It’s a sad truth that company fun days are often anything but fun. Really, who wants to be holed up with their colleagues for yet another annual round of embarrassing trivia only slightly improved by cheap wine served in plastic cups?

If you too are shuddering of the very memory of such hideous events, consider suggesting a cooler one next time – a citywide, Amazing Race-style adventure, for example.

This is the specialty of Strayboots, an Israeli-American company whose mission is to make company team building a super-fun and engaging affair.

Strayboots, which operates in more than 100 cities worldwide, offers some 200 different activities such as scavenger hunts, treasure hunts, interactive tours and trivia challenges that all take place via a dedicated app. It even has two pending Guinness World Records, for the largest scavenger hunt and the largest treasure hunt game.

Workers document themselves on their engaging adventures. Photo courtesy of Strayboots

Its activity, according to its CEO, came about by popular demand.

“The company actually started as a B2C company with solutions for tourists and people who want to explore the city in a different way,” explains Strayboots CEO Ido Rabiner. “We were cultivating scavenger hunts for individuals and with time we received more and more requests from companies to give them our services for their employees.”

Nowadays, and after working with some 1,500 companies, Strayboots has offices in Tel Aviv, New York, Fort Lauderdale and Lisbon, with sales and marketing in the US and technology being developed in Israel.

Rabiner himself, originally a kibbutznik, moved over a year ago to the States as the company expanded its operations.

“It’s well-known that employees who are more engaged stay in the firm for longer, are more loyal to the company and their productivity is higher.”

“We work directly with HR managers and operation managers and others responsible for events in companies and we supply them with access to our platform,” he says. “All they have to do is connect via their mobile phones and we build the content of their activity, which is adapted to each one of the companies.”

This, Rabiner says, is what makes Strayboots unique. “It’s a tailor-made experience,” he says. “It’s not any old generic content that doesn’t apply to the company.”

This non-generic content is created by utilizing a high-tech platform, content editors and local content editors, who tour prospective sites for cool activities and routes. The result is very cool, unique events – Rabiner notes Universal Studios, the Atlanta aquarium, national parks and museums as recent and interesting locations.

Employees complete challenges and engage with one another on Strayboots’ digitalized days out. Photo: courtesy

Customers’ top three picks, according to Rabiner, are indoor, interactive office activities, city adventures like scavenger hunts, and onboarding and orientation activities for new employees that are all documented with photos and videos by players in real time.

“We provide them with a two- to three-hour-long interactive activity during which they get to experience the area where they work with a lot of emphasis on teamwork, engagement, bringing workers closer to the brand, the company, its culture and one another,” he notes.

Since the activities are custom-made, they can suit anyone between the ages of 18 and 80, Rabiner notes. They can also be adapted for companies of all sizes, the biggest corporate event so far involving some 2,000 employees.

The Strayboots platform is available in languages such as English, Hebrew, Arabic, Portuguese and Spanish, so it really can be rolled-out all over the world.

The feedback, Rabiner says, has been amazing.

“We look at the employees, at the videos that they put up, the photos that they put up, and we’re generating smiles,” he says. “We help employees be happier, more engaged and feel better at their workplace, and that’s our win.”

“For the companies, it’s well-known that employees who are more engaged stay in the firm for longer, are more loyal to the company and their productivity is higher,” he adds. “It’s a win-win for everybody.”

Rabiner’s own personal favorite form of action, he says, is a combination of indoor and outdoor activities. “It creates a lot of interactions and a lot of shared experiences for employees,” he explains.

Time to move over, paper wine cups.

For more information on Strayboots, click here.