1The Challenge
What was the challenge?
HFFC (Home First Finance Company), a leading tech-driven affordable housing finance company with a pan-India presence, partnered with The Thought Bulb for a large-scale team building experience in Kochi. Bringing together 450+ employees at Hyatt Regency Kochi, the programme needed to do more than fill a conference room — it needed to genuinely engage a geographically spread workforce, most of whom work across different branches and states and rarely get to collaborate in person.
The brief was clear: design an activity that could hold 450+ people at once, work outside the walls of a hotel, and give the team something more memorable than a typical offsite. It needed to be high-energy, scalable, and rooted in something bigger than the activity itself.
2Our Solution
What solution did we design?
The Thought Bulb proposed the Kerala City Race — a gamified, Amazing Race-style format that took HFFC's teams out of Hyatt Kochi and into the city itself, racing between checkpoints to earn treasure points through challenges built around Kerala's history, trade, and traditions.
Rather than one large group moving as a single mass, the 450+ employees were split into mixed teams that deliberately crossed branch and department lines — so the race itself became a tool for breaking silos, not just a memorable day out. The format ensured that colleagues who had never worked together were placed side by side, forced to lean on each other's strengths to compete.
3How We Did It
How was the programme delivered?
The Thought Bulb designed a full-day race anchored at Hyatt Regency Kochi and extending into the city's most iconic locations — Fort Kochi's colonial lanes, the Chinese fishing nets, spice trade landmarks, and local markets. Each mixed team was handed a route and a set of culturally-themed challenges: tasks tied to Kerala's spice trade history, its performing arts traditions, its backwaters heritage, and its street food culture, each worth treasure points toward the final leaderboard.
Teams navigated the city together, split tasks based on strengths, and made quick calls under time pressure — while a dedicated facilitation crew tracked progress, verified challenge completions, and kept the pace high across every team simultaneously. The day closed back at the hotel with a live leaderboard reveal, prize distribution, and a group debrief connecting the race dynamics to how the team collaborates day-to-day.
4Key Outcomes
What were the results?
The Kerala City Race gave HFFC's team a shared, high-energy experience that broke down the usual branch and function silos — employees who had never met were paired up and had to rely on each other's strengths to win points.
- Cross-branch collaboration: The deliberate mixing of teams across branches and departments meant the race itself was the intervention — connection happened through competition, not through a workshop.
- Cultural immersion: Teams walked away with a genuine, on-the-ground appreciation for Kerala's culture and history — moments of discovery that no conference hall session could have produced.
- People-first identity: The programme reinforced HFFC's ethos as a people-first organisation — the same values the company brings to its customers, reflected back in how it invests in its own teams.
- 450+ participants. 13+ states represented. One city race through Kochi.
