We know that COVID-19 is hitting hard for all of us. Businesses, jobs, and even self-employed are suffering due to the outbreak. Most countries enforced lockdown, and those who opened workplaces, find it a totally different place after COVID-19. Changed work style without ability to socializing with colleagues, is something we miss most often. Hence, we all feel disconnected with office and our colleagues during pandemic.
As everyone embrace the change with maintaining work-life balance, organizations are finding opportunities to keep their employees engaged and motivated. Every strategy that worked so well in past, is not viable now. Organizations relied on events, games, trainings, parties and office socializing, which aren’t possible now. That leaves organization heads and HR department with a new quest to solve.
So, here comes another question; can games be a solution to bring back the office fun? Can organization keep employees connected in a fun way? The answer is YES, and the article highlights the usage of games to enhance employee engagement.
Social distancing
Due to social distancing, many companies had to shift their work dynamics to the work from home policy. Everyone understands the seriousness of the situation but coping with it while working from home is not easy. While you were working in the office, you had break times to talk to each other, laugh together, eat together, work together, and even play together.
It is the time when managers need to step up and maintain employee engagement. So, to make this time interesting despite the disallowance of social gatherings, we can switch corporation entertainment towards online games.
Engaging employees during a pandemic
People are working from home and it can be a major distraction for many, and they may lose focus. And losing focus can directly affect their productivity at work. Managers have to come up with innovative idea to solve the problem.
One idea is to stay connected. But staying connected is not just being in touch. You need a subject to talk about or at least learn something together to build the connection.
So, the finest solution is to play games. Many organizations used to play outdoor games and attend company events for connection building and team learning. Well, we can bring that learning to computers too.
Can games fill the void
Being a manager and in charge of your employees, it is your responsibility to help your employees by introducing entertaining games that can also enhance their learning. We all need distractions while working or at least we look to relax for a while and free our mind from usual routine work.
A short answer is “Yes”. And if you dig down to the answer:
- Implementing virtual team building activities can keep the mind fresh and active will result in enhance employee engagement.
- You can assign different game tasks to different teams comprising of employees of different departments, to enhance collaboration
- To make them participate in the game, you can set a few exciting points and funny punishments on losing it.
- Incentivize the top players to motivate them for participation.
Recommended Games
Here is our list of game ideas that you can play within organizations to keep employees engaged:
Quizzes
Quiz can be an amazing way to connect people and make them learn new things. You can make it relevant to the company or just for the management skills, leadership skills. There are online quizzes available for the corporation to dig into their emotional health and in their interests and hobbies.
Create one to help them take their mind away from any negativity and indulge them in fun activities.
Problem solving
Problem-solving is not only a game but a learning process. You can ask your employees to solve the code, a math problem, puzzle, etc. Or you can also create your problem-solving games and set time frames for it to make it interesting and exciting.
Storytelling sessions
Stories are part of life that keeps us alive. It helps people share their experiences of life with confidence and listeners can connect deeper with a concerned person. So, you can have storytelling sessions too. Let your employees share any of their interesting, horrible, adventurous, or any experience that makes them feel more human. It is the best way to collaborate and learn about the person.
Role playing
Maybe you are already familiar with the role play idea. Well, this can be an exciting idea. We have many corporate movies some interesting drama series too. You can choose a character from them and ask your employees to play it for a day or an hour or two. This can keep the things interesting between them during meeting sessions too. Yes, we all know that corporate meetings are usually boring, and half of the members lose interest after five minutes. So, let us keep them engaging by using different games or fun activities.
Wrapping up
Corporations shifting on work from the home policy can still enjoy engaging sessions and keep their team intact. The game ideas depend on the size of the teams you have in your organization. Smaller teams are lucky in this matter as they can collaborate with more convenience and can play interesting games to cope with the tough situation.
The surprising element is that if you have an online gaming gang among your team members, you can play multiplayer games. Gather them for the games like call of duty, combat reloaded, and a lot more. So, if your gems are ready to play and cope with the chaos, just be the part of it and plan the sessions together to stay positive during this stressful situation.
GenITeam is a leading game development firm that help companies find creative ways to engage employees. Reach out to us to know about our services and offerings.
