How Playing Games at Work Can Help Boost Your Productivity

8 thoughts on “How Playing Games at Work Can Help Boost Your Productivity”

  1. PREACH IT.

    Rules are merely distractions limiting productivity. Why hire the best and the brightest, then treat them like irresponsible idiots? Those who come into contact with a rule will almost always spend some time thinking about how it shouldn’t apply to them, how they find it insulting to think it does, and how to work around it. So goes the endless productivity sink called “management.”

    Where time is money, “it all pays the same,” but where results are money, and people feel trusted, secure, and valued, rules become moot.

    1. Hi Brian! Whoahhh! Wonderful set of comments, my friend! I surely love he quote of how you started a great argument: “Rules are merely distractions limiting productivity”. This is just *so* spot on and reminds me of another great quote with regards to embrace the Social Enterprise and how some organisations may not be ready just yet, because they just don’t trust their employees to do the right thing… Well, “if you treat people like sheep, they would eventually behave like sheep”.

      I am surely looking forward to that transition from measuring knowledge workers’ performance by their sheer presence and hours “worked” to that one of measuring the results delivered, regardless of the time it took to complete. I do believe that’s what matters at the end of the day and what I think most folks believe they were hired for in their respective companies in the first place!

      Thanks for adding further up! Greatly appreciated 🙂

  2. I couldn’t have said it better myself! Businesses hire creative thinkers and spend all their time devising ways to stifle & control them. If somebody isn’t producing, by all means, look into the situation. But if somebody is kicking ass at work, stand back and let them kick ass their own way!

    1. Hi Jeff! Great comments! Thanks much for sharing those along as well! I really liked your use of the words “Creative thinkers”, more than anything else because in an era where we are starting to depend on the knowledge we create, share and collaborate on (The so-called Knowledge Economy), I am still finding it amazing that businesses would want to put constraints on that creativity process, just because they want to control their knowledge workforce. Indeed, it just doesn’t work like that. The more hurdles you put together out there, the more time knowledge workers would be spending in figuring out how to overcome those hurdles. Be done with them and allow people to do what you hired them for in the first place! 🙂

  3. Agreed on the all points above.

    I’ve heard there are some forward-thinking organizations out there which (dare I say it) trust (gasp!) their staff to deliver – to GTD. For me, that’s the dream. Tell me what you need from me, when you need it, and what constraints to keep in mind (making sure to explain WHY these constraints are legitimate), then get out of my way so I can GTD.

    That’s the difference between work and what you do for a living.

    1. Great points again, Brian! I think you pretty much described, and rather nicely, what the main challenge would be for not only organisations out there, but also knowledge workers. Let go of that command and control, of clinging to power to no end, to start trusting your workforce and in return knowledge workers delivering on that creative work we all know we have and can shine at, as that’s what we were hired for in the first place. I think we are going to continue witnessing how plenty of this new fresh thinking is going to permeate throughout organisations as I doubt we would be having much of a choice shortly, as we are transitioning into that knowledge economy I mentioned above.

      Time will tell, but it does look like we are heading in the right direction! Finally!!

      1. Well, Luis. We’ll either see more large organizations move in this direction, or we’ll see more of the best and brightest strike out on their own.

        The ironic thing about this is, it’s not hard. Blows my mind how management can lock things down and distrust everyone, without taking the time to qualify the risks they’re trying to mitigate by doing so. Take social media, for example, what are the risks? How could they be categorized? Why are they so damning to the organization?

        With this information in mind, the risks can be categorized and information/training can be provided to guide employees in how to participate in social media – on the clock – in ways which actually benefit the company, as opposed to holding everyone back out of irrational fear.

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