Of the corporate team buildings, 97% have been postponed in 2020

Based on a 2020 survey of 740 companies, Exit the Room discovered that 97% of the casual end-of-the-year team buildings have been postponed 

The main reason was the pandemic

Looking into the reason for this extremely high rate, we discovered: 

• 48.6% of the surveyed companies answer that their team building was not held due to the COVID-19.
• 16.2% of them wanted to decrease their expenses by the abandonment of these corporate events.
• 32.4% of them did not organise team buildings for reasons other than these. 

Among these responses, a lack of interest and the extra workload placed on organization were also primary reasons. This shows that there are a great number of businesses – typically small and medium-sized enterprises – where organizing team buildings is an extra task.

There’s a great demand for online team buildings

Online team building, which can easily be held from the home office,  was almost unknown to the general public before 2020. Today, 56.8% of companies would like to make use of this service and at least 35.1% would consider the opportunity. 

“We’ve started to develop online escape rooms in the Spring of 2020 and at the same time, started to create the demand for these programs in Hungary. Though we received some positive feedback, the interest was still minimal. Then autumn, along with the second wave of the virus arrived.  

But this brought a twist to this industry – something none of us could have imagined. Thanks to social distancing, the online games began to pick up. Apple, Google, Amazon, and FIFA, to mention a few of the many companies that left positive reviews after we hosted their online team building. 

Escape rooms have always been a popular team building program, but we did not think in advance that online team buildings would create such an interest. Now more than 1,000 companies have participated in our games, coming from around 50 countries from all over the world” – said Gábor Rétfalvi, the CEO of Exit the Room, confirming the results of our research.