Why Play Works: An Explanation in One Venn Diagram

Employee engagement is a huge problem that has received a lot of attention in recent years. In their most recent report on the State of the Global Workplace, Gallup found that only 21% of employees are fully engaged at work.

That means nearly 80% of employees are NOT fully engaged! Not only that, the year over year drop in engagement was most pronounced for managers, who set the tone for culture and morale across teams. Yikes!

The consequences of continued low engagement are monumental, and it’s not a simple problem to fix.

There are two ways to look at the employee engagement problem:

1. It’s an individual problem.The more intuitive perspective is to think about the root of the problem as something wrong with individual employees. With this lens, the solution is firmly placed on the individual: what can a person do differently that will make them more motivated and connect at work?

   
   

2. It’s a culture problem. The other side recognizes that there are systemic causes to disengagement, especially when multiple people within a team are showing red flags. This perspective recognizes that there are factors within the work environment and culture that are causing employees to tune out.

Most solutions only focus on one side, which is why they don’t succeed in the long run. In this article, we’ll explain why, and what you can do to make sure your efforts succeed!

The Three Categories of Engagement Efforts

Efforts to improve employee engagement fall into three categories: Talent and Organizational Development, Fun Team Experiences, Employee Wellness.

Below are the benefits and limitations of each...

Talent and Organizational Development

This category includes training, coaching, and consulting to enhance skills and resolve specific pain points at work. There is so much research on what workplace factors make for engaged employees and what skills they need to perform their best. Simple logic that assumes sharing this knowledge about how to grow and improve.

One major limitation of traditional talent and organizational development efforts is that unfortunately, humans don’t change their behavior based on knowledge and facts. These initiatives often ignore the social and emotional aspect of the employee experience, so they don’t try to get upfront buy-in regarding how this learning and development will benefit the employees, and are often met with resistance.

These also generally tend to target learning and change at the individual, rather than team level, and are often boring and dry in their delivery.

Fun Team Experiences

Many companies and leaders plan social experiences for teams as a way to demonstrate good culture, like happy hours, offsites, and team activities. The goal of these events is for colleagues to have fun together so that they grow to know, like, and trust each other more. Sounds great, right?

The problem is that people don’t go to work to have fun. Often these events feel forced and awkward, especially in an environment where there is a lot of stress, conflict, and lack of trust and accountability. When the experience of work is generally negative, a fun social event can feel anything but. In these situations, they seem more like an attempt to put a band-aid on a gaping culture wound and only lead to more cynicism, resentment, and mistrust.

Unless there is a clear connection between the activity and how it will benefit employees, it’s likely to either fall completely flat or only provide a quick boost that dissipates as soon as everyone returns to the office.

Employee Wellness

Since COVID, many companies have recognized that employee mental and emotional health are very important for their performance, and have added benefits to support well-being and work/life balance. These might include enhanced mental health benefits, access to free or subsidized therapy, gym memberships, meditation workshops, etc. All of which are nice and well-meaning.

The problem with most wellness efforts is that by and large they put the onus for change on the employees, rather than the work environment, which is often a major source of mental and physical health problems. This adds even more to the already stretched-too-thin employees plate, and does nothing to make work better.

The Solution? Play!

Play-based learning and development sits at the intersections of all three of these avenues for improving employee engagement, magnifying the benefits and mitigating the limitations. Here’s why:

• There are mountains of evidence that experiential learning is the most effective approach to training, development, and change in adults, largely because they activate the social and emotional parts of the brain.

  
  

• The structured play is a team experience, so the learning and change impact both the individual and collective. The shared experience enhances stickiness and accountability of the learning and makes change more sustainable.

  
  

• Because it’s play-based, the experiences end up being fun, although fun is not the primary goal. It allows employees to enjoy the process of learning more about how their colleagues feel, think, and act in different situations.

  
  

• As teams build confidence in how they work together, they are better able to identify opportunities to improve problems and stressors in the workplace. Employees and leaders alike feel more accountable to making sure that their contributions to the team are positive, and to think about their impact on those around them.

  
  

• Addressing these interpersonal and environmental problems in the workplace removes sources of stress and conflict, making work a more positive experience overall and less of a source of mental and physical health issues.

Intentional, facilitated play allows teams to incorporate all three channels at once to improve engagement and morale. So why not give it a try?

If you are interested in learning more about how Barometer XP can help you, click here to schedule a conversation!