Pokemon Go Becoming an Office Trend? How to Keep Your Employees Focused at Work
Pokemon Go has gone international with just about everyone from school kids to office workers and grandmothers addicted to this augmented reality game. While reports have shown that healthwise it’s doing a lot of good by getting you up and moving, it’s not ideal when your office become a pokestop leaving everyone searching for pokemons instead of focusing on the task at hand. The Telkee key cabinets team is here to help with some great suggestions to help stop your employees from staring at their phones and slipping away from their desks.
Don’t Ban Pokemon Go, Instead Setup a Policy
While this may seem like the first step to take, it will just lead to employees coming up with ways to play the game behind your back. Passive aggressive signs like the one below won’t work either as they’ll just be ignored. Instead devise a policy that lays out proper guidelines for device management. By doing this you have a solid framework to address unreasonable employee device usage.
You can also include a section on the use of cameras at your workplace. Adding this to a policy will allow you to deem that the Pokemon Go AR mode is counted as using a phone camera and should be disabled when the game is played within office premises.
Analyse Employee Performance
Look beyond the amount of screentime used by an employee, instead analyse their performance. If you notice a huge drop in performance after the viral game hit the office – it’s definitely worth talking to the employee and highlighting the use of the game a possible problem.
If an employee is playing the game without letting it affect their performance you should just leave it instead of trying to micromanage their time. Most high-performers can be trusted to manage their time efficiently, so if they need to a couple of minutes to swipe through social media or a couple of Pokeballs, trust them to do that while getting their job tasks done too.
Set Deadlines Clearly
Research has shown that employees tend to waste time browsing social media and playing games when they don’t have enough to do. This typically happens when you don’t also have any set work deadlines and are just meandering through tasks. To avoid this happening, it’s important to set clear tasks and priorities for your team either on a daily or weekly basis.
While employees will most likely play the game during their breaks, you will be restricting the game to their downtime since they have to check off their day’s work against their prioritised tasks.