3 Critical Ways video games can transform your employee culture.
“Games are for kids.”
“Games are an empty distraction.”
As a gamification consultant, I hear this a lot. But I have news for you. If you think the people around you don’t play games, you couldn’t be more wrong! The gaming industry has taken the world by storm, and now, there are currently 2.5 billion video game players around the world. That’s more than a third of the world!
Games have a phenomenal power to arrest our attention, and drive us into frenzied efforts to conquer impossible mountains, endlessly slog and ‘grind’ to complete our tasks, and work together in close knit units and communities to achieve a common goal. Essentially, everything that corporate HR wishes they could get us to do.
So, what power do games possess, and how do we harness them to drastically transform our employee culture at work?
- Compelling Narratives
The best games out there employ the use of great narratives, storytelling and visioning create an immersive and intimate player experience. Games such as World of Warcraft, For Honor and the Call of Duty grip audiences with strong storylines that capture the imagination of the player, and keep them rooted to the journeys of their characters.
What this does to Players: This creates a strong sense of relatedness, as players become bonded to the characters in these stories, and cry and cheer as events unfolded before them. Players are likely to:
- Feel more connected to the game
- Put in more effort to objective completion
- Form global communities and build ‘clans’ within their factions (check out the case of World of Warcraft)
How this translates to employee engagement: Think about the story that binds your employees to your organization. Is there a compelling narrative amongst your teams that bonds them to you? Do they want to put in their utmost to see everyone to the next chapter of the journey together? Do they know their WHY? This is strongly tied to organizational culture, and building a strong narrative can bind your team into an unstoppable tribe.
Remember the famous line of the janitor at NASA when John F. Kennedy toured the facilities and asked him about his role in NASA: “Mr President, I’m helping to put a man on the moon!”
2. Freedom of Choice / Agency
If there is only one way, and one way only to play a game, and that’s to do what the game tells you to do, people will lose interest extremely quickly. Great games have functions that allow players the autonomy to explore different types of gameplay, either by allowing them to create new characters, upgrading different skills and abilities, or by trying the same scenarios in different difficulties. Games like Counterstrike allow you to purchase different types of weapons at different prices, while other games like Diablo allows you to play the same campaign using different characters, and on different difficulty modes (‘Nightmare’ is literally… the stuff of nightmares.)
What this does to players: This allows the players to challenge themselves by taking on different roles and playstyles within the game, allowing them to experience the same scenarios in different lenses, thereby mitigating game stagnancy. Players will start to:
- Acquire multiple competencies within the game setting
- Learn to adopt versatility and flexibility within the same scenarios
- Challenge themselves to master the process over time
How this translates to employee engagement: Employees need the freedom to explore the confine of their work and their role in the organizations to thrive. It’s definitely not a breeze to allow employees to ‘choose their own work’, but a programme similar to Google’s 20% Time will work wonders in allowing employees to freely explore how they can grow the organization in their own way. Sure, you don’t need to dedicate 20% of an employee’s time to their own projects(that led to its own issues even within Google), but even 5–10% is enough to allow team members to build new relationships, create inter-departmental collaborations, and self-innovate for the organization.
3. Creating the right reward and feedback systems
One of the greatest features of good games is the reward systems that acknowledge a player’s performance in a game. It’s not as straightforward as rewarding game progress; games often reward players based on the following categories: Diligence, Competence and Exploration. Players get achievements and experience points for putting in long hours into the game, achieving high levels and defeating bosses, as well as taking the effort to explore the peripheral parts of games, such as hidden levels and side-quests.
What this does to players: This allows players to feel a more complete sense of immersion in the game; they are encouraged to enjoy and appreciate the game in its entirety, and not just complete the main quests as fast as possible. This also makes players feel recognized and appreciated for their efforts in playing the game, and not just how good they’ve gotten at it.
How this translates to employee engagement: Employees are usually appraised based on their performance, and more human aspects of being a team member are usually shunned to the side. Providing recognition and appraisals for employees on metrices like “improving team morale”, “ability to take criticism and provide feedback”, and “willingness to self-improve” will not only strengthen and recognize employees who often go unnoticed for such important aspects of working life, but also help to mitigate workplace toxicity by ensuring that all team members look beyond just achieving their numbers at all cost.
The working world is about to enter a new age, one that requires the whole team on board to lift organizations to the next level. The world of games has far surpassed the engagement level that the working world has dared to attempt, and it’s time we learn from it, to game the system in our own way.
