If you still have your inner child, rejoice: games are coming back in force in companies. Recruitment, training, customer service, innovation – no sector seems to be spared. Between good old traditional games, serious games and the gamification of professional processes, there is something for everyone… especially the employer.
From card games to serious games
To tackle a sensitive issue, to diffuse a situation that could fester or to improve the working environment, your manager might well surprise you by pulling out a pack of cards. A short game of “delegation poker” to clarify decision-making in the company? A “speed boat” to identify bottlenecks related to a project? A “fish philosophy” to bring positive thoughts to the floor? Or a “hackathon” to create an emulation, and not a competition, within a team? If your superior was born with an iPhone in his hands, he will be more inclined for serious games. Officially developed to create participation and efficiency within the team, they enable a very interesting return on investment to the employer who sees his employees take themselves to the game of the scale of values (ranking, badge, points, rewards…), regardless of the type of serious game developed: edutainment, InfoHealth (e.g., training of nurses), play-based awareness (e.g., promoting collaboration rather than competition), simulation, role playing (e.g., customer-seller), research games or training games (e.g., manipulation of a machine).
When the company games itself
Before delving into the subject, it is good to remember that serious games and gamification are not synonymous terms. Gamification is the contributions of certain elements of video games in an environment other than games, such as the world of work and its different departments (recruitment, training, human resources…). Gamification therefore goes through a stage which consists of deconstructing a video game, analyzing it, finding its added value (competition? interaction between the characters? strategies?…) and transposing it. Estimated at five billion dollars in 2018, according to Markets and Markets, the market for gamification generally targets sales management (by leveraging social media, more on the collective and relational than on individual performance) and the areas of innovation and creativity where from now competition between teams leaves room for emulation. Small changes in the organization’s methods? The employer can use gamification to rally colleagues to these new practices, before they gang up and rebel… Although gaming processes does not seem difficult (the work tool is generally digital), it is good to be sensible to avoid creating an unhealthy climate or stigmatizing certain colleagues… like the cashier who, judged a little slow, had a red light above her cash register, unlike the green lights for the others. No comment.
So that the employer does not find himself with the tables turned, he will have to trust professionals who know how to support him in the different steps of gamification of his work processes (adapted graphics and scenarios, successful integration into existing processes, clearly defined objectives, accepted methods of evaluation) to avoid the search for emulation becoming stigmatization.