Eight Fun Games to Motivate Employees in the Workplace

What strategies do you use to retain staff in your workplace? Have you ever tried incorporating fun games to motivate employees?

Some companies combine fun games with human psychology to get the best from their human workforce. These two strategies go a long way in releasing stress build up that could otherwise lead to staff burnout.

But do you know any fun games to motivate employees at your workplace? Below is a list of the most effective and popular fun games you can start with.

Flash Mob Surprise

Are your colleagues or superiors celebrating an anniversary soon? Or is your department the winner of the Achiever’s Award for the month? Celebrate these milestones with a flash mob surprise.

A flash mob surprise happens when large groups of persons work together to pleasantly surprise a targeted audience. If you’re too busy to coordinate and plan the surprise, you can hire professional flash mobs.

Alternatively, if your departments are spread out in different areas, you may start your next group meeting with a flash mob surprise with colleagues from the other departments.

As the name suggests, flash mob surprises work best when there is an element of surprise. Do a bit of research to know what your target audience’s interests are.

Sing their favorite songs. Throw in a birthday surprise. Better still, bring in the much-awaited equipment that the department wants.

Role Exchange

What do your colleagues’ or employees’ day to day tasks entail? How well do they understand each other? Organize a day within the week when you play role exchange with employees in the same department or branch.

In this game, employees appreciate the effort their colleagues have to put in just to get the job done each day. It also helps your staff understand how the whole organization functions.

Besides, role exchange is an excellent opportunity to come up with innovative ideas to resolve the everyday challenges in your organization.

Game-Based Learning

Do you offer regular training to your employees? You can use fun games to motivate employees into undertaking complex or monotonous training sessions. Such fun games can be in the form of rewards and recognition stages in an eLearning course.

Use puzzles which feature exciting scores, badges, trophies, and leader boards that build on past performances. Use game-based learning to familiarize your sales team on the features of your latest products.

Let them gain social recognition by mastering the various features of the new products and services.

Game-based learning initiatives promote friendly competitions among trainees. They are an excellent way of getting employees' full attention in training sessions that require regular feedback about their performance.

Computer Games

Most computers come with preloaded games.

Whereas most employers prefer to uninstall such games as a way of discouraging procrastination at the workplace, these fun games provide a quick break to employees who undertake monotonous tasks.

As an employer, you can allocate a part of your recreational area for computer games. Effectively, employees only undertake computer games during their breaks. Also, by having the games away from the desk, you are able to monitor how much time employees spend on these games.

Picture Stories

A picture is worth a thousand words. Therefore, in this era of digital literacy where almost everyone has access to a smartphone with a pre-installed camera, creating picture stories is one of the best fun games to motivate employees.

Ask your employees to take as many pictures as possible during a business lunch or group outing. Let them display their photos on the office noticeboard. In addition, reward the employee with the best photo that best describes what is happening, in line with the company’s objectives.

Finally, add these photos to your monthly newsletter and distribute them to the rest of the company’s branches.

Picture stories are excellent fun games to motivate employees who are experiencing a challenging phase in their work stations. These include persons working at the hospital emergency unit, firefighters, rescue teams, or persons dealing with trauma victims.

The Communication Game

Companies with complex hierarchies often encounter a lot of miscommunication problems. Subsequently, to emphasize the importance of attention to detail in passing along information, carry out this simple communication game at least once or twice a week.

Let the leader of the team explain a set of instructions to one of the employees using facial and body expressions only. Ask the employee to pass these set of instructions to his/her colleague.

In turn, this information passes on to other employees in this same manner. Do this for about ten minutes, until at least 20 employees take part in the exercise.

Once the last employee receives the set of instructions, gather all the employees at one place. Ask the last employee to narrate the set of instructions to his/her colleagues.

This exercise is powerful at showing how easily information distortion happens in organizations. Therefore, it motivates the staff to be more careful when handling crucial information and minimize the number of persons it is passed through.

The Temperature Zone Game

Are you working in a fast paced work station such as a call center or an emergency hospital wing with very few breaks?

Ask employees to make use of multi-colored flags to express exhaustion, a need for help, or when they want to share a key discovery with their colleagues. Temperature zone games provide an opportunity for bonding and teamwork.

Create Tasks as Games

When tackling a complex task, make the work easier on your employees by designing the milestones in the form of exciting game challenges. Such challenges can be in the form of quick virtual reality games that focus on developing strategy skills among your employees.

Alternatively, integrate fun games in mobile apps. Let the user unlock more benefits of the mobile app by accomplishing the various milestones in the fun games.

Conclusion

Employers who use fun games to motivate employees create an engaging culture in the workplace. In turn, the motivation boost results in increased productivity, job satisfaction, and low stress levels.

You may also want to try some basic techniques to make meetings a bit more fun and interesting.

Customize the fun games above to suit your employees. Incorporate engagement games and create a fun workplace that your employees will look forward to every day.