Planning Poker: An Agile Training Game for the Workplace
Employee disengagement has become a major issue for workforces. The Harvard Business Review reports that disengagement in the workplace recently hit a nine-year high in the U.S., with approximately three-fourths of employees reportedly disengaged. As a result, there has been an increase in employees showing lower productivity and exhibiting higher absenteeism. This is why finding ways to improve employee engagement has become a vital part of fostering a strong business culture, and one way this is being achieved is through gamification.
Gamification is the application of game-like elements in non-gaming environments, and in the workplace, this can include creating fun competition between employees through the collection of points or team games that improve workplace outcomes. Alongside gamification, another key methodology in business is being agile. As described in our post ‘What Is Agile Methodology?’, this emphasizes collaboration, iterative development, and customer-centricity. In order to introduce agile methodology in the workplace, some companies have turned to gamification, with one activity that combines both practices being the agile card game Planning Poker.
Agile Card Games
An agile card game is a variation of a standard game that has been modified to enhance collaboration, communication, and reflection. These games can also reflect simulations that illustrate certain processes in the workforce, be used to collectively achieve a result amongst team members, or to encourage reflection over certain issues. There are many different types of agile card games available, with Planning Poker being the most prominent member of this group. It is a facilitation tool that encourages collaboration and problem-solving.
How to ‘Play’ Planning Poker
The goal of Planning Poker is to get team members to estimate how long different tasks are expected to take and work together to decide the best result. Each team member is given the same number of cards that represent units of time. The cards can be a sequence of numbers that can represent minutes, days, or months. These cards can be customized to suit the problem-solving requirements, depending on the task and company.
A team leader will then provide the team with a task and invite them to discuss the appropriate time. This is a good way to get different departments to provide insight into tasks they are familiar with and learn about tasks they are not acquainted with. The players will use the cards to vote on how long they think the task should last without showing the rest of the team. Once everyone has made a decision, the cards are flipped, and the score is averaged out to decide how long that task should take.
Why is Planning Poker So Appealing
A big part of the appeal of Planning Poker is its roots in traditional poker and how the card game takes elements from it. Poker is one of the most popular card games and is played throughout the world in various forms. The profile of poker rapidly increased in the early 2000s through the accessibility of online poker and key figures who opened up the game to a much wider audience. The person most synonymous with popularizing poker is Chris Moneymaker.
In 2003, Moneymaker won an online poker tournament that allowed him to compete in the Main Event of the 2003 World Series of Poker. Against all the odds, he won the event and walked away with $2.5 million, which led to Moneymaker’s induction into the Poker Hall of Fame in 2019. Today, he is a poker pro for Americas Cardroom and continues to promote the game through the platform. By inspiring a whole new generation of poker players, Moneymaker changed poker’s reputation from that of an exclusive game to an inclusive game that is now played across all demographics.
Employees who play Planning Poker will likