The Science of Play at Work: Games for Greater Performance

Alexandra Suchman joined Engage by Cell with insights into the science behind using play to enhance work performance and foster team collaboration. Find the transcript and time stamps below.

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[00:00:00] Dave Asheim: Let's get started. I'll kick it off and then I'm going to turn it over to Alex. My name is Dave Aschheim. I run a company called Engage By Cell. We've been around about 15 years providing mobile solutions. We met Alex at the SHRM conference where I think you were presenting on this topic. Weren't you Alex?

[00:00:24] Alexandra Suchman: I did a workshop on how to incorporate more games and play into the onboarding process.  

[00:00:30] Dave Asheim: On onboarding. Okay. That is Something that's really needed. Tell us just a little bit about a barometer XP.  

[00:00:39] Alexandra Suchman: Yeah, we are. Our mission is to foster healthy, inclusive and human centered workplaces where people feel like they're set up to succeed in their work.

And we use play as a tool for that for everything from. Fun team building to really deep organizational change and professional development and leadership development. It's a great tool for experiential learning, especially when you're dealing with any type of interpersonal and collaborative skills. So I'm going to share a bunch of examples today on on ways to think about using play.

[00:01:15] Dave Asheim: Excellent. How fun. Okay. This is going to be a fun webinar. Everybody. This company engaged by cell, everything we do has to do with text messaging and mobile websites. We have a couple thousand different clients using us for everything from onboarding, like you said, Alex to messaging to garden tours.

So it just, just a huge range. And so we are. Great. Excited about hearing how we can adopt some of your principles and practices in our clients. So these are the two services we've got text messaging services just for engagement and then portals of content, whether it's for training, onboarding.

Cultural visits, anything you can imagine and we're going to have everybody scan a QR code. So everybody take out your phone. This is a game like day. So let's do that and scan that code. It'll pop up a little pop up and then it'll open up text messaging and the word demo will show. So go ahead and hit send.

Laura, if you put your cell phone number in the chat for Anna. And a Busby, then she will add you to the list because you're on your phone. And then during the presentation, we'll send a few text messages out just for fun, just to give you a sense for how you can use the tools that we have to try to improve and, and help with the engagement.

All right, everybody, let's get this going. Alex, we're going to turn it over to you. I will hide my camera and take it away. And then you can also explain how you would like people to chat in the chat window.  

[00:03:08] Alexandra Suchman: Yes, absolutely. I hope this is really interactive. I have a couple of different activities that we're going to do, but really want to hear your questions, your comments, your ideas.

So please feel free to be active in the chat and I'll try to get to as many questions and comments as I can. And then we'll have time for more questions at the end, but don't hold up to the end. Feel free to put them in whenever. So the way that I think about team performance and people's performance at work is how do you remove obstacles to And it's about getting the most peak performance out of people.

What are some of the obstacles and how do you remove them? And just based on what people spend time complaining about or voicing as their biggest challenges, a lot of it has to do with other people. A lot of it are interpersonal dynamics at work and in thinking about, well, how do you improve interpersonal dynamics?

Why do they often cause so much tension and friction? Because we're all Interesting quirky emotional, sometimes rational, sometimes irrational beings. And we all have different backgrounds, different types of preferences, ways of communicating. And if you don't know that about people, if you're just interacting with people, the way that makes the most sense to you, it might not make the most sense to everybody else.

And so things that don't necessarily. And really mean there's a conflict, it's just two people talking past each other, not really understanding each other can show up as conflict and really derail performance. So, in thinking about what are some tools to, to be able to look at those different dynamics and explore those differences and explore opportunities we build a better understand each other and feel more connected in their work and more motivated, we realize play is a really great tool.

And so that's what today is going to be about is. I'm going to share a little bit about the science of using play for in the workplace for improving. improving performance, improving mental and emotional health at work, improving psychological safety and engagement, which are all really critical for, for company success.

Since the pandemic, one of the things that come out of it is there is more deliberate attention being paid to culture now. So it seems like a real opportunity to think about what are some Some areas within the whole range of the employee experience to, to make it easier for people to get to know each other to feel more included to to feel like.

