Fantasy Sports and Workplaces – Play Together Stay Together
Determined to bring coworkers together, to get them to know each other better and build employee engagement; we at ArcGate launched a first-ever company Fantasy IPL Cricket league during this year’s Cricket IPL season. The winners walked away with fabulous prizes and tons of excitement. It was before we chanced upon this study by Quantum Workplace. A study which shows that employees participating in a fantasy football league with their coworkers have higher scores on survey items measuring teamwork and trust with coworkers. The Quantum Workplace survey collected data from nearly 1,500 employees from companies across the U.S. to explore the correlation between employee engagement and an employee’s involvement with NFL football, including Fantasy Football. Of the respondents, 16.6 percent participated in a fantasy football league; of those participating, 51.8 percent were in a league with a coworker. “The results seem to indicate that workplaces with great teamwork and great work environments have employees who play and socialize together. In other words, those who play together stay together,” said Jason Lauritsen, Director of Best Places to Work at Quantum Workplace.
As much as we are in complete agreement with Jason’s views and Quantum’s study, we can also vouch from our personal experience that the idea of launching a Fantasy Cricket IPL league exclusively on our employee social platform www.workmob.com, was a sure shot hit and helped us achieve all that we had in mind. Employee engagement was at its all-time high given people were excited to create and own their dream teams and, more importantly, see their teams win! We created a “chatter box” where coworkers could chit-chat in real time while the matches were on. We witnessed a gamut of emotions on that real-time chatter box. There were traces of cheer, fun, edginess, competitiveness, anticipation, excitement and frustration. Of course, it was all related to how their teams were performing. It helped them loosen up and shed their inhibitions to start a conversation with coworkers. They created and shared cool logos for their teams and posted taglines that reeked of team spirit – for instance – “Because Together we play & it’s the reason we win!”
And as Jason Lauritsen puts it, “Companies serious about culture should identify and foster opportunities to bring employees together and insert fun into the workplace. As you can see, sometimes something as simple as an office fantasy football league is a way to bring together your people and build engagement.” We are more than glad we did it! We were able to create an atmosphere, a wonderful and necessary escape where our employees could get rid of the monotony of a 9 to 5. The camaraderie fostered through the IPL Cricket Fantasy league helped coworkers at ArcGate get more comfortable with each other and increase their personal bonds. It indeed was a simple and easy way to bring the employees together!
September 25, 2020