Have more fun at work: Three ways to Stimulate Engagement Through Games
Build engagement in your teams with a little play at work
Work is so bad, says a friend of mine, that they have to pay you to do it. This disengaged view of work is all too common, and has negative effects on productivity, contributes to feelings of burnout, and leads to employee attrition. At Latin Biz Today we have recently reported on data suggesting that employee happiness is on the decline, and offered up some strategies to counteract these trends. In this article I want to focus on a particular type of strategy to stimulate engagement: how to have more fun at work. Let’s start by asking why you should even consider this.
My thinking about this topic really changed when I read the book Total Engagement, by Stanford professor Byron Reeves and entrepreneur and investor J. Leighton Read. Reeves and Read make a strong case for incorporating games into workplaces, detailing how gamifying work can help with engagement and how play can lead to significant improvements in workplace culture and productivity. There are many properties of games that lead to engagement; Reeves and Read focus on the properties of multiplayer online games.
In a game, you have multiple lives (which encourages risk taking and provides opportunities for practice), you take on a character that is not you (which lets you go a little meta about your own strengths compared to those of your character), you have abundant information about your progress (“levels”, “lives”) and might even have incentives (like “dragon kill points”) increasing your motivation to succeed. Multiplayer games provide an excellent model for designing teamwork: success in these games, like with a team at work, requires socializing and community building, clear leadership, healthy competition, and exploration. To top it all off, games alter your emotional stage, and the excitement helps you think more clearly and work harder, say Reeves and Read, possibly even facilitating flow states.
What can you do to stimulate engagement through games at your workplace?
- One approach is to make work routines fun. Examine processes from the perspective of gamification. Build in friendly competition when possible, which can be managed by setting up a leaderboard that’s available to everyone in the organization and compares progress by teams. Be sure to celebrate when teams hit milestones or achieve wins. Counterintuitively, also be sure to celebrate failures, as a way to recognize that failing is very normal, and as an opportunity to review where things went wrong.
- A second approach is to take advantage of the socializing potential of games. Be careful, and try to identify team-building games that won’t be perceived as silly, which will depend very much on who is in your organization. What could resonate with recent college grads (escape rooms or paintball, maybe even karaoke) may not resonate with seasoned managers (who might prefer bowling or a simulation or strategy board game). Getting people from different units to socialize outside their units is a great way to build community and at the same time get people oriented to the expertise outside of their area. You can also build community with your team by taking them into the community on a volunteering mission, maybe something that aligns with your organization’s mission.
- A third approach is to lean into your own cultural values and those of your team members. Encourage lingering and informal conversation in a meeting after the formal agenda, like the sobremesa you might have at home after a meal. You can also center team-building activities on food, music, literature, art, or sports, and if these highlight cultural identity, that much the better.
It’s been a decade and a half since Total Engagement was written, and workplaces are still generally not places that people think of as fun. In fact, I’ve been part of some workplaces where having fun is actually frowned upon. But, in my experience, workplaces with high doses of innovation and productivity all incorporate principles associated with gamification. Workplace culture won’t change unless we’re intentional about changing it, so experiment with bringing games and play into your work environment, and you’ll reap some long-term benefits. Maybe we should set up a competition about this: are you in?
Image Caption: Fun is so rare at work, it’s hard to find good visual representations! This image was generated by Gemini’s Imagen 3 (a text-to-image model), to depict a photo-realistic board game about a business process, with some office imagery in the background.
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