Case study
How One Game Day Started Breaking Down the Wall Between Two Siloed Teams
PROBLEM
Guden had done a lot of things right. Profit sharing, solid benefits, a leadership team that genuinely cared about its people. By every measurable standard, they were investing in their workforce.
And yet something wasn't working.
The physical divide between their office and warehouse had quietly hardened into a cultural one. Two groups of people working in the same building, side by side every day, who had somehow never made it into each other's world. Interactions felt transactional. Problems got passed off rather than solved. People were focused on clearing their own desks rather than on the larger goal everyone was theoretically working toward.
"Something has changed. If 30 people here saw just two coworkers more fully as humans today, that's 60 new stitches in the fabric of this company. It’s a big deal.”
- Kirby Moyers, President
SOLUTION
Once Upon a Roll was brought in to design and facilitate a full-day experience for all 32 Guden employees. The goal was to build real connection across departments, shift people out of small-picture thinking, and create the kind of shared experience that actually sticks.
Once Upon a Roll developed a custom strategic play day built around four games, each targeting a core challenge the organization was facing:
Every Role Matters: helping people see that different roles carry equal value through a two player game where the pilot and copilot had to work together to land a plane
Different Perspective Expand Our Horizon: we each interpret the world through our own lens, and those differences make the whole team stronger, through a game where players match meaning across wildly different interpretations of abstract art
Empathy is a team skill: every culture, generation, and life experience all shape how we hear things in ways we rarely stop to consider through a modified game of telephone
Constraint breeds creativity: coordination comes from learning to read the people around you, through a game where teams must work together in complete silence.
Each game was followed by a facilitated debrief where the group connected what they experienced at the table to how they show up at work.
RESULTS
The feedback from the team was immediate. The biggest value was in shared challenge and the chance to actually meet coworkers they don’t normally have the opportunity to talk to.
People came away seeing colleagues in a completely new light, as full human beings rather than job titles or departments.
Small but meaningful moments of connection accumulated across the day in ways nobody had predicted.
Culture isn't one big thing you fix with an announcement. It's hundreds of small connections between individual people, built up over time, that either hold an organization together or quietly let it pull apart. Guden Game Day created 60 of those connections in a single day.
Want to discuss what Once Upon a Roll could do for your company? Set up a discovery call to chat.
ABOUT GUDEN
Industry: Industrial supplier
Location: Long Island, New York
Founded: Over 100 years ago
Employees: ~32
