Playing video games with co-workers increases office productivity: Looking for increasing your output at the office? A study says it will enhance office’s productivity by playing video games with co-workers and will ensure better performance at the workplace.
As per a recent study, work teams experienced a 20 percent increase in productivity on successive tasks after playing video games together for just 45 minutes.
Greg Anderson, co-author of the study said, “To see that big of a jump, especially for the amount of time they played, was a little shocking. Companies are spending thousands and thousands of dollars on team-building activities, and I’m thinking, go buy an Xbox.”
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According to the study published, the researchers recruited 352 individuals and randomly organized into 80 teams, ensuring no participants with previous relationships were on the same team.
For their introductory experimental task, each team played in a geocaching competition called Findamine, an exercise created by previous IS researchers, which gives players short, text-based hints to find landmarks.
Participants were encouraged with cash rewards for winning the competition.
After its first-round ofFindamine, one of three conditions were randomly assigned before being sent out to geocache again:
1) team video gaming, 2) quiet homework time or 3) a “goal training” discussion on fixing their geocaching results.
Every condition lasted for 45 minutes and those involved in video gaming treatment chose to play either Rock Band or Halo 4 — games selected because they are both familiar and require coordinated efforts amongst the players.
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In the research, it was found that while the goal-training teams noticed a higher increase in team cohesion than the video-gaming teams, the video gamers increased actual performance on their second round of Findamine automatically, hiking average scores from 435 to 520.
This study was published in the Journal of AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction.
The lead researcher, Mark Keith said, “Team video gaming may truly be viable — and perhaps even optimal — alternative for team building.”
It was also found by the researchers that it doesn’t matter if people are enthusiastic video gamers to see the positive effects of gaming together; they witnessed video game beginners established communications norms – and built working relationships – even faster with new teammates so as to learn the nuances of the game.