They can rely on each other, they can communicate in the ways that make the most sense. And that's really what play. Is so useful in a big part of of play, not the main part, but a huge part is is joy. Just creating these moments of laughter and happiness at work. If work is all serious, you're going to drain people.

People are not going to feel as motivated. They're not going to feel excited. I'll feel alienated. So there's a real case to be made for investing in opportunities for joy. These are some stats from a Forbes article from a couple of years ago that estimate that 90, 000 hours in the average adult lifetime is spent at work, which is a third of our life and half of our waking hours, because another third of it, we're sleeping.

So, half of our waking hours are spent working. Some of the biggest indicators of employee success. Our relationships to people feel like they have connected to other people. They feel like they're. Their work is contributing to something meaningful that they feel like their, their role is important that they're connected to other people.

So, creating more opportunities for people to experience joy and connect with each other is going to have an enormous effect on just their morale. And by that way, their performance as well. And unhappy employees are more costly. They have higher health care costs. They're more likely to have on the job accidents.

They're going to be less engaged and less conscientious about the quality of their work. So it's going to be poorer performance. So creating happier, more joyous workplaces is a really sound investment that's going to pay off in many different ways. So today what I'm going to talk about are three different use cases.

For using play to enhance joy and connection at work. The 1st is enhancing employee engagement. The 2nd is boosting team productivity and the 3rd is to using play to catalyze culture change. This is, as I mentioned before, going to be really interactive. So we're actually going to kick it off with. I'm going to share a question that I'm going to share with you all.

I'm going to go to another tool called Slido. What is your gut reaction to the idea of play at work, playing games with your colleagues or with your fellow leadership team or other other colleagues of yours within the workplace setting? You want to scan this QR code. Or you can go to slido. com and type in this code.

I would love to to see your responses

and be able to access the poll.

Wow. I appreciate that. Most people said you like games. I'm very used to a lot of people who find it really cringy. They, there's always examples of play sessions that went poorly, whether it's the stereotypical ropes course or a trivia night at a happy hour or something. And a lot of the reason that play doesn't always land well with people is because it wasn't used well.

The, their activity wasn't. A good match for what that team needed the type of emotion that they wanted to create or the type of outcomes that they were looking to have. And it may be the instructions weren't clear. And that's going to make a negative experience for people because if people don't know what's expected of them, they don't know what success looks like.

They're going to be much less willing to be vulnerable and fully engaged. And sometimes it, it just wasn't led by somebody who is a skilled facilitator. It takes a certain amount of energy and attention to detail and creative ways of engaging different people. So a lot of the work that I do is how do you make play at work a more positive experience?

And we do that through both facilitating with teams, but also training other people on how to bring games in and how to lead games. The one story that I like to share. About a. And so one of the things that we did in our play session that did not go well is this is an accounting firm is not one of my clients is anecdotally from someone in my community, it was an accounting and finance firm who those are often very introverted people, they don't interact a lot, and the company really wanted people to feel more connected with each other to share information across teams and across departments, people were working very isolated, and so they decided for that they were going to go bowling.

Well bowling is not an interactive activity. Yes, you're sitting around with people, but only one person at a time gets up to bowl and if you're not necessarily inclined to talk to the people around you when you're sitting and waiting for your turn, you're not going to be talking to other people. So there really were not any opportunities for people to get to know each other or feel more comfortable with each other.

Take care. People didn't have fun. They don't feel like they got anything out of it. They felt like it was a day wasted especially for precious off site time. And so that just wasn't a good choice of activity for that particular group and the particular outcomes that they were hoping to get out of it.

Checking any questions or thoughts so far. Nothing. Perfect. So let me go back and

I was managing my screens. So why play? There's more and more research coming out that shows that play at work is beneficial beyond just the, the connection between joy and performance that I shared before. It's a way to invest in culture. It's a way to get people to feel more motivated about their work, because through the play experience, you can, you can have people focus on what would you do differently next time?

What are some ways you could communicate with each other? And and have had a better result within the game? Or, you know, What are some ways to leverage different people's talents or leverage different perspectives? Or how can you spend your time when you're working with other people so that you're getting the best out of people?

You know, some people are more motivated by. You know, having a tight deadline, some people are more motivated by some sort of competitive aspect. So you can figure out how do you set up your work in a way that that really meets everybody where they are and how they how they like to work and how they like to be motivated.

