How Collaborative Play & Games can enable Human Resources to better support Business Agility

Several years ago, I began exploring ways to incorporate collaborative practices and activities familiar within the agile community to improve the effectiveness of activities conducted by Human Resources that impact agile teams. What started in 2014 as an optional way for team members to get additional performance review feedback, has grown into a methodology and series of collaborative activities (or do I dare say ‘games’) to gather feedback and assess necessary skills to improve performance reviews, peer-to-peer feedback and even improve job interviews.

Establishing and growing the World Wide Technology innovation practice for the last 3 years, we have hired all staff within a global consulting team using a series of collaborative games that determine if a candidate’s career needs, skills & desires align to the job at hand and most importantly provide a means to assess how well a candidate is able to collaborate with other team members when engaging in knowledge work. Within our innovation team, we use collaborative practices such as story telling, metaphor, and strategy games to exchange constructive feedback and build trust between team members, their customers, and their manager.

Stated simply, use of collaborative play and games to enable feedback and provide coaching to peers, managed staff (direct reports), and even senior managers can significantly improve the mindfulness and understanding of feedback/coaching provided while also significantly increasing the psychological safety associated with such performance management activities and discussions. Join us to review what we have learned on our journey to introduce collaborative practices and play to better align Human Resource activities to be supportive of the agile mindset.

Learning Objectives

• Participants will learn how collaborative activities and games can improve traditional Human Resources facilitated activities such as job interviews and performance reviews to be supportive of the agile mindset.
• Attendees will learn a collection of collaborative practices and games that can be used to gather feedback from their peers, build trust between team members, and engage more effectively with their manager to receive open and constructive feedback.
• Participants will see examples of how including collaborative practices and play can better assess job fit and future performance moreso than traditional interview questions on past experiences and career aspirations.

Jason Tice

Vice President @ World Wide Technology

Jason Tice, MBA, leads the Business Innovation practice at World Wide Technology and specializes in the use of collaborative frameworks and serious games to help organizations discover measurable business outcomes, generate data to build consensus, measure progress and return on investment towards goals, and foster a culture supportive of greater learning. In his 12+ years of experience at World Wide Technology, Jason has led multi-team digital transformation and business growth efforts in both the private and public sectors, and as a Six Sigma Black Belt pioneered practices by which agile transformation can be aligned with Six Sigma, Enterprise Architecture and Business Process Management (BPM) activities.

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