At first glance, you might believe that a task manager is only the to-do list that each professional has to perform. So prepare yourself for good news. Do you know the feedback that most managers don’t like to offer and always ends up leaving off the agenda? A task manager also exists to help you to recognize your team – in a way you did not expect to be viable: by gamification and even remotely. Check out:
The great power of games
The expert in motivation Dan Pink lists 4 basic human drives that games can meet. Notice how they are all part of your workplace and can be more fully explored:
1) Autonomy: You control your own pace and view your progress.
2) Excellence: You evolve overtime and according the difficulty of their missions.
3) Purpose: You have a very clear goal to reach and that’s why you keep playing.
4) Social interaction: You can compare your performance with other players’.
Did you notice? No wonder that the game industry is so successful and profits so much: they understand what motivates people and gives it to them. All this will make even more sense for your reality if the task manager of your company use gamification to show your team how is their productivity going and their care with deadlines. Always in a playful way, rather than punitive.
Recognition even afar
Just as you can play and take part in exciting championships with people across the world, it’s perfectly possible to work in teams remotely without losing focus and productivity. A task manager, when online, is a tool that gathers the entire company in the same virtual environment. Thenceforth, it both streamlines communication and collaboration and fosters healthy competition among professionals. And since all the work’s progress can be monitored in real time, managers are able to know who are the talents must be recognized and what processes can still be enhanced.
Luis Gonçalves, Dell’s Brazil CEO, says that “There is no expectation of surrounding a conference table with employees. Everybody knows that you can join the meeting by phone or video. It’s not relevant informing where you are talking from.” To find out if this kind of initiative is indeed effective, an experiment of MIT Collective Intelligence Center with about 270 people assessed whether groups that interact only via text message can “read” the behavior of other participants with the same efficiency of who’s there in person. The results were impressive and showed that both are equally able to measure the “social sensitivity” of the other participants, resulting therefore in the maintenance of collective intelligence, regardless of the communication adopted.
Among the more advanced management systems there are the tasks, time and performance software, such as Runrun.it – able to raise the productivity of a team in about 25%. Discover RR-Rating, an exclusive Runrun.it feature that measures users’ productivity overtime and rewards them based on performance increases. To find out, try it for free: http://runrun.it
