Why employees engagement?

There is extensive scientific literature on the relationship between employees engagement and companies’ results. The higher the engagement, the higher the results: the higher the results, the higher the profits.  With this linear correlation, how easy or not, it is to enhance people’s engagement at their daily tasks?

Easy, it´s like playing.

It seems that gamifying some parts of their routine tasks can help boost their performance, but what is “Gamification”?

In a nutshell, gamification is the application of elements of game playing (e.g. point scoring, competition with others, and rules of play) to other areas of work. Companies can use gamification to train employees in a fun way that encourages motivation, competition, and solidarity as well as to motivate workers and optimise the workforce. It also helps to gather data that can be used for actionable insights into a business.

At Barcelona Ambassadors, we feel the need to tailor incentive trips so that they also include gamification components such as:

• Competition; igniting the fire of competition is a tried-and-true method of motivation for most (if not all) employees;
• Tangible achievement: some employees need more than just the satisfaction of a job well done to motivate action. Awarding badges for completion and mastery could make all the difference;
• Group sharing and collaboration; imagine that an employee gets stuck on a specific quiz question or activity, she/he might give up and disengage from the situation, but imagine if she/he had the capacity to use tokens or points toward asking a group of colleagues for their inputs. Social tools make collaboration simpler, creating a symbiotic relationship between the learner who needs help and the learner who wants to demonstrate his knowledge base.
• testing for knowledge; social gaming is the ultimate test for where each employee falls in the pack. Sizing up proficiency against other co-workers helps each learner understand his or her strengths and weaknesses.
• Feedback looping; don’t forget that social gaming also offers benefits for leadership and management. Scores, leader boards, and badges are simple ways for management to see real-time feedback in form of proficiency and engagement. Issuing feedback and pointers then become more effective and personalised, based on a learner’s actual performance.

Gamifying incentive trips allows the employees to boost their motivation and engagement whilst having fun and discovering new things through authentic experiences.

Spot the difference: Team activities or Group activities? 

At Barcelona Ambassadors, we’re often asked whether there is any difference between team building activities and group building activities. Are they just different words for the same thing, or do they function differently? Let’s take a look at each of these terms in more detail.

When we talk about teams, we are talking about an aggregate set of people who are all aligned and directed towards a common goal or result, such as the completion of a particular project or starting a new business. A graphical representation of a Team could be as follows:

Our team building activities are based on the fact that individuals share a common goal and are usually looking for someone to help them with the processes of working together more effectively to achieve a result. In general, team building activities help individuals to reflect on their behavioural pattern in a team; through this they may establish new patterns for a better performance.

When we talk about groups, we are talking about people who come together with a common interest but do not have the same goal in mind. For example, a group of people can meet to be trained on effective leadership, but each individual have their own ultimate goal to which they would apply their new skills. Group activities focus mainly on the development of the single person. A graphic example of a Group could be as follows:

At Barcelona Ambassadors we tailor our activities also based on this important difference. This allows us to design tours and group or team building experiences that leave a long-lasting impact.

How many times you found yourself in a situation when you joined a new team or got a new job and were extremely motivated to do your best and wanted to get noticed for your great performance, yet you just did not know how?

How many times you found yourself in a context where for too long you have been doing the same thing over and over again to the point that you were merely repeating a routine?

How many times you found yourself at the same time in exactly both situations? Joined a new team, struggled to get things done but with time and experience you started to excel in your tasks but yet, it came to a point where you felt kind of “stuck”?

Well, the good news is that most of us face these situations and that we all are in control of how we wish to ignite our performance and future growth.

The learning curve is the so-called proportion between experience (increasing over time) and the learning whilst doing a specific task.  The more experience you acquire the more you learn at doing something.

Each one of us is improving with time at doing his/her job, and by acquiring experience and expertise this learning at some point comes to an end, leading to a situation where there is nothing more to learn and to experience.  The consequences associated with this can be multiple, such as frustration at work, low performance, increase of errors and so on.

To ignite again performance and motivation, a “rebirth” is needed. How?

Start with simple steps:

1. Review your current responsibilities and rate your performance on those on a scale from 0 to 10 (10 the highest) ;
2. Any surprises? Select the top three that you believe can be improved
3. Public Professional Identity: ask three of your most trusted colleagues the following questions on your performance:
   1. What do you admire most about me professionally?
   2. What do you think I do best?
   3. Do I inspire you? If so, how?
   4. What about me makes me a one-of a kind colleague?

Now that you’ve done your homework, consider using what your colleagues said about you to improve those top 3 responsibilities.

At Barcelona Ambassadors, we strive for better performance in team building activities. Our major aim is for you to be “reborn” within your team and guide you back on track to a prosperous professional career!

Already in the year 460 BC, one of the most outstanding figures in the history of medicine, Hippocrates, was recommending to ride horses to cure those illnesses which were supposedly “incurable”.

Some science: dogs look so much like their owners

Usually, a dog imitates or copies another dog while interacting socially. The dog can mimic gestures, movements, body language, muscle tension, eye movement, or even breathing. This is the so-called “mirroring” of a dog-behaviour.

Studies emphasise that both dogs and horses reflect through their behaviour, the behaviour of their owners or the people with whom they interact.

In the human’s world, specifically in the workplace, leaders and learners often count on hidden feedback from colleagues, using others’ experience and interpretations to guide their decision making. The book “Think Fast, Think Slow” (Kahneman, 2011) highlights how this human perspective can be a problem because of human cognitive bias in interpretation and decision-making. Horses and dogs do not have this issue. In contrast, horses do not consciously interpret their experiences like humans do—they do not seek to label events or to create meanings.

The book “Hope…” (Pike, 2009) highlights how horses communicate through what they feel internally. Their safety strongly relies on how they are able to sense danger and the presence of predatory animals. They can perceive the stress that predators hold before an attack. This stress not only creates a specific physical posture but also a particular chemistry. Horses are able to read all this information and sense when it is safe or not. Their communications skills are so fine that a human mind cannot comprehend it.

A human who is in an incoherent state of being – thinking one thought while feeling a different emotion, or carrying a hidden agenda – sends out the same vibration or stress signals as a predatory animal in the wild. A person who is trying to project happiness but is inside frustrated or angry will most probably notice their horse more difficult and frustrated too.

There is no surprise that Sir Winston Churchill once said ‘There is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man.‘