Being literally trapped inside your office might sound like a stress-induced fever dream to anyone familiar with job burnout. But a local government technology solutions company is letting its workers experience that … for fun. Research Innovations, Inc. (RII), has built a fully fledged escape room in its Alexandria office in an effort to keep up its longstanding playful culture.
Games have long been part of what RII calls its “RIIdiculously awesome culture,” Rachael McConnell, RII’s marketing design director, and Erin Fristoe, RII’s director of talent and community engagement, told DC Inno in an email. Ongoing chess games, board games and video games are a regular sighting, they said, often even including remote employees. The escape room, implemented last week in a “big empty closet,” is just the latest addition to the norm at the company.
“The escape room is one of many creative projects conceived of and brought to life by our employees. Not only does it keep our office exciting, but it’s an exercise that folks can do together with their work teams or use it as a way to meet new people from different parts of the company,” McConnell and Fristoe said.
The escape room was created by Erskin Cherry and Jamie Swogger, a pair of engineers at RII, who put it together in their spare time over a few months. The hourlong experience has a James Bond-themed villain story. Appropriately, the room weaves RII-specific elements into the experience, with company founder and CTO Rich Briggs as the hero of the story.
Titled the “Chamber of Escalation,” the room also features a custom-made electronic patch panel with LED displays and a computer with a custom app for groups to track their progress. The team plans to rotate in new puzzles and themes as more people complete the room. Everyone so far has made it out within the hour target, McConnell and Fristoe said, but the times on the company-wide leaderboard have been getting faster and faster.
“Fortunately, everyone who escapes gets an ‘I escaped the Chamber of Escalation’ sticker for their computer, so we're all winners,” they said.
Despite the hype, the team is actually fuzzy on how the unconventional idea came about: “Erin found an old sticky note in our office that read ‘Idea: Chamber of Escalation’ and nobody could remember what it meant,” McConnell and Fristoe said. The question turned into a spitballing session on Slack before Cherry and Swogger “suggested that it must refer to an escape room.” So they ran with it. “One big empty closet and 4 gallons of paint later, it became a reality.”
RII was featured in DC Inno’s “50 on Fire” last year for Fristoe’s accomplishments at the company and active role in D.C.’s tech community. The company is also recognized as a “Great Place to Work" by the Great Place to Work Institute.
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