Hobbies And Interests
Total Enterprise Games
Total enterprise games are management-simulation games that represent your firm as a whole. These games cover a wide scope of planning and decision-making practices. The decision variables cover every function of your company, including marketing, sales, finance, human resources and production. The players get to make decisions at a top management level. These games are usually played by teams of employees. Every employee in the team plays a separate role. For example, one employee might play Vice President for marketing, while another plays Vice President for production, and a third, Vice President for finance. The team will be given a problem that involves all three functions, for example, that must market a product and they won't be able to produce it in time for the holidays. The team is then responsible for working together to devise a solution to this problem.
Functional Games
Functional games rely on in-depth understanding and specialized knowledge of particular functions of your company. These games are usually played by individuals within a particular department of your company. They will be presented with a problem or situation specific to a particular function of your company and will need to solve it in the most efficient way possible. Examples of functional games would be sexual harassment role-playing drills. Employees may role-play with a facilitator who pretends to sexually harass them or they witness the facilitator sexually harass a co-worker. Then, the employees must determine whether the facilitator's behavior was against the company's policy and what actions should be taken.
Keys to Success
According to researchers at Pepperdine University, five principles are very important to the success of your business simulation. First, more cohesive teams outperform less cohesive teams. This means that the employees' skill sets must complement each other. Don't put all the guys from marketing on one team and all the guys from payroll on another. Next, people in influential positions must support the simulation. The employees won't take the simulation seriously if their manager doesn't. In addition to this, each team must have a leader dedicated to performing well in the game. Furthermore, it is vital that every team member understands how the game is played. Employees won't learn the lessons the game is intended to impart if they didn't entirely understand how the game worked. Finally, it's important to follow up with a debriefing session. Employees should hear, in a safe and comfortable environment, what aspects of the game were played well and what could be improved upon.