Are treasure hunt games for the workplace?

Companies are always looking for new and creative ways to increase the engagement of their teams. I have found that treasure hunt games that are structured with a focus on collaboration can help break down some walls and get people to know their peers. The ideas can be simple and most can be done in an afternoon. I was reading this great article on HBR which I have included below and they discuss some great research that has gone into achieving true collaboration.

Achieving true collaboration — in which the whole is definitely more than the mere sum of the individual parts — is difficult in any environment. People have to set aside their egos, trust one another, and share their expertise willingly. In a virtual workplace, collaboration can be all the more difficult to attain, especially when team members work for different companies, are essentially strangers to one another, and have different cultural and professional backgrounds. We have interviewed a number of researchers on this topic and have also studied dozens of virtual teams, some that possessed that magic of collaboration and numerous others that didn’t. Here are some of the lessons we’ve learned.

Adjust for size. Teams have been getting larger and larger, some even exceeding 100 people for complex projects, according to one study. This trend has made true collaboration increasingly difficult to achieve. One solution is to use a flexible, fluid team structure that consists of three tiers: a core, an operational level, and an outer network. The core consists of individuals responsible for strategy and important decisions. The operational level includes those who are doing the day-to-day ongoing work and might make decisions about their portion of the project but they don’t tackle larger issues (which are handled by the core). And the outer network consists of temporary or part-time members who are brought in for a particular stage of the project because of their specialized expertise. Using this hierarchy groups together those who need to collaborate with one another for particular purposes (and exclude others who aren’t important to that process). Another tool that I recommend is the Relationship Action Plan, which can be used to manage an organization around loosely configured, flexible teams.

Don’t be afraid of social media. People are more prone to collaborate with others who are similar to them. So how, then, do you get dissimilar people to collaborate? The trick is to find the common ground between such individuals, and social media — blogs, wikis, online collaboration tools, etc. — can play a huge role in doing so. Many managers have been fearful of using social media beyond marketing purposes. But those companies that have begun to use social media for internal purposes are starting to reap the benefits.

The chipmaker Xilinx, for instance, has reported an increase in engineer productivity by around 25% thanks to social media tools that encourage and enable employee collaborative activities. Employees could, for example, maintain wikis or online forums that help share best practices and workarounds for particular problems. The open source community routinely uses such approaches to spread knowledge of programming tricks and tips.

, researchers investigated how companies could use online role-playing games like “World of Warcraft” and “EverQuest” to build leadership and teamwork skills. In such multiplayer games, players must collaborate to survive in a fast-changing environment with fierce competitors and incomplete or ambiguous information from which to base important decisions — that is, an environment not unlike many hypercompetitive global markets. In these games, members must continually do what’s best for the team. Leaders, for instance, will often step down to allow others who are more qualified to take the reins. This helps encourage an atmosphere of collaboration as well as sacrifice for the greater good of the team….More at How Successful Virtual Teams Collaborate – Keith Ferrazzi – Harvard …