Perkbox: Company All-Hands
The brief asked one day to do three jobs: share company updates with the full team, celebrate recent achievements and give everyone a genuinely engaging experience.
A day that serves both leadership communications and team activity has a sequencing problem. A leadership session that overruns, or doesn't land, drains the energy a team-building activity needs. An activity placed first can leave people too wired to absorb structured content. Order and pacing matter as much as what's actually said. The Crystal Maze added its own demand. It needs active participation across puzzles, physical challenges and time pressure, which meant the drinks reception straight after had to allow real decompression rather than holding the group in the same heightened state. The photography brief layered on top of all of it: headshots and candid coverage are two different briefs running at once, one structured and one opportunistic, across a day that already had a full programme.
We did not start with the activity. We started with the order, because the order was the thing that could make or break the day.
Breakfast opened it, unstructured on purpose. No agenda, no facilitated icebreaker, because the Crystal Maze would do that work far more effectively later.
The leadership presentation went directly after breakfast, when the group was settled but before the energy of the activity. That positioned the communications as purposeful rather than an interlude. It set context for the celebration that followed instead of competing with it, covering company achievements and progress so the Crystal Maze had a shared milestone to mark rather than just being a fun thing to do. The Crystal Maze itself was the team-building core. Physical and puzzle challenges ran across zones in teams, creating natural peer interaction and shared stakes under time pressure, and the competitive format drove collaboration between people who don't work closely day to day. The acoustic drinks reception was designed as a deliberate decompression, a low-key conversational close that let the group come down from the activity without the day going flat. The photographer worked across both phases, structured headshots alongside candid coverage, so the day produced something useful beyond itself.
The four phases held together, and the leadership content and the team activity each did their job without compromising the other.
Breakfast, leadership session, Crystal Maze and drinks reception ran in sequence across the full day. The structured communications landed before the activity took over, and the group carried through to a conversational close rather than a flat one. Professional headshots and candid photography were delivered across the day, giving the company updated employee assets as a practical by-product of the away day.
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This was a connection moment. See how we design team building and away days.
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