Case Study: Building Bridges at Heathrow

The team here at Events & Venues have been very busy working on a large team building event which saw 170 delegates trying to work out how to build a model Tower Bridge…We were given the brief to find a venue large enough to house up to 170 delegates for a 2 day conference, and evening team building event, with the attendees flying in to Heathrow and driving from Hertfordshire, Wiltshire and Hampshire.

Once we had narrowed down the options available, negotiated rates, arranged site visits and negotiated some more, the Sheraton Heathrow was confirmed and the real fun began. Given the theme of the conference – ‘Building our Bridges To The Future’ we set to work thinking up imaginative team building activities working along this theme. We only had a short time slot before dinner and around VIP speeches and space was limited so after considering everything from circus skills, to lego models and finally settling on a set of challenging bridge themed tasks.

The attendees were put into 17 teams, and each team was given a box containing a variety of puzzles. To start with we had three small puzzles made for the event, each with the image of a different famous bridge. However, the team members who were assembling them were not given a picture of the finished jigsaws, and were only told that there were three to make. These puzzles were to be made against the clock on a board, which had to be returned to a member of Events & Venues staff in order for the team to progress to the next  task – a timed quiz. This was thrown in the middle of all the puzzle making to throw their concentration and unsettle the teams.

There was one more puzzle that had to be made, a 3d plywood model of Tower Bridge. These, whether completed or not, would be used as each team’s centrepiece at dinner, on show for all to see, so there was a definite air of competition amongst the teams from the off. there was such intensity and concentration that even when the FREE bar was opened in the lobby no-one moved for quite some time.

Everyone really got into the spirit of the evening, getting more and more competitive as time went on, and we were left with some interesting ‘sculptures’ at the end of the evening.

If you are in need of a team challenge that will really get people talking, get in touch today.

“The evening was amazing and I’ve had lots of really good feedback. Given the numbers and the time constraints it was a perfect set of activities and the idea of having three different things to make sure everyone in the groups was involved worked really well. Everyone really enjoyed it and found it a lot of fun – they have been talking about it a lot today… You just seemed to quietly bring it all together in the background, very efficiently” – Feedback from the client.