at our London location or can be set up at your own company if you have suitable space and venue. Our team of VR trainers and psychologists can also offer developmental versions of escape room team building if you wish to include some extra team development and feedback on the day.
For more details on our VR escape room team building click here.
Room
Escape
VR SOFTWARE TYPICALLY USED FOR LARGE GROUPS
For larger team building groups
we use a range of carefully selected off-the-shelf VR experiences that genuinely allow for interaction and collaboration. Our in-house psychologists have constructed fun yet challenging activities around them to encourage team development. We have included some examples below.
Furthermore, we can select
and if necessary design new VR activities that better reflect your corporate sector, services that you offer or particular competencies that you may wish to focus on and develop on the day.
For any team building day
we do recommend focusing on just one or two areas, so delegates leave having had focused and incremental feedback in a powerful additive way across several activities that will have a memorable impact.
Tilt Brush
Competencies – Leadership, communication, problem solving, spatial reasoning
This excellent VR application is a personal favourite of ours, why? Because it can be used in so many different ways with teams.
This VR application allows users to draw in 3 dimensions and is trickier than it sounds. Why? Well, most of us are not used to drawing objects with depth as well as width and height so it always presents some interesting challenges to teams.
We have designed this activity to be all inclusive, which means everyone has to be involved. It is a meaningful lesson on learning to adapt our personal preferences and communication styles in order to interface effectively with others.
Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes
Competencies – Leadership, communication, planning, problem solving, teamwork
This challenging yet exciting VR application is used when you really want to put your teams through their paces and see how people perform under a little bit of pressure. The goal being to highlight how people in challenging circumstances can behave in real work situations.
Teams have to defuse a series of bombs, they each take turns to enter the bomb room and are faced with increasingly complex devices. They are totally reliant on their teammates who have the various manuals to guide and help them.
If teams don’t work together in clever ways they always run out of time, so it can be very rewarding for them as they slowly improve and start to defuse these devices.
This VR activity is also very cognitively challenging so we usually recommend a lighter VR experience afterwards to allow participants to recover and re-energise.
See the video below for an example how this application works.
Fantastic Contraption
Competencies – Creative thinking, problem solving, teamwork
This skillfully constructed VR application makes budding civil engineers out of all of us. Incredibly immersive and easy to use, teams have to build various contraptions to get objects to the other side of walls and across gaps in a floating terrain.
This VR application really challenges groups to think in new creative ways, but also not be afraid to start over instead of constantly refining a bad idea (which some teams end up doing)!
We have designed this activity to challenge teams to work together as a unit in solving the increasingly demanding contraption puzzles they face.
Check out the video below for more details.
Waltz of the Wizard
Competencies – Problem solving, teamwork
Another favourite of the VRE team is Waltz of the Wizard. Here teams step into the shoes of a newly qualified wizard and have to quickly solve a number of magical puzzles in a short amount of time.
Due to the highly entertaining nature of the activity, delegates often get distracted from the tasks at hand, and instead make objects float in the air or throw fireballs around their wizarding cave.
Teams have to work together to succeed in this activity and good problem solving and communication skills are an essential part to achieve a success.
Other VR Team Building Services
Other Non-VR Training Services For Your Team Building Day
Here at VRE our team includes Business Psychologists and senior learning & development professionals who have led training departments and designed and delivered management training programmes across a range of sectors.
As a result, clients often ask us to run other parts of their team building day event. Team building is part of our core background we are happy to run additional non-VR elements to support other outcomes that you wish to focus on.
This can often be company values or specific behaviours/competencies that clients would like to emphasise on their day.
E.g. for larger team building days we can run hybrid days using VR alongside experiential training sessions involving innovative non-VR elements that force people to work together in other ways.
So, if your day requires multiple sessions, some with virtual reality and some using more traditional team building methods, VRE is your one-stop-shop. We can help with your complete event and team building planning.
We also offer a range of VR training courses for soft skills, leadership and coaching from our experienced experts.