Murder Mystery Snack for Fitprime: Christmas team building in Rome
End-of-year corporate events carry more strategic weight than they are often given credit for. Planned well, they consolidate a sense of shared achievement, reinforce company culture, and send people into the new year with their engagement meaningfully renewed.
Planned poorly, they pass without trace. When Fitprime, one of Italy's leading corporate wellness companies, commissioned a Christmas event for their Rome team in December 2022, the brief called for something designed to the former standard, and the result delivered on every count.
Planning a unique corporate Christmas event with an exciting team-building activity
The brand came to us with a layered request: they wanted a Christmas celebration that would honour the year's achievements, set a tone for the one ahead, and give their people a genuinely immersive experience. The People & Culture team wanted team building woven into the fabric of the day, purposeful and fun, designed to land as a natural part of the celebration.
That bit can be tricky: a Christmas team building event succeeds when the activity feels like the point of the day, when people arrive curious and leave energised, when the whole thing holds together with its own internal logic. Getting there requires considered design at every stage, and it begins with understanding what the client actually values.
The Murder Mystery Snack: theatre as team building
Most people know the Murder Mystery Dinner format, a staged crime, a cast of suspects, a room full of amateur detectives. The Murder Mystery Snack takes that premise and reframes it for a daytime setting, with sharper pacing and considerably more physical participation.
Participants were divided into groups and tasked with unravelling a staged criminal case, guided throughout by a professional actress who kept the narrative taut and the energy high. The format demanded genuine collaboration under a specific kind of pressure: collective, time-limited, and pleasantly absurd. People inhabited characters, argued over clues, and arrived at conclusions through actual lateral thinking, all of which tends to surface unexpected qualities in all participants, which, after all, is the ultimate goal of any thoroughly thought-through team building activity.
The Fitprime HR lead later noted that the activity pushed everyone out of their comfort zone in the best possible way, that acting as someone else, even briefly, produced a particular loosening of the usual workplace dynamic. Hierarchy softens when everyone is equally baffled by the same fictional murder.
Choosing the venue and designing the menu
The venue brought its own character to the day: cultural in atmosphere, informal enough in tone to let the evening breathe, and well-suited to the full arc of the programme, from the morning corporate meeting through to the team building activity and the dinner that followed.
The buffet was prepared with genuine care, refined in its composition and notably attentive to the range of dietary requirements within the group. Vegan and coeliac guests were catered for at exactly the same level of quality as everyone else at the table, and the Fitprime team singled this out in their feedback as something they particularly appreciated. Inclusive catering signals respect, and every detail of how it is handled communicates something about the standards an organiser holds.
The evening closed with music and karaoke, which, after a day of solving fictional crimes and dining well, landed with exactly the kind of warmth that a corporate Christmas event ought to finish on.
Creating the perfect corporate Christmas event
The feedback from Fitprime was generous and specific. The decision to work with us was described as the best one made for the event, with every participant asking their HR lead to pass along compliments for the murder mystery activity. The food drew praise, the organisation drew praise, the attention to dietary inclusivity drew praise, and the overall experience exceeded the expectations the team had set going in.
A corporate Christmas event that holds together from a morning meeting through to late-night karaoke is the product of deliberate, detail-oriented planning. The venue, the activity, the catering, the rhythm of the day: each element carries weight, and when each one delivers, the result is a day people place firmly in the category of memorable. Fitprime's people left with that impression, and their HR team left ready to collaborate again.
That outcome is precisely what the work is for.