And so these studies suggested that that people who play regularly at work with their colleagues feel more motivated. They feel more connected, not just to their colleagues, but to the mission and purpose of their work and that's going to drive them to be more engaged and more productive. I want to make 1 very quick distinction before I go on is the word gamification is a really hot word right now.

And. Gamification is a little bit different than games and play. Gamification is adding game like elements to something that is not a game, and that's not an activity. So that's something like badges and leaderboards on different apps for different types of interaction, or adding game you know, maybe adding like a quiz component to something to make learning more engaging, have people spend more time on a, on a learning platform.

But what I'm talking about are real games and activities that people do together. Where they have to solve some sort of problem or come up with some kind of solution. They're trying to accomplish a goal together, whether it's competitive or collaborative. So I hope that that was helpful and when you hear the word gamification it's not necessarily bad, but it's more, it's more linked to the attention economy.

And how do you keep people's attention on a particular application? Are on a particular initiative, so please let me know if you have questions about that. I'm happy to share more about that distinction

when when play and work have a lot in common. As I mentioned before, any type of game, any type of activity, there's some type of outcome or objective you're trying to reach. And if you're doing it with other people, you need to, you know, they need to work through different communication styles and different thinking styles.

There's going to be different approaches to plan and strategy and process and how do you balance different needs? How do you balance different perspectives in order to, to reach that goal? And how do you balance? Sometimes there's tension between an individual goal and the collective goal or the individual values and the collective values.

So how do you balance those? How do you get people to buy in to something that might be a little bit different than what's most intuitive to them? And these are all dynamics that come up in the workplace. And so it's a great way to practice them and to come up with the language to talk about them and work through some of these differences within the lower stakes context of a game.

Any questions so far? A good question. Do games need to be tied to a work task? It depends. I, Usually the way that I am using games is to focus not so much on the substance of work, but on the interpersonal piece. How do you communicate with each other? How do you understand each other? How does a particular team like to get instructions or like to get feedback?

So it's it's more working on that culture component or developing you know, emotional intelligence and interpersonal skills, but you can absolutely use games as a way to tie to specific work tasks. So, I mean, for example, if you're trying to give you a better project management or time management, there are games that have that particular mechanic in it, and you can have people practice how they work through that more successfully.

So hopefully that was a helpful answer. I'm happy to talk more about that at the end. So now I'm going to share three different levels of depth, three different types of outcomes that you can get through play. And this is the most important and first decision to make when you're bringing games or play into any type of workplace situation is what do you want people to Get out of it.

Do you want just team bonding, spending time together, fostering new connections, learning stories about the people you work with, getting to see your colleagues as a 3D person and not just the role and the responsibilities that they have or that you interact with in your, Transactions with them, and that in and of itself is a really valuable outcome.

I like to think of it as building up your goodwill bank towards other people. The more positive experiences you have with someone else, the more likely you are to give them the benefit of the doubt when they do something that. That you don't like, or they ask you a question when you're really busy. If you don't have these relationships with people and you're having a really stressful day and somebody comes and asks you a question that seems like it's coming out of left field, it's really easy to say, this person doesn't care about my work.

They're just trying to, to screw me over. Or they don't know what's going on. If it's somebody that, you know, and trust and have had good experiences with, you can just be able to say, hey, I'm really busy. Is it okay? If I get back to you on this later, and you're going to give them the benefit of the doubt and be more positive in your interaction with them, which is going to preserve the relationship and.

Preserve the working dynamics going forward. So that's team bonding. That's the tip of the iceberg. If you go down a level, it's what we call team building and that's using play to better understand your own behavior and preferences as well as your colleagues behaviors and preferences. So you're trying to strengthen the individual connection.

So I can give an example of, let's say, we were all playing the game Pictionary together. Okay. And I thought it was really fun. I got really fired up that there was a timer that only gave me a minute to draw. But somebody else. I'll just pick out because he asked that question. Maybe Dave finds that really, really stressful.

And, you know, he. Doesn't like having a tight time constraint, especially when it's something creative. And so he either withdraws and isn't really performing his best. Well, that's a really healthy thing and helpful thing for me to know about my colleague, Dave, figure out when we're working together and there's a tight deadline.

