A Remote Team, a City-Wide Treasure Hunt, and a Cuban Party: Team Building in Leeds
SERVICES DELIVERED
CONTEXT
A corporate client with a distributed workforce came to Stacked Events for a team-building day in Leeds. The team was remote and largely didn't share a physical workspace. The brief was to give them a structured reason to spend a full day together and come away with real connections formed. The programme needed to build from low-pressure social time into active competition and then celebration.
Team-building days for remote workforces carry a specific problem: arriving in the same city doesn't automatically create familiarity. People who don't share an office tend to self-select into the same small clusters they already know. A lunch that isn't structured carefully can reproduce the remote dynamic in person — everyone talking to the people they already talk to.
The activity brief required something that created genuine interdependence rather than parallel participation. A format where individuals could complete tasks independently, without real collaboration, would not achieve the connection the client was looking for.
Three phases — lunch, city-wide activity, evening celebration — needed to build on each other. A celebration that followed a flat afternoon would feel disconnected. The activity had to produce genuine shared experience and competition that the evening could actually celebrate.
The day opened with a team lunch at The Met Hotel in Leeds. Rather than an unstructured social period, it was framed as the moment before the competition — introducing teams and setting stakes for the afternoon.
The afternoon activity was the Hidden Quest GPS treasure hunt. Teams used GPS-enabled iPads to navigate Leeds, discover locations, solve challenges, and encounter costumed characters who handed out surprise tasks. The format was chosen because it placed 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. Photo challenges and trivia varied the demands alongside the navigation tasks, ensuring the activity held a range of people across the afternoon.
The evening moved to Revolución de Cuba, with a Cuban-themed celebration continuing the energy the treasure hunt had built. Food, cocktails, and a dance floor provided an unstructured close after a highly structured afternoon. The evening gave the team space to consolidate the connections made during the activity.
The three-phase programme ran in full — team lunch, city-wide treasure hunt, and evening Cuban celebration — across the full day. Remote colleagues who had not previously met in person completed the treasure hunt as mixed teams and shared the evening together. Following the event, the client engaged Stacked Events to manage their entire events calendar on an ongoing basis.
Incredibly fun!
IF THIS FEELS RELEVANT
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