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Tired of the same old employee events? Not this year.
Picture your team building something genuinely remarkable together: a massive doodle, a mega game, a story people retell for years. Whatever you choose, we make sure it wins hearts and minds and stays with everyone long after the room empties.
Enter the Zense Employee Engagement Event Factory (Zeeef for short, don't ask).
Actually, yes, please do ask!
We're Zense, a strategy and storytelling studio in Zurich and Berlin. We've spent years making complicated things land for the likes of SWISS, Helsana, and Baloise, and this is the playful end of what we do.
We're not event managers, though. We don't book the venue or argue with the caterer. We bring the idea, the format, and the craft.
It comes in two flavours, depending on what you're after:
Engagement events.
The big productions that turn a day off-site into something people actually remember. Whether you want to move an entire company or just your team of twenty, there's something here for you.
Games and gamified learning.
We turn the serious stuff - service, collaboration, the dysfunctions nobody names - into fun games, rather than another slide deck. Some formats are ready to go; others we build with you from scratch.
… through games and events.
Sketching magic to spark conversations and generate new ideas at any event.
A live illustrator, or several, capturing your conference as it happens. In the style of courtroom sketches, people get drawn as they arrive, ideas and debates land on paper in real time, and a giant mural takes shape through the day to be unveiled at the close. Watching their own thinking become visible has a funny way of drawing people deeper into the discussion (again, pun intended).
And when it's over, the mural goes home as a tangible record of everything the group built together. Made for HR conferences, summits, and any gathering you'd rather people actually remembered.
A collaborative doodle event for teams who know what can be achieved when everyone draws from the same set of values. Pun intended.
One giant, interconnected doodle, built by your whole company in a single day. Everyone turns your culture, values, or strategy into A0 posters. They then get stitched into one enormous tapestry - ten by ten meters or bigger - and raised at the end like a ship's sail to cheers and dramatic music.
What we love is how quietly it short-circuits the room: the most senior person ends up drawing next to the newest hire, and by the end nobody quite remembers who did which bit. Which is exactly the point.
This event idea started as a one-off in 2023 and has since travelled through construction, aviation, academia, and, most recently, a law firm (hand a felt-tip to a room full of lawyers and you'll see why that's worth a mention).
A non-verbal communication workshop, aka, the team day where nobody has to listen to boring speeches.
A whole day without speech. We take away the tool everyone leans on most and let people communicate through everything else: gesture, drawing, attention, patience. When you can't just talk louder to be understood, you get creative, and you finally listen.
As an additional tool, we usually thread in moments of reflection so the insight travels back to everyday work. It sounds like a gimmick and lands like a revelation: teams leave with a wordless understanding of each other and a new respect for what collaboration actually takes.
Not points and badges, but rehearsal for the things that actually matter.
People learn faster when they play their way to something than when they're lectured at. A good game does what a values deck never can: it puts your people inside the hard calls, the trade-offs with no clean answer, the moments where doing right by one thing means letting another slide. They get to make the decision, get it wrong, and try again, all without real-world consequences.
None of our games come shrink-wrapped on a shelf. We build them with you, around your people and your problem, and then they're yours, to replay as often as you like. One of our all-time favourites is The Game of Great Service, first built with SWISS. It puts teams in realistic guest scenarios where the right call isn't obvious and every choice costs something, so they make it the way they would on a real shift, and find out what your values actually ask of them. Tough, but oh-so-educational.
Focused sessions that get real teams somewhere real.
Sometimes you don't need a whole production. That's why we built facilitated workshops where the awkward stuff can surface right then and there to be discussed in a mindful debrief.
And when you'd rather run things yourselves, our workshop kits hand you the templates, the plan, and the playfulness, so you can do it all without us in the room.
Our favourite examples include the Office Monster Game, built on the book of the same name by Prof. Martin J. Eppler and Andri Hinnen. For teams, leaders, and coaches who'd rather hunt monsters than "talk about communication challenges."
Way more, glad you asked.
Doodling is great fun, and so are board games, paper airplane contests, marble runs, and room-sized chain reactions. Our specialty is Zense-making, so we don't limit ourselves by tool or medium. We start from your message and your team, and find the format that lands it.
What's the magic behind this?
Every format runs through the same four gears:
Facilitation. We pin down the message, the goal, the audience, the tone, and who's actually in charge.
Sensualization. We find the story, the event or game metaphor, and the medium that carries them.
Mobilization. We work out the where, the when, and the who.
Sustention. We make sure the day doesn't evaporate by Monday and that the learnings land in everyday work. So, what's next?
