How a leading international investment bank reimagined global onboarding during lockdown – and what happened when play was deliberately designed in.
When the 2020 Covid lockdowns hit, organisations everywhere were forced to rethink how they brought people together and integrated new employees into a shared culture.
With offices closed, all those informal shared moments over coffee or lunch stopped, and there was no way of immersing people in all the natural social cues that come from being in the same room together.
For a leading international investment bank running global onboarding at serious scale, this was a cultural challenge as much as a logistical one. The team knew that many of the things that had always made onboarding work simply couldn’t happen in the same way.
So, rather than trying to recreate those experiences imperfectly online, the bank took a more intelligent approach.
They asked a better question: Given these constraints, how do we design something that genuinely works?
With hundreds of people joining at a time, across roles, seniority and continents, the client recognised that onboarding had always been about more than just downloading information: it’s about confidence, trust, relationships and also a sense of belonging from day one
During lockdown, the usual routes to those outcomes were unavailable, yet the outcomes themselves mattered more than ever. So the brief was to create something new, that could work in an online format but be meaningful and effective.
It needed to create real interaction as opposed to passive virtual attendance. It needed to be energising and engaging, and it also needed to work at a global scale yet be inclusive and feel human.
Working closely with the internal team, Sharky + George helped design a live, game-show-style escape room experience, delivered online and hosted in real time.
Participants were placed into small breakout teams of around ten, each supported by a facilitator. Together, they tackled a series of collaborative puzzles, racing other teams to the finish.
The format was deliberately simple, but carefully structured, without long briefings and presentations or too much pressure to ‘perform’.
Instead, the experience created the conditions where connection could happen naturally.
Seen through the lens of the Transformational Power of Play, three elements were purposefully built into the experience:
Play allowed people to meet one another properly, even if they were at a geographical distance.
The programme never felt like a Covid-enforced compromise. It ran over two years, well after the lockdowns had eased, welcoming more than 15,000 new employees worldwide.
Across cohorts and regions, the same outcomes consistently appeared:
What made this collaboration successful was a shared belief that serious organisations don’t need to lower their standards when circumstances become difficult, they just need to find creative solutions and new ways of thinking.
The bank recognised that human connection doesn’t happen by accident, especially online; and Sharky + George helped translate that belief into a play experience that was scalable, while also being inclusive and genuinely engaging.
Read more about the serious benefits of play in our free white paper The Transformational Power of Play.
