Bringing Games into the Workplace
“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”
We’ve all heard this well-worn proverb as we were growing up, but when you stop and think about it, you realize it does not exclusively apply to little kids. Even as grown-ups in the professional world, the saying holds water. We are becoming busier by the day, juggling multiple responsibilities both inside and outside the ever-competitive workplace that consumes so much of our time.
With such increasing pressures at work, it’s easy to forget that we need to balance play with work to help maintain our sanity levels and stay energized during any given work day. It is common to hear stories of extreme work pressures resulting in health or other personal issues, including some cases of severe depression that affect both an individual and the organization at large.
While we understand both sides of the issue—the need to balance work and play, as well the consequences of not doing so—the struggle we often face is implementing it. How do we carve out time to accommodate both work and play? There are several articles with tips for achieving this. However, a newer emerging trend is the art of merging work and play. Can I bring in play to my work to help me better perform what I do?
In our internal technical conference at QA InfoTech recently, one of our keynote speakers was Ross Smith, the director of test at Microsoft. He talked about “waking up the gamer in you to excel in software testing.” A few numbers he presented from 2012 were mind-boggling: 91 percent of kids between ages two and seventeen are gamers, while 69 percent between the ages of two and five can use a mouse but only 11 percent can tie their own shoelaces.
He spoke about the many different traits in a gamer that employers really need, such as fairness, transparency, communication, strategy making, engagement, and productivity. The 6-11 Robert Dillon framework was particularly interesting, describing how a gamer showcases emotions that can be brought into software testing given the increasing importance of the emotional quotient to truly represent end-users.
That left me thinking: On one end, we are grappling to create the right work-life balance for ourselves. On the other, we are working hard to stay competitive at our workplace within a dynamic landscape. We can solve these two problems with a single solution, which is to bring games into our workplace. This will help us get better at what we do through a practicing mindset, while also promoting the work-play balance within the organization itself. This may not be an overnight change to implement, but if we can start with something small by building possible productivity games at the workplace, I am confident we can start seeing positive changes right away.
