What this department actually does
Most corporate nights are not one thing for four hours. Something hosted early, while people are still arriving and nobody wants to dance, then music once the room has warmed up. What that looks like depends entirely on the room.
The one everyone remembers or complains about. Booked from July onwards for December.
Garden parties, terraces and rooftops, where the music has to work outdoors.
Hosted from the stage, run to a schedule, and handed back on time.
The evening after the day of workshops, when everybody has had enough of breakout rooms.
Half the team has never met the other half. An evening in teams with strangers does more for that in two hours than six months of video calls.
Available formats
Run from the stage rather than read out, on our own software, so the scores and the screens keep up with the room instead of holding it up. Rounds written for the room — and, if you want it, written about the people in it.
Bingo where the numbers are songs. It gets a room that does not know each other talking within ten minutes, which is why it works for a team night.
Run so the shy ones sing too, which is the whole trick — and the difference between a corner nobody visits and the thing people talk about in January.
Full sound and lighting brought in, and somebody reading the room rather than playing a set list. Sound that fills a function room without distorting it.
Hybrid and online
Half the room in the office and half at home is a format in its own right rather than a compromise, and it needs to be run that way — the people on a screen have to be played to directly or they drop off within twenty minutes. We have done this for Takeda, in the room and online at the same time.
New teams and remote teams
The hardest room to run is one where nobody knows each other — a company that hired thirty people remotely, two teams that merged in the spring, an office where half of them come in on different days. Standing everyone in a room with a drink does not fix it. People find the two colleagues they already know and stay there.
What works is giving them something to do in teams they did not pick. Music bingo has a room of strangers shouting at each other inside ten minutes; a quiz needs six people to agree on an answer, which is a conversation whether they wanted one or not. It is not team building and we would not call it that — it is just the fastest way we know to get a room past the first awkward hour.
The version that works best is a quiz about the team itself. Send us what you know about your people — who has run a marathon, whose desk that is, which of these three is the finance director aged six — and we will build rounds out of it. That is the round everyone quotes back at each other in January, and it is the fastest way we know for thirty strangers to learn thirty things about each other without anybody having to stand up and introduce themselves.
The screens are ours too, and they do more than hold the scores. Send us anything you want up there between rounds — the photo from the last away day, whatever happened at the summer social, the MD in a hard hat — and it goes on the big screen while the answers are being marked. It costs nothing, it is the gap in the evening that usually goes quiet, and it is your material rather than ours, so it lands with people who were there.