What happens when groups of employees play video games? High-performance patterns emerge that have meaningful application in the real world, too. Much of it evolves around rapid, effective communications, but that alone is insufficient. This study reveals critical components of high-performing online gaming teams that, if applied to the workplace, can have the same high-performance impact.
“We were originally looking at ways to improve change management methodologies for the digital era,” said Craig Moss, Executive Vice President of Ethisphere and Director for the Digital Supply Chain Institute.
Moss said the idea came about after talking to younger colleagues who were gamers. After publishing an article on the topic in March 2021, they developed interactive workshops to share the effects with companies.
“The engagement workshops used excerpts from high-performance video games and facilitated discussions that connected classes from the gaming world to solve demanding quick-replacement control situations in companies,” Moss explained.
“We have also developed an immersion workshop where participating players revel in the excitement of the game with their colleagues. “
While debriefing the participants, whose ages ranged from 20s to 60s, Moss began to observe the four distinct characteristics of high-performing teams and recognized the business application.
Since then, the Digital Supply Chain Institute and Moss have hosted executive engagement sessions in other countries involving other people from many corporations and company-specific sessions. The immersion workshop was more complicated to organize, given COVID-related travel restrictions and organizational cybersecurity issues.
In online multiplayer games, other people get together without knowing each other. They get together on discussion boards and say, “Okay, let’s team up and play this game!” In high-performing teams, it takes little time to determine respective roles and perform well.
But to be successful, 4 distinctive elements are present.
Gamers are constantly communicating about what needs to be done. They are also very conscious of critical communication versus chat. For example, while they play, they still cover others. They use direct language like, “Watch for the enemy over there,” or, “You need more building materials ASAP.”
Not only will it have to be timely, but it will also have to be appropriate. If a worker sends 3 questions to their colleague and temporarily receives the answer to a single question, it’s not efficient, it can be fast.
Compared to the business aspect, corporations have useless communications, such as multiple channels where other people don’t consistently use one of them for the right purposes. For example, one colleague would possibly use email, while another prefers Slack and a third likes it. According to Moss, this does not advertise effective and timely communications.
Prompt and effective communication affects the ability to temporarily develop acceptance as true. If a worker sends a communication and hasn’t gotten a reaction in a day or two, they’re less confident than when they send a communication and get a quick reaction. In this way, communication and the construction of accepting as true with are temporally linked: lack of communication undermines acceptance as true with.
Trust-building is also about how time-bound goals are achieved.
“One thing that’s clear about the game is the limited-time objectives. We’ll temporarily discover that you may be a better card reader than I am, but I’m a better builder than you. Our other teammate could be a better shooter. or a better hunter than any of us,” Moss said. “It’s through communication that those decisions are made, building the rules to move forward. This is helping to develop acceptance as certain temporarily. “
On the corporate side, projects have confusing goals, according to Moss. A lack of obviously articulated, time-bound goals and useless communication are a recipe for disaster.
The games provide players with an enormous amount of knowledge: a map of the game world, the position of enemies, the amount and type of building materials, ammunition or food available, the point of aptitude and strength or changing weather conditions. Players want to know when to look at each type of knowledge and accept it as true.
This trust is not true in business.
Companies also generate a lot of knowledge in other formats, applications, and systems. What do workers do when they want knowledge to complete a project?They move on to a fountain.
Dashboards may look pretty, but how do you retrieve all that information?This consultation can inspire employees. . . [ ] to stick with what they know and what they trust.
“I hear from other people all the time that they need to delete parts of spreadsheets,” Moss said. “But if you’re an Excel expert, you can trust them more than the formula they just spent $10 million to install. “
For employees, the temptation is to extract knowledge from complicated dashboards and pass it on to those who consider them true Excel experts. They don’t accept what happens in the system, but they do accept it with the expert.
“When I talk to people, they’ll see numbers showing up on the dashboard, but they have no idea how those numbers were determined, what algorithms were used or where the data was sourced. People aren’t comfortable making decisions based on numbers that they don’t know the origin of,” Moss said.
Moss likens it to desperately craving a glass of water. Going to the store and buying a bottle of water is one thing; Finding a random water bottle on the sidewalk is another thing. Most people are comfortable with bottled water when they believe it’s true to the source, but most people would reject curbside water because they don’t know the source.
Employees need to believe the data is credible, from its source all the way through the pipeline.
In video games, there is less hierarchy. Instead, effectiveness depends on dynamic leadership.
As Moss explains, “At this point, we accept it as true among ourselves. We know who’s smart at what. Leadership is based on the scenario we are facing. If we come across a scenario where we want a card reader, then you are the leader. I’m the leader if we want to build a design or a staircase.
Leadership becomes dynamic and not static. And that’s the culmination of high-performing teams.
In the corporate workplace, leadership is not only fixed, but also hierarchical. The leader remains the same, even if others are experts in the team’s desires.
The game is popular across all ages and women make up the percentage of users, as shown in this graph from Statistica 2023. With many other people drawn to gaming, the benefits of teaming up are increasing.
“If we look at this across the age range, we’ve found that online gaming can be a way to boost confidence,” Moss said. “When leaders and groups go through this procedure together, they temporarily build acceptance as true and we begin to perceive the price of the game. ” Dynamic leadership. Different people have other skills and each person, each skill, is a valuable asset in getting the pass. “
In the working world, the idea of dynamic leadership is a bit more challenging. “Yes, that’s what we’re up against,” Moss said.
These play sessions also have positive implications for cross-cultural and remote groups where other people have never met face-to-face.
The biggest surprise in this work, according to Moss, is that participants never thought about the connection between high-performing online gaming and company teams. Both gamers and non-gamers had never drawn the connection between gaming success and the working world.
“The convergence of several points demands that leaders adopt a new mindset and technique for building high-performing teams: new technologies and knowledge sources, remote and hybrid workplaces, intergenerational dynamics with new generations entering and younger leaders handling older experts,” Moss explained. New collaborations are needed that combine internal departments and others from external corporations to meet visitor expectations, regulations, and geopolitical realities. “
All four classes of multiplayer games have direct and consequential application for creating high-performing intergenerational groups to achieve specific business objectives, but require leaders to be more flexible in their technique for representing performance.