The times are changing swiftly, and so is the corporate world. Offices have gone virtual, and workplaces now fit in the screens of laptops and tablets.
As per an article by Forbes, it is forecasted that 70% of employees will work remotely by 2025.
This means that you will have to overhaul your strategies to foster high employee engagement. While engaging employees in a physical workplace seems convenient, doing so in a remote workforce seems challenging.
However, you can make this daunting task seem simple by gamifying it. Oh, it’s no joke: you can create high employee engagement when your team is working remotely with some awesome online corporate games!
You can choose from a broad spectrum of fascinating online corporate games, and these kinds of games can help dispersed teams find the spark of collaboration yet again.
To elaborate further, this post underlines the amazing benefits of online corporate games. You will be convinced that your employee engagement strategies for sure need a gaming touch on the other side of this post. Let’s get going without further ado!
Working in front of the screen for long hours can make workers feel dull and frustrated. Working relentlessly can cause employee burnout. Employees need their due share of time and to switch off and rejuvenate as you do. In such a scenario, a touch of fun with online corporate games can be vital.
A report by the UN cites that around 40% of workers report high stress during remote working.
Online games can give your employees the perfect opportunity to relax. When working from the office, co-workers are pretty used to in-person interactions and together finding ways to bust stress. They have conversations in breaks and find reasons to laugh and let go of some of their work stress. Of course, these kinds of interactions don’t come so easy while working remotely.
Smartly planned online corporate games can help co-workers manage their stress. When stress levels come down, productivity will shoot up by default.
When you give your employees the right channels to manage stress, it promotes employee wellness. No employee can perform at a high caliber if she does not feel up to it. Hence, besides providing some fun at work, online corporate games can also promote mental wellness in your team members. Eventually, all these minor positive elements will culminate to create high engagement.
An article in LinkedIn Learning mentioned that creativity is the most imperative skill in the world. To add, according to IBM, 74 percent of CEOs believe that creativity is essential for future success. However, it is essential to note that creativity and engagement go hand in hand. To explain, if an employee is creative and has outside-the-box ideas to offer, he will engage playfully. On the other hand, an employee who feels he has nothing new to offer will disengage. So, keeping creativity flowing is the key. Creativity is best promoted when you challenge people to be extraordinary. What can be a better alternative than online corporate games to challenge remote workers?
According to IBM, 74 percent of CEOs believe that creativity is essential for future success.
Corporate games like Pictionary, personality quizzes, and Charades can work wonders to spark creativity. Moreover, there is a never-ending list of games that can incite critical thinking skills in workers.
The more opportunities employees have to be creative, the higher their engagement and productivity will be. Plus, the idea of winning games played against their colleagues will encourage some healthy sportsmanship and work as a catalyst for motivation.
Everyone likes to win even if there are no medals or rewards for the winners 🏆 It is interesting to note that creativity is a feeling. Once employees feel it brimming inside them, they will carry the same excitement into their work commitments. Don’t forget that even your creativity will get polished in the process — you have to be the perfect gaming host, after all!
Teamwork and collaboration are prominent features of corporate working. Whether employees like it or not, in many instances they have to work in teams to achieve common goals. For these teams to be effective, colleagues must share cordial and coordinated relationships 🤝
The problem is that for more than a year now, employees have been working from home. Ever since the outbreak of COVID-19, they did not get many opportunities to foster healthy relationships with their co-workers besides online chats and video calls. It is possible that they may not have spoken to most of their colleagues for a long time, unless they were working directly on the same project.
It is a well-known fact that employee relationships are crucial for employee engagement.
This is where online corporate games can prove to be priceless. There is a wide range of corporate visual games that require team participation. So, these can work brilliantly to make remote employees more familiar with each other.
This enhanced familiarity will further translate into deeper connections and effective team building. In this way, games can have a significant impact on collaboration between employees.
There will always be a particular set of employees who stay away from any sort of participation. They choose to keep to themselves and limit themselves to their job roles. Not that there is anything particularly wrong with that, but a happy workplace is one where everyone participates in one way or another.
Are these employees non-participative because they lack self-confidence, or maybe overloaded with work? Ideally, every employee should take out some time to chill and have fun with colleagues in their free time. Thus, for employees who are disinterested in social participation more often than not, corporate games could be really interesting.
Online games will give reluctant employees the chance to participate and involve themselves in workforce discussions. If it turns out to be a positive experience, they would want to replicate the same in their work as well. Playing games also builds confidence, so they will become more likely to speak up in the workplace.
Corporate games can help give everyone a presence and a voice. Even those who hardly speak at work in the office, will get the chance to be at comfort and be more expressive while working online from home. As an employer, you don’t want the output of a worker to be limited to productivity. You also want your employees to participate in decision-making and give them leadership opportunities. Again, organizing online corporate games is the perfect way to accomplish this.
High employee engagement is driven by leaders who do not give up before trying the last trick. In your team, you do not want people who are easy quitters. The grim reality of the corporate world is that quitters can neither help their own cause nor be of any good to others.
You want people who have autonomy, inspire others to keep going and take accountability for whatever the outcome may be. But these attributes are difficult to judge during interviews. Of course, every recruit will describe herself as ‘able to lead’ in a job interview!
Online corporate games will give you an insight into the mindsets of your talent pool.
Online corporate games can give you some good insights into the skills and attitudes of your employees. You will be able to more easily identify leaders as well as those who tend to respond to losses with futile excuses.
Your future policies, promotion strategies, and work delegation practices — essential decisions to making the success of your organization — will benefit from better equipped employees. You will be able to envisage the future torch-bearers of your organization. What is more significant is that you’ll be able to identify productive workers and people who are honest about their failures.
To summarize, employee engagement is the buzzword in corporate scenarios in this era. Employees, as well as employers, have realized that job satisfaction has now become an obsolete idea. The commitment of employees is now viewed from larger purviews. What has made employee engagement a little complex is the major transformation in working cultures as more people are working from home.
Engaging remote employees requires a special set of strategies to get the job done. That’s why online team-building activities and corporate games are becoming increasingly popular. Online games can benefit the productivity of a workforce in many ways, as we’ve unpacked in this article. To promote wellness in employees and enhance collaboration among team members, virtual corporate games seem like a great tool to do this. Remember, the best results will require the most thoughtful and intriguing games!
An ardent writer, Jessica Robinson works for The Speaking Polymath. She uses this platform to weave her magical words into powerful strands of content and share with her readers. It is with her power of influential writing that she has been captivating the hearts of multifarious readers for over a decade. Reach her on her blog or on LinkedIN.
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