How we looked for London robbers and found 8% of the company's missing budget

Europlast company always keeps to its traditions. This year, despite all the difficulties, it once again repeated the employees' beloved corporate ritual and held the annual conference to review the season results.

The ManGO! Games team was invited to run a smart team-building session, leading to all of us having a great time playing The Bank Job.

Mission: Hold a smart team-building session within the annual season debriefing conference.

Background:

It's always our greatest pleasure to be repeatedly invited by our customers. One of such projects was a business game we ran for Europlast. Our previous collaboration took place exactly one year ago when we delivered a smart team-building event for the company's employees as part of the annual conference. With Europlast clearly not intending to betray its traditions, they made this year's conference happen after all. In turn, it has become our tradition at ManGO! Games to help Europlast boost its staff emotional commitment at the end of another tough season.

The event took place in Solnechnogorsk, on the picturesque shore of Senezh Lake.

With Europlast's primary activity being focused on the production of plastic bottle and cap molds, the company is well known in the market for its 25-year history and long traditions. The annual conference usually features a keynote address, a team-building event, and a closing banquet. The event provides a rare informal setting for representatives of different departments to meet, the opportunity available to some employees only once a year.

Following the ceremonial part, the company traditionally runs intellectual games for introspection, team bonding, horizontal networking, along with the development and strengthening of important skills.

This year, the company management entrusted us with a business game on cross-functional communication and team interaction.

We found the perfect option for this task would be the Bank Job business game, and we were not mistaken. The game promotes and enhances cross-functional interaction, problem-solving, along with interpersonal, organizational, time and conflict management skills. Besides, with the game taking exactly 2.5 hours, it makes optimum sense under strict timing conditions.

Game plot. Each team is allocated a certain budget and communicative channels, with every gameplay action to be paid for with in-game currency. The teams can also buy tips and hints from the coach. Another thing to spend money on is a chance to confer or write a message: just like in life, each procedure costs a certain amount of valuable "currency", whether it's time, money, or effort.

Round after round, the participants attempted to solve the crime in a faster and more efficient way.

Interestingly, all the Europlast employees demonstrated respectable decency during the game, and never once tried to overstep the rules. All this was probably influenced by a strong corporate culture.

The participants were simply delighted, including the CEO, who happily played along with the others. And it is not often you get a chance to look for criminals hand-in-hand with the Big Boss.

Successful and exciting, the initiative left behind plenty of positive emotions and proved the company's ability to properly reward its employees!

In the end, the participants managed to accomplish the daunting task of locating and disarming the criminals. And while both teams did a great job, the winners were first to spot the robbers' hiding place. Besides, they managed to re-create the whole story of the crime so convincingly that we could not help but believe them!

The game pursued important missions of building and assessing employee competencies, above all teamwork skills and cross-functional interaction. In this context, it gave us some fairly serious conclusions to consider.

Once the game was over, we estimated the extra costs that could be avoided had the participants been better negotiators. The considerable expenses mean there is still something to think about. We can surely say that a great deal of resources, energy, and effort could have been saved through mutual cooperation. Instead, it just so happened that the duplication drained many of the teams' resources.

So, could this be expressed in figures? Yes, it could! That's what we did. All in all, unnecessary expenses amounted to 8%! Meaning that the lack of teamwork skills costs the company 8% of its employees' efficiency!

Now imagine the impact the company would achieve had it managed to save 8% of its budget. And we gladly believe that Europlast will make use of this obvious cost optimization opportunity.