Team-building? Overcooked!
You and your team of cooks must prepare and serve meals to your waitings guest. Will your kitchen be a well oiled machine? Or a kitchen nightmare that no one can recover from? Responsibility for success at this game come from all 4 players.
At the initial stages of Overcooked, each player has a well-defined role in the game–fetch the onions, chop the ingredients, cook them, or serve them to customers. Each individual only has one task to accomplish and the job is done. The game then slowly ramps up the difficulty by presenting growingly absurd level designs with more objectives and increasingly annoying obstacles, such as washing the dishes, catching a pesky kitchen rat,receiving an order for tomato soup or making a custom burger with lettuce.The tasks become more sophisticated and each player has to take up more than one assignment in order to deliver the order. You can imagine how things escalate quickly and get overwhelmed when the workload gets heavier while the team does not have a clear role division.
The one-hour Overcooked experience is more than just having fun. It is like a startup simulation where additional responsibilities throw in as entrepreneurs move along their way of business. Like in Overcooked, you know it is bad when things start “catching fire”. This is the point where effective communication and clarity on team’s immediate goal come in in order for the team to work efficiently. In later rounds, our team had experienced bottleneck because we failed to have a clear role division. People were just jumping here and there whenever that task or spot needed to be filled. This resulted in leaving some tasks vacant and some tasks with too many people working on them. After several attempts, my team and I learnt to define our job duties clearly, we divided our tasks by geographical constrain and managed to hit our personal best!
Another take away from the game is that I observed certain teammates opt to stick to a specific role, whereas others will slot into any job as required. Some members of the team relish the challenge presented by a new scenario, whereas others may be a little bit more cautious of the unknown. I believe it is important to understand our team dynamics and their personalities like what each of them is best at or most comfortable with, so that we can best utilize people’s talents, maximize their values and help our business to grow.
P.S. It was awesome to have a teambuilding event like this!