Perkbox: Company All-Hands
The brief was a culture goal wearing the clothes of an away day.
Casio wanted a day that broke down departmental silos and landed equally across a multi-generational workforce, all in service of a bigger ambition: a place in the UK's top 100 companies to work for.
That ambition changed what the day had to be. This was not a morale boost or a date in the calendar. It had to contribute to culture, measurably enough to matter to a ranking. So the work was never the activity. It was getting people who sat in different teams, and different generations, to leave feeling part of the same company.
Cross-department days carry a specific risk. People arrive with existing loyalties and quiet assumptions about colleagues in other teams. Get the format wrong and the day reinforces the very silos it was meant to break. The multi-generational brief sharpened it further. An activity built for one age group often leaves another on the sidelines, and nobody should be disadvantaged by fitness, seniority or technical confidence. On top of that, a leadership strategy session had to sit inside the day without flattening the social energy the rest of it was building.
We did not start with activities. We started with the thing the day had to change: do people leave feeling like one company, or several.
That set the structure before anything else. The day ran in three deliberate phases, sequenced so each one set up the next. It opened with coach travel and an unhurried arrival, coffee and conversation before any formal content, so the leadership strategy session met a warm room rather than a cold one. Starting structured content after a natural icebreaker, not on the dot, gave the leadership message a better reception.
The team build was chosen for what it demanded, not how it looked. A spy-themed format built on code-breaking, timed challenges and sequential clues put everyone on equal cognitive footing, which is what makes it work across ages and roles. Problem-solving and communication, not physical ability. A trophy for the winning team gave it a real conclusion to compete for, without making anyone who did not place feel shut out.
The evening BBQ was designed as decompression, on purpose. After a full afternoon of structure, an unscheduled close let people carry on the conversations the team build had started. Food and music in the background, no agenda. The point of the day was connection, so the day ended on the part where connection actually happens.
Departments that rarely cross paths spent the day solving problems together, then stayed into the evening as one group.
The three phases gave the day shared reference points, strategy, activity, social, that people experienced together across team lines rather than separately. The team build ran to a clear finish and produced a winner. And the day held: people stayed through the structured afternoon and into the social evening, which on a day built to bring teams together is the clearest sign it worked.
This was a connection moment. See how we design team building and away days.
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