Game on: how playing makes work fun

We advise financial services firms on how to transform their businesses, and this inevitably involves helping clients restructure who does what and how.

In recent years, we’ve seen the emergence of radical, technology-driven workforce transformation tools that are helping human resources executives deliver significant business results.

These tools include mobile learning and gamification, which can help in the process of change management – guiding people through a journey towards a specific business outcome.

We manage change by leading people towards a vision, help them understand how they fit into the vision, and give them the information and tools (eg training) to get there. It’s also about embedding the change to make sure it sticks so it becomes business as usual.

Digital solutions such as mobile learning and gamification make change fun, which is essential if you want it to stick. The idea of fun is to understand what appeals to people and approach the change in a way that makes it easier for them to accept – this is about understanding their context, speaking their language, drawing upon creativity to guide people through the unfamiliar. So, for example, enabling someone to use their smartphone to take a class on the MTR while commuting to work can be more fun than logging online in the evenings at home or trying to cram in a training session during work hours when people are caught in the swirl of their day job.

If you look up from your mobile phone while on the MTR at what others are doing you’ll likely see them watching YouTube, visiting Facebook or playing games like Candy Crush. What if you could encourage your staff to watch work videos, use corporate social media sites or play a work game instead?