How can we support each other? So we both feel like we can perform our best. Another type of. Helpful dynamic is who are the people that are really focused on detailed instructions and basically need to hear not only all the rules of the game, but all the possible permutations and contingencies before they'll start to play.

And then there's the people that are like, let's just figure it out as we go. And we can make up our own rules. If something's not. Clear those types of preferences show up at work and starting a new project. Some people are like, we have to talk through the entire plan. We have to think there was contingencies.

We have to make sure we have all these resources in order. And some people will say, let's just dive in and figure it out as you go. Well, in order to have a positive experience and have a positive outcome with that project, you need those different perspectives to be able to work together and understand each other.

So games are a really great way to have those conversations and figure out how to better understand each other and come up with a way to work together going forward. So that's team building. Team development. Is going even deeper with the reflection to look at how can this particular group of people perform better.

So it's less about understanding individuals and more at looking at the dynamics of a whole, you know, is there. Are there too many people who are more detail oriented on this team and the team could benefit from having someone who is a more big picture, creative thinker. Or what does everybody in the team prefer to communicate?

You know, synchronously you know, through and have conversation, your check in meetings once a week or every, a couple of times a week rather than being on Slack. So it's looking at what are the tools, what are the cultures, what are aspects of the work environment that a team would need to do better that would really help them.

And Play is a great way to not only explore what are those needs, but to also work through the change process in, in adapting to whatever changes you're making. So I'll pause there. Just see if there's any other questions before I continue on.

All right, no questions. So now we're going to dig into each one of these three areas and play a game and I'll share some stories. So first we're going to talk about team bonding, which again is just getting to know each other building stronger connections with people and feeling like you're part of something together and you know each other.

A huge predictor of employee success at work are people who have a friend who feel like they're part of a community. They're more likely to be engaged, they're more likely to stay longer, so you're going to get less turnover. So it's worth spending time on building these connections. So now we're actually going to do an activity.

One of my favorites is called Pickles. So I have this question. What is one game or activity that you really enjoy doing? But instead of sharing your answer in the chat or sharing it out loud. We are going to use an app called Pickles to draw it. So if you want to grab your phone to scan this QR code, but you will see I'll pull this up on my screen.

The QR code will be there. So you can scan it here to the question. What's the game or activity that you really enjoy? And when you scan the QR code, this app will pop up where you can draw with your finger and your drawing will show up on the screen. And I will say in advance that even professional artists.

We'll do something that looks like it came out of a pre K room. So it is not about what your drawing looks like. It's just getting an idea out there and learning from each other and sharing stories and seeing what other people put in. So I very much encourage you to contribute a picture.

Really fun watching these come in.

Looks like there might be some tennis courts or pickleball courts. Monopoly, tic tac toe, classic. Oh, someone on your phone? So open up the camera on your phone and hold it over that, that QR code where it says scan to join. And then a, a link to a website will pop up. Can you please let me know if that works?

I love these.

I'm curious if anyone wants to share in the chat. As you're drawing this or as you're looking at the drawings come in what are you feeling? What's going through your head? Is it making you curious about what other people's drawings are?

No, it didn't work. Okay, I will put Kimberly, I'll put the link in the chat here. It's harder, a little bit harder to draw with a mouse. But but you could still, you could still do it. I'm sorry that the app's not working. These are great. There's some really fun pictures in here. I would love to hear the stories behind all of them.

Oh, whoever put Euchre, I'm a huge Euchre player. So we might have to. You might have to talk Euchre after this.

So something like this is very quick, it's very easy, and it's a great way to, to bring out stories and learn a little bit about people. See if you have certain things in common or learn a little bit about what makes people tick what they do in their spare time. So we're going to do another question we're going to do it the same way.

Okay. Share. So now this is another type of conversation that this type of game can open up. What's the most interesting or unusual job you've ever had? And I know it's hard to draw a job, so just an object or an image that reminds you of that. So, again, if you want to scan this QR code. And this other question will go up on the screen and we'll see your drawings come in.

I'll go to the next.

The next page here,

and I'll share this link in the chat as well. If people can't access it on there.

And this question always leads to really fun conversations, because you know what your colleagues jobs are now, but we all had some strange jobs when we were teenagers or when we were early in our career, or maybe you went through a big pivot in your career one of the conferences where I did this activity, someone's job.

Was to wrangle chickens at a farm and to, like, was constantly chasing chickens and when she was telling the story, it was so funny. Everybody in the room was was just laughing and it made other people want to share their stories. And it's such a fun way to create a sense of community and cohesion. I love this.

It's like somebody else had an animal related job.

The There's some strawberries and an elephant. So just something like this that has people think a little bit more creatively it's different answering a question in images than with words. You could be less literal. You could think outside the box. It's a way to add in more humor and an element of curiosity because.

It's especially because it's a clunky tool. You often need to hear what people were drawing or what they meant by it. So feel free to keep drawing. I'm going to go back to the slides, but this is a really fun tool and it's free for up to 10 people. So, I highly recommend you bring it back to your groups and play when you want to do something quick and fun.

So that was team bonding. Now we're going to go into the team building area, which is.

For boosting productivity, removing points of friction and misunderstanding between colleagues. So looking at different communication styles, getting agreement on shared roles and values and navigating different personalities. You think of a team, you have in this example, there's 5 individuals. But each individual has a relationship with all of the other ones.

The relationship doesn't need to be exactly the same, but you want to encourage all of these to be positive relationships, or people feel like they can clearly communicate with each other, they can, they're accountable to each other, they can trust each other. And so the more you can learn about people's particular strengths, or their pet peeves, or their motivators, or their backgrounds and skills, the more likely all their interactions are to be positive with them.

And so when you're playing a game with that eye towards reflection to better understand your own behavior and other people's behavior, it's, it's a really great way to strengthen these individual bonds. And these are some examples of the type of reflective questions you can play with any game, that you could pair with any game to get into some of those individual differences.

So how did I show up? What factors influenced the way I showed up? So this might be, I found this really stressful because I don't like drawing. Or this was really fun for me because it was competitive or because it was collaborative. So looking at what are the situational factors that affect people. How did my experience compare to other people and what's behind some of those differences?

What are some patterns that you might recognize in your own behavior and other people's behavior? So an example of a pattern might be, I tend to do really well when it's a more collaborative exercise, or I tend to do really well when I can be in a position of leadership and coordinating. And so looking at what are those patterns and how can you leverage those patterns in your work for better outcomes.

And then how can you use this information to be a better colleague or team member? So a way we use games a lot here is if you have a group that did 1 of it, like the disc assessment or Myers Briggs or strength finders and you understand that there are these. Different drivers and different perspectives, but how do you actually use that information in how you work together?

That's where games are a great way to add on and have an experience and say let's look at for the people who are More introverted and the people are extroverted How can you better understand each other for the people who are? More focused on detail versus people who are more focused on big ideas. How can you get shared buy in?

With with what you're doing and feel like you're you're you're On the same team and working towards the same goals. So it ends up opening really great conversations and getting people a chance to practice interacting in different ways to get better outcomes. And then the third level of changes, team development, it would be for catalyzing culture change.

And again, that's looking at how can the team do better? What would help the team get better outcomes next time? What resources might be useful? Here's a couple of example questions. You know, what if we tried to do something a little differently next time? Or if only we'd known this before we started you know, it would have gone better if, You know, X, Y, Z, and these are all really concrete ideas to, to talk about process improvement or culture change.

And so you can start to think about how do you operationalize these within the context of a game? You can play the game again and say, okay, now we're going to be clear about how we do roles, or we're going to be clear about what success looks like and see if we have that better understanding up front.

Do we do better? Do we feel better about how we performed? And so these are some of the examples of culture change improvements that can come out of play using this type of reflection. So, practicing changes to the process, clarifying what communication channels work best for a team, clarifying roles and expectations, improving how meetings are structured, making sure that you're structuring your meetings in a way that's best for the outcomes that you're looking to get and in the way that people need to be engaged and feel included and that it's a useful way to spend their time.

Looking at gaps in knowledge or capacity or tools that could be filled in that would have a really positive impact on performance. So, pause there to see if there are any questions about the, the 3 different. Levels of the iceberg and types of use cases for play.

All right, wind it down now. So in summary. Bringing play into the workplace combines 3 very different elements of employee experience or 3. Different industries right now. There's the fun social team experiences. So that could be your happy hours or your trivia or, you know, bringing having a catered lunch or I know companies now are doing, like, a virtual chocolate tasting or something like that.

So. It's a way to connect those types of situations those types of events to outcomes that have to do with learning and development or making organizational change, or outcomes that have to deal with employee wellness, mental health, psychological safety and culture. So it's the intersection between these 3 different bodies to make everything deeper and, and more meaningful and connected to important outcomes that affect performance.

Thanks. So the last question I'm going to share is after having seen this presentation and heard some cases has your idea about using change or incorporating more chain play into your work? Has it changed? So I'm going to open another.

Another poll, so again, if you want to scan this QR code. Or you can go to the. Web address on the screen is compared to the beginning of today's session. How do you feel about incorporating more play at work?

So the last thing I want to share is one more QR code. If you're curious to learn more, if you'd like a copy of these slides just scan this and share your email address, your name and email address with me, and I'll send these. I will also invite you to on October 1st. My partner is facilitating a virtual game session that's free to take you through what some of our favorite activities are and how to how to use them.

Those, these will be activities that you could absolutely take back to your team. They're very easy to lead and really fun. So if you want an invitation to that session and a copy of these slides. Just scan this now and send me your information. I'll also put my contact information in the chat if you want to reach out that way.

But I would love to talk more with you about the ways that we help companies through play. People want to learn how to facilitate games themselves to incorporate into their work. I could share information about that. All that is in the chat. And now I'll open it up to questions.

[00:33:03] Dave Asheim: Okay. Wow. That was fantastic. Alex. I have a million questions, but maybe some of you folks have some of the same questions I have. So before I take the floor, let's get Christine and everybody else to. Toss your questions in the chat. All right. There's there's a good one from Christine. Alex.  

[00:33:25] Alexandra Suchman: This is a very hot topic right now are multiple generations in the workforce and a lot of the differences that that cause tension in multiple generations are different ways of communicating both the different channels of communication, but also the formality of of how people communicate.

And so playing games is a great way to get people to share what are their preferences and why do they prefer that way? I know it's something that comes up on in zoom a lot. If I'm doing a workshop with a team and there's people, you know, from people in their 20s to people in their 70s people who are younger are really comfortable using the chat and putting in comments and reacting with emojis, whereas the older generations who aren't used to having that type of text based communication available all the time, they find it really stressful.

They're just trying to pay attention to what's on video and the audio. And so having a chance to explain what those preferences are and why some people find it more confusing or why people, you know, prefer to use it, it's really helpful to just hear those and hear the stories behind that. So I think introducing a game as a way to understand each other better and figure out what are some norms that we can all come up with so that we all feel included.

We all feel like we're getting the information that we need. It's a really, it's a really nice way for different generations to understand each other and be open to finding some type of compromise. I've done sessions like this for a lot of teams. Christina would be happy to share some ideas afterwards.

If you want to reach out  

[00:35:09] Dave Asheim: and Alex, you do sessions virtually, you do sessions in person, so if any of you would like to talk to Alex about holding sessions in her building one for you folks that would be awesome. So just contact and we do  

[00:35:25] Alexandra Suchman: everything from, you know, 45 minute, just team bonding, fun lunch sessions to multi day.

Retreats and and training. So happy to talk to anyone who's interested in learning more about that.  

[00:35:39] Dave Asheim: Let's keep the questions going while they're coming in. I'll ask you a few Alex. Do you need to have this kind of attitude of games on a continual basis? Versus once a year, because you know, so many times bosses say they get this, they get this great idea.

Let's do a retreat. I read, I went to a Sherm conference and I heard Alex talk, we're going to do this. And then they never hear about it again. What's the frequency you need to have to really build some authenticity with this program?  

[00:36:14] Alexandra Suchman: That's a great question. I think it's useful to play together on at least a quarterly basis.

You know, there might not be time to do something more often, but a lot of it is what comes out in. The game experiences, especially if you're adding an element of reflection is people advocating for themselves. People saying, hey, I would have felt better if we did this or you know, for this particular game, I need to hear the instructions again, or I think it'd be better if we.

You know, divided the teams this way and just having getting people used to those conversations and comfortable sharing their own needs. Get more comfortable asking other people questions about what they need. And the differences is so helpful. But it's it's muscle memory. Those are ways that we're not intuitively.

And so the more you can practice, the more those types of interactions become second nature and people will have them outside of the context of the games to a lot of the purpose of it is looking at the insights that come from the games and how do you apply that into the real work setting?  

[00:37:21] Dave Asheim: This next question is similar to Christine's.

How do you, how do you use these tools? If everybody is in the office and it's not virtual, is it a board game? Like Pictionary? Is it something else? Is it 30 minutes? Is it. An hour. What's the what's the guidelines there?  

[00:37:43] Alexandra Suchman: Yeah, it can. I mean, the beauty is there's so many different types of games and they're all valuable for something.

1 of the things that we are doing is is building a database of games and. cataloging them by what are the team dynamics that take place within that game. So if it is sort of intergenerational or intercultural a game that brings out storytelling would be really helpful to hear from other people and to build that empathy and curiosity.

So those would be good types of games to play. You might not want to play a game that has really intricate rules or that's very competitive because that might exacerbate divisions that are there. So it's all about and there's one thing that I helped do is figure out what's the right kind of game for the team that you have for the conversations and insights that you want to to spark.

For games where people speak different languages, something that has a visual component like that pickles activity we did can be really useful because it's. You know, it's sharing information visually. And then it's also just a helpful reminder with some games, a helpful reminder that a lot of times the language that we use makes perfect sense to us because of what our cultural norms are, whether it's geographically cultural or what industries you've worked in but just a reminder that, you know we can't assume that everybody has the same references and the same connotations and understanding that we do.

And so how do you make sure that people feel comfortable voicing? Hey, I don't really know what you're talking about, or I'm lost here. This isn't a universal reference. Can, can we back up a little bit?  

[00:39:18] Dave Asheim: Alex, how would you recommend people get their bosses, the supervisors on board with this concept of play, if it's not tied to a specific training exercise, and much of what you're showing is not really tied to a specific business thing.

So what's the ammunition we can all use for those conversations?  

[00:39:42] Alexandra Suchman: Yeah, well, some of the statistics that were in these slides, which again, I'm happy to share you know, that's real data from, from Forbes, from Harvard Business Review you know, from reputable sources about connection and joy being really strong indicators of positive performance.

And a lot of times the way to increase positive performance and productivity is to remove points of tension. And if a lot of those points of tension have to do with other people. Well, you kind of have to address them head on as much as we tend to be conflict averse. There's healthy ways to talk about differences and healthy ways to get through conflict, especially when you're working together to do it.

And there's that sense of shared accountability, shared ownership, and shared investment in the outcome. And so plays are really great tool for that. And we also have a couple of tools on to me. How do you connect specific games to different elements of performance? So. Again, that's something else I'd be happy to, to share information about if people are interested.

[00:40:44] Dave Asheim: I would bet most people listening to this webinar are thinking I'm sold. I don't know where to go, which is one more plug for contacting you because you've been doing this for years and years and years, you know, the kinds of games. So I'm not recommending everybody just go to Google and say, how do I find a cultural language difference for remote team game?

Just ask Alex and she can help you do this. And again,  

[00:41:11] Alexandra Suchman: I'll share my contact information in the chat as well as a link to a blog article I wrote about. Choosing the right game and facilitating play and what are some tips to make it go well and pitfalls to avoid.  

[00:41:22] Dave Asheim: Nice. Any more questions for Alex?

If not we'll show you the final slide, our contact info. A lot of games can use and be. Served by mobile technology. That's why we're here. So if if, if you've ever thought about using mobile technology for better engagement and text messaging and mobile games, let us know. And for all of the things we talked about with play, then please contact Alex.

I think that's probably a wrap, Alex. Thank you so much for your insights. I think we all learned a great deal about the concept of play, and the difference between play and gamification was interesting. So, thanks for that insight. And we'll hang out if anybody has more questions, but otherwise, we'll send you a copy of this webinar tomorrow.

[00:42:16] Alexandra Suchman: Thanks.  

[00:42:17] Dave Asheim: Thanks very much, everybody.

All right. I think that's that's a wrap. Thank you so much, Alex.  

[00:42:25] Alexandra Suchman: Thank you. It was great to get to work with you both.

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