When people hear the word “games” paired with “business meeting” in the same sentence, their sighs may be audible throughout the building. But that’s only because, in the past, people have been forced to sit through contrived ice-breakers and clichéd trust exercises time and time again. They’ve played “two truths and a lie” and tried not to freak out when falling back while a colleague whose Facebook friend request they denied is waiting to catch them from behind. They’ve been there, done that and they don’t want to have to go through it again.

But gamification these days is about so much more than an exercise your HR manager read about in an introduction to business psychology textbook 12 years ago. Using gamification can completely revolutionize the way you run meetings and, ultimately, make people look forward to an event they might otherwise see as nothing more than a distraction from their lengthy to-do list.

What do we mean when we say “gamification”?

Well, we don’t mean having a simple round-the-room introduction session where people answer “quirky” questions about themselves. It also doesn’t mean that you take the team away for the day to play some kind of indoor sport that no one has heard of to encourage teamwork. No, we mean incorporating gameplay into that big creative pitch or project kick-off meeting you’ve been planning for months where you’ll be hosting a variety of skilled workers, clients, creatives and executives at one of those unique meeting rooms in London you’ve been looking forward to renting.

Games aren’t just about having fun. These days, games include strategy, learning new information, on-the-spot thinking and an element of excitement. And that’s exactly what you want in a meeting. You want people to think strategically, learn from each other, think quickly and clearly on the spot and be excited about the idea you’re pitching or the project you’re about to embark on. By including a game at the beginning of your meeting or even using it throughout the meeting, you can encourage people to be in a different headspace and abandon their preconceived ideas about how they should and should not behave in a meeting.

While it may be fun to have a hint hunt that leads to the destination of your meeting by having people visit your favourite pub or an underrated pizzeria, gamification should be used to reach the purpose of your meeting as a whole.

For example, using mobile or tablet games to encourage e-learning during a training session can be a great way to immerse new employees or contractors in the training process instead of having them watch a five-minute instructional video. This way you can even have the result sent to you to see how people are engaging with the training material and what they’re actually taking with them from the experience.

Gamification encourages teamwork in a new and exciting way

Whether you have remote workers, make use of independent contractors or your clients simply haven’t met your team properly, gamification can introduce people on a level playing field (literally) and help them get to know each other. Whether it’s a permanent team or a temporary collaboration, In order for people to work well together, they need to be able to trust who they’re doing business with. Gamification fosters trust and can unite a disconnected or even brand new team. And when that team is sitting together at a meeting venue trying to come up with new ideas, set an action plan or solve a problem, trust is more important than ever.

You could use a virtual game where the meeting attendees have to face a series of challenges in order to access material that would be brought up in the meeting. For each challenge successfully completed, a new piece of information will be released. If you keep the challenges related to the purpose of the meeting, no time will be wasted as you would be expected to present this information anyway. Attendees will be required to work together to solve issues and come up with ideas in a fun and exciting way. You can do this digitally using tablets or smartphones, so there’s no physical mess to have to clean up afterwards.

You could a use a mobile quiz game format to find out how team members would tackle certain problems they may face in the workplace. What values do they place highest and do those values align with your own? Or you could use gamification to bring to light the vision of your company or a project that you’re all working on together. It may seem like a little bit of fun but it can offer you information on how the people you work with think and operate.

Gamification can help you understand your team

Understanding your team better can help you improve the way you work together going forward.

At the end of the day, using gamification is a great way to inject fun into training sessions, help people come up with solutions as a team or even help you better understand the people you’re working with.