Perkbox: Company All-Hands
The brief was connection for people who don't share a room: a remote, distributed team that needed a real reason to spend a full day together and come away actually knowing each other.
The day had to build from low-pressure social time into active competition and then celebration.
Team-building days for remote teams carry a specific problem. Arriving in the same city doesn't create familiarity. People who don't share an office self-select into the small clusters they already know, and a lunch that isn't structured carefully just reproduces the remote dynamic in person, everyone talking to the people they already talk to. The activity had to create genuine interdependence rather than parallel participation. A format where individuals could finish tasks alone, without real collaboration, would not produce the connection the client was after. And the three phases, lunch, city-wide activity, evening celebration, had to build on each other. A celebration after a flat afternoon feels disconnected, so the activity had to produce shared experience the evening could actually celebrate.
We did not leave the social work to chance. We engineered interdependence into the day, so connection was the only way through it.
The day opened with a team lunch at The Met Hotel. Rather than an open social period, it was framed as the moment before the competition, introducing teams and setting the stakes for the afternoon.
The afternoon was the Hidden Quest GPS treasure hunt. Teams used GPS-enabled iPads to navigate Leeds, find locations, solve challenges and meet costumed characters handing out surprise tasks. We chose the format because it put teams in genuine interdependence. Navigating an unfamiliar city, solving problems under time pressure, competing on a live scoreboard. There was no passive participation, the activity only worked if the team worked together, and photo challenges and trivia varied the demands so it held a range of people across the afternoon. The evening moved to Revolución de Cuba for a Cuban-themed celebration that carried the energy the treasure hunt had built. Food, cocktails and a dance floor gave an unstructured close after a highly structured afternoon, and the space to consolidate the connections the activity had started.
Colleagues who had never met in person spent the day as mixed teams and stayed together into the evening, and the client kept us on afterwards.
The three phases ran in full across the day, team lunch, city-wide treasure hunt and evening celebration. Remote colleagues completed the hunt in mixed teams and shared the night, and following the event the client engaged Herewith to manage their entire events calendar on an ongoing basis.
This was a connection moment. See how we design team building and away days.
Get the strategic thinking behind internal events that actually land. Frameworks, perspectives and the principles behind briefing, designing and judging the events that change what a business does next. Delivered monthly.
