What has long been murmured around in hushed tones at workplaces around the world— “Let’s FIFA”—can now be screamed out from the tallest of mountains, the glassiest of glass buildings, office rooftops .A recent study published in the journal AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction, says playing video games with one's co-workers result in more productive hours. Researchers made new co-workers, those without any pre-existing relationships, play for 45 minutes, and found that the teams experienced a 20% increase in productivity on subsequent tasks."To see that big a jump— especially for the amount of time they played—was a little shocking," says co-author and BYU associate professor Greg Anderson. "Companies are spending thousands and thousands of dollars on team-building activities, and I'm thinking, go buy an Xbox."Hell, yes!All HR people should buy XBoxs and Playstations and let people game, rather than take us on retreats and make us attend team building workshops.This becomes even more important considering the bane of all modern workplaces IE co-working spaces. These ‘open and shared’ spaces don’t do jack for produtivity. How is one supposed to write about the existential dread of the universe when our neighbour is watching an endless playlist of cat videos? It’s messed up.Almost 90 minutes a day are lost because of distraction everyday in open plan workplaces. Distracted workers mean a reduction in personal interaction, which results in even more emails.The perfect, most productive workplace then, is full of cubicles, and a giant-ass lobby choc-a-bloc with PlayStations.You’re welcome, HR reps. Watch us turn into productive bunnies.
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