9 fun ideas to engage your Staff

Over the last 18 months, most people have not been having much fun at work. They’ve had to deal with more change, more pressure and less social interaction.

We all know that fun is important in the workplace. More fun = more productivity, fewer sick days and increased engagement.

With less social interaction and more people working from home, it can be a real challenge to find ways for your people to have fun. Lunches, drinks after work, etc. are just not as easy to organise these days.

And yet, without fun, you risk the loss of motivation, loss of good people and the culture of your organisation.

If you recognise how important fun is and you are open to some different approaches to creating a fun workplace, we’ve put together 9 ‘thought starters’ which we hope will be some inspiration for you.

Make your online training fun. Is your online training actually pretty tedious? Do your people do just enough to get through it? There a lot we can learn from game design that can be applied to online learning to make it fun and engaging. The more engaged people are, the better they learn.

A product knowledge quiz. How well do your people know your products and services. Challenge them with a product knowledge quiz. make it a competition and see who is your real product champion. Celebrate them for a bit of extra motivation. maybe run a variation every month

A Business Simulation Game. Do you find that your people often don’t fully understand how your business actually works? Would they benefit from a risk-free environment to explore the business? Creating a simulation of your business is the perfect way for your people to get to know all aspects of the business, play with how it works and discover which parts are key to business success.

An Ideas Platform. Do you want your people to look at how your business can be improved? Have you tried this type of thing before, but found it just runs out of steam? By using game design methodologies, you can keep people motivated for longer, reward those that engage with the platform and use the crowd to rate the ideas against predefined criteria. Innovation in action.

Make onboarding seamless and fun. Onboarding new staff members is sometimes a bit clunky and tedious for everyone involved. Having a rethink of the approach and adding in some fun can help new staff members hit the ground running with the right attitude. Make it fun from day one.

Who knows who?. How well do your people know each other these days? Remote working doesn’t make relationship-building easy. You might have some newer staff members who have not yet met some of the people they work with face to face. have some fun with a ‘get to know each other’ game and help build those relationships in a fun way. You might learn something about your people too!

KPI Tracker. If you set KPIs at a team level, then how about making team performance a bit more transparent and fun. Create an app that shows each teams KPIs and how they are progressing through the month, quarter or year. Add a leaderboard and some fun prizes for a little extra motivation.

The Early Starters Game. Set up some tasks that people have to do before a certain time of the day. Keep track of performance over time with leaderboard (individual and team). As well as seeing who performs well and having some fun, you’ll get everyone starting early in the day which has got to be a good thing.

Customer Service Detective Game. Do you use Net Promoter surveys to understand your levels of quality of service? How might you use a game to develop high levels of customer service skills? By using a series of scenarios, where customers have given a rating of less than 10, players have to solve the clues as to why they did that and put solutions in place to make sure that doesn’t happen again. The player is the hero and all kinds of situations can be explored this way.

All of these ideas have the potential to increase staff engagement, help you gather valuable insights data and make the working environment a bit more fun

Do you want to explore some of these ideas further? Or do you have an idea of your own? Let’s have a chat about it.

If you’ve not already, you might want to download the 2021 Fun Report