How one game day helped a 100-year-old industrial supplier turn office and warehouse into one team.
Setting the table for game day, right on the warehouse floor.
For over 100 years, Guden has been one of those companies that quietly keeps the world running, supplying the springs, hinges, and fasteners that go into everything from furniture to industrial machinery. We worked with their full team of roughly 32 people across office and warehouse.
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, 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.
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.
We developed a custom strategic play day built around four games, each targeting a core challenge the organization was facing. 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.
The games are the warm-up. The debrief is where insights become day-to-day habits.
In a two-player game where pilot and copilot must work together to land a plane, people experienced firsthand that different roles carry equal value. Neither seat lands the plane alone.
Through a game of matching meaning across wildly different interpretations of abstract art, players saw that we each view the world through our own lens, and those differences make the whole team stronger.
A modified game of telephone revealed how culture, generation, and life experience all shape how we hear things in ways we rarely stop to consider.
In a game where teams must work together in complete silence, players discovered that coordination comes from learning to read the people around you.
“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
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.
The biggest value was in shared challenge and the chance to actually meet coworkers people don't normally have the opportunity to talk to.
People came away seeing each other as full human beings rather than job titles or departments, on both sides of the office and warehouse divide.
Small but meaningful moments of connection accumulated across the day in ways nobody had predicted, from the first table to the last.
As their president put it, dozens of coworkers seeing each other more fully as humans is not a small thing. It's the beginning of a culture that holds together.
Let's build your game plan for connection.
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