Video Gaming Can Help Improve Employee Efficiency at Office

Gaming is almost always considered as a big taboo in an office environment. It is hated and detested to the extent that extreme measures are taken against an employee who is found gaming during the office time. It is considered a waste of time and unethical use of company’s resources.

However, quite on the contrary, some companies are actually encouraging gaming (to a certain limit). Most of the tech companies in the San Francisco Bay Area and the Silicon Valley are promoting gaming as a way to destress their employees.

Aside from the fact that video games have actually been used as a simulator for military, and pilot training, it has several benefits for corporate offices. Let us look at some ways gaming can help the employees at office.

Destress

This is an obvious benefit. Corporate work can become overwhelming for most employees especially if they are overloaded with big projects. Gaming could be used as an escape from the stresses of the work.

A stressful employee is an inefficient employee. Therefore, keeping the psychological health of your employees is an important consideration. Video gaming is one way of solving this issue.

Team Building

Office work has the tendency to turn the employees into 9am-5pm zombies (longer in most cases). You wake up you work, you work, you eat and then you sleep. A work like this can have a serious impact on one’s social life. Even at work itself, employees seldom interact. Most are so caught with their work that it is hard to exchange pleasantries with their colleagues.

With a few minutes of gaming, not only can it encourage the employees to socialize, it can create strong bonds between them. The gains for this are huge. This can lead to better understanding between employees, which in turn can lead to a higher quality of work.

Problem Solving

Employees are often asked to put on their thinking hats when working on complex projects. However, an already stressed employee can come up with very few creative ideas to solve a problem.

Video gaming offers a natural stimulation of the brain. In general terms, this is called taking your mind off of things. Gaming is like an exercise for the brain where you find creative ways to solve a particular problem. This in turn can sharpen the brains to help them out with physical and real-life issues.

Motivation

Employees tend to lose the motivation in the work if they have to do the same mundane tasks over and over. Gaming can not only keep the morale high, it is something that the employees can even look forward to every day.

A highly motivated team is an asset to the company. You need employees who are ready to take an initiative. This can only be achieved if the moral among the team is high.

How to implement a video gaming environment?

There are plenty of ways where you can implement these changes in a controlled manner so that the employees don’t over exploit their gaming benefits.

1. Game Room: You can have a game room with all the typical features like a nice corner gaming desk, a cool looking and relaxing seating arrangement, a gaming console with a nice TV etc. This way when someone has to game, they would only be allowed to do so in the gaming room and not on their desks. This room could be monitored by the manager.
2. Gaming Tournaments: You could setup up a monthly tournaments where the top employee gets to have his/her name on the hall of fame. Arcade and sports games are the best in this case as they only take 10 – 15 minutes per session. You could have one or two of these sessions at max per day.