Engaged employees are more effective and innovative because they are showing their true selves at work.
Involvement is key to engagement and games have always epitomised that. So it stands to reason that an effective route to employee engagement is to encourage people to play games.
In our recent international executive survey, which explored the most important traits that make up engagement, a third of respondents revealed that number one on the list was feeling ‘involved and involving’.
At the end of the 1980s, Action Man was the ‘toy of the decade’. Before the age of video games, millions of kids played with him, creating fantasies that were as vivid and involving as any PlayStation offering today.
Games help children to experiment with and make sense of the world and, for hundreds of millions of people, they still do – not just ‘game geeks’ but people from every age group, whether they are board game devotees or they enjoy taking part in Wii-based activities with the family.
And it’s not hard to see how work could be viewed as one big game such as RISK or chess. We have our visions and our missions and, whether we’re the chief executive or frontline customer service representative, we often perform role-play.
We have our uniforms, our enemies (is that the competition – or the customer?), our myths and legends, stories of success and failure, winners and losers. The ‘Masters of the Universe’ in the financial services industry even indulged in a real-life Monopoly game with the property market, leading to lots of losers and a world recession.
Encouraging high performance
So work, it appears, is just a grown-up version of the games that we played as children – although they are a lot more sophisticated these days. A crucial difference today between real life and video games, however, is the ability of the latter to analyse every digital move and interaction you make.
Games companies producing titles such as World of Warcraft, which have millions of players, can observe the billions of interactions that take place all the time. Psychology is laid bare as buttons are pressed. And these psychological insights have been reapplied to the physical world in the shape of ‘gamification’.
Gamification is the application of gaming techniques in non-gaming environments. It’s a new way of appealing to customers and staff and is valid for everything from recruitment, retention and engagement to product branding, on-line promotion and advertising.
While gamification may be a silly word, the seriousness of the concept lies in encouraging people to perform more effectively by using gaming theory and practices.
Gaming theory is employed to model strategic situations, in which an individual’s success in making a given choice depends on the choices made by others. The idea is to create a safe space in which to experiment with scenarios, some of which, at some point, will be applied ‘back at the ranch’.
The idea was initially developed to analyse behaviour during competitions in which one individual succeeded at another’s expense (zero sum games), a tactic that can be readily applied in a business environment. But it has since been expanded to cover a wide variety of interactions, which are classified according to several broad types of games.
Prominent examples include cooperative and non-cooperative games as well as those with perfect and imperfect information. Both set up scenarios that the average employee is likely to face during the course of their career, but which most instruction manuals, standards documents and key performance indicators will be unable to help them with.
Safe environment
Two examples of games that we have developed include a storytelling-based executive role-playing game ‘Brand Champions’™, which is intended to help identify, engage and encourage potential agents of change to act as part of a transformation programme.
It has been employed by executives in the petro-chemical industry to try and change the way that strategy was developed and health and safety issues communicated to staff in order to save lives. It has also helped employees working at an tourist board, who felt under siege, to permanently change their culture by creating a network of champions.
The second game is ‘Brand Challenger’™, a strategy development and future scenario-planning game that sets up a crisis situation and encourages workers to solve it by stimulating innovative thinking and teamwork.
It has been used to help a global insurance company introduce innovative change into its product set as well as unleash the untapped potential of its line managers, transforming the culture within the space of 18 months. The offering has also helped the senior executive of a utilities company position the organisation as a credible challenge to key rivals.
In each of these scenarios, the senior team had become stuck in traditional ways of corporate thinking and needed a safe but challenging environment in which to subvert and reinvent their usual approaches.
And this word ‘safe’ is important. Scenario-based game-playing enables participants to make critical but constructive suggestions for how to solve pressing business problems, while enabling people to own the solution as a team and take responsibility for implementing it.
It is commonly-accepted wisdom that children, like all mammals, play games in order to learn important lessons about life. As is so often the case in corporate life, we forget that people, even when they grow up, also operate most effectively if are involved enough to take risks, make mistakes and learn through trial and error in an environment that they perceive to be safe.
Ian Buckingham is chief executive of brand engagement consultancies, Bring Yourself 2 Work and Brand Engaged, and Kevin Thomson is chairman of Brand Engaged.
One Response
Game playing for learning people management skills
I enjoyed and agreed with the sentiments of the article. (I also loved being reminded of my action man). I also think that the game format has much to offer in the task of learning about people management. Role plays, scenario planning and problem solving in a game format is a very engaging and fun way to get crucial people skills and knowledge embedded in all managers.
To this end I have been working on a flexible boardgame called ‘Feelgood People Management’ which is now ready for use in any organisation where a team wishes to develop their people management skills and processes in a cost effective and fun way. The facilitated game is based on typical employment situations where people management decisions and actions are required to gain or lose ‘feelgood points’, the team with the most points wins, (but actually the learning goes to all participants). I believe it is unique and hope it will be a way of introducing new and experienced managers to the thrills and pitfalls of people management.
More details can be found on http://www.feelgoodpeoplemanagement.com and their will also be a simple app available soon.
Regards
Steve Ellis