Every so often a client comes to us wanting something a bit different from the usual outdoor games and trust exercises, and the ADNOC Technical Academy day was exactly that brief. Rather than run the same format we might use for a bank or a school, we built the whole day around a “Squid Games” theme, taking the idea of playful, high-stakes competition and turning it into something physical, collaborative and genuinely enjoyable for a group of colleagues who don’t normally get to step outside the classroom or the office together…
The Technical Academy sits at the heart of how ADNOC trains and develops its people, which meant the group we worked with were used to structured, technical environments. Our job was to flip that on its head for a day. Instead of lecture halls and assessments, we gave them a series of physical and team challenges inspired by the games that made the “Squid Games” theme so recognisable, reworked so they’d actually work as team building activities rather than pure spectacle. The point was never to recreate a TV show scene for scene. It was to borrow the tension and the fun of those games and use them as a vehicle for something more useful: getting a group of colleagues moving, laughing and problem solving together.
What made the day work was the mix of physical effort and group thinking. Some challenges leaned on speed and coordination, others needed the group to talk to each other, agree on a plan, and adjust when that plan didn’t quite work. That combination is deliberate on our part. A team day that’s all physical tends to favour the fittest people in the room and leave everyone else watching. A day that’s all whiteboard and discussion can feel like work with different furniture. Blending the two means everyone has a moment to contribute, whether that’s through pace, strategy or just keeping the group’s energy up when a challenge gets tricky.
We’ve described this one on our portfolio as an extremely fun team building day with an awesome group of people, and that’s really the simplest way to put it. There wasn’t a scoreboard-driven grind to it. It was a day built for people to come away from their desks, work through a set of shared challenges, and leave having laughed more than they expected to at a work event. That’s often the real measure of whether a team day has landed, not attendance numbers or feedback scores, but whether people are still talking about a particular challenge a week later.
For a technical, competency-focused organisation like the Academy, that shift matters. Communication and camaraderie aren’t things you can teach in a classroom the same way you teach a technical skill, and they don’t build themselves through proximity alone. Days like this give colleagues a shared experience to draw on afterwards, a shorthand and a bit of shared history that carries back into normal working life. It’s a small thing, but it’s the kind of small thing that changes how a team talks to each other on a Monday morning.
This project is a good example of how we approach team building generally: we don’t keep a fixed menu of activities and slot clients into whichever one fits the day. We start with the client, their people and what they’re actually trying to get out of the day, then build the format around that. A themed day like the Squid Games concept works brilliantly for a group that wants something with a bit of drama and playfulness to it. Other clients want something quieter, more focused on communication exercises, or built around a specific outcome like breaking down silos between departments. We’ve run team building Abu Dhabi days for government entities that needed something fairly formal in tone, and we’ve done the same for private sector clients who wanted the volume turned all the way up. The theming, the pacing and the balance of physical versus collaborative challenges all get built around the group in front of us, not pulled off a shelf.
We’re based in Abu Dhabi, with our flagship gym at the International Tennis Centre in Zayed Sports City, but we work with businesses across the UAE, and that includes a steady stream of team building Dubai clients who want the same tailored approach without compromising on quality because of distance. Sector doesn’t really limit what we can do either. We’ve worked with energy companies, technology firms and schools, and count organisations like Mubadala, G42 and Yas Marina Circuit among the partners we’ve built days for. Each one has needed something different, and that variety is honestly what keeps this side of the business interesting for our team.
Team building sits alongside our other five core services, Gym & Physical Wellness, Employee Wellbeing, Events Management, School Outreach and Active Youth Holiday Camps, and there’s a reason it doesn’t feel bolted on. Corporate wellbeing isn’t just about gym memberships or wellness workshops, it’s also about the culture a team builds day to day, and a well-designed team day can do more for that culture in a few hours than months of policy documents. We’ve been doing this long enough now to know the difference between a day that ticks a box and a day that people genuinely remember, and we’d rather always be building the second kind.
If your organisation is thinking about a team day that’s a bit more memorable than the usual offsite, we’d love to hear what you’re trying to achieve and talk through how we’d shape it for your team.
Written by Rensché Graham Corporate Wellness Manager, HARAKA, October 2026
Reviewed by Sam Bolger, Managing Partner, HARAKA, October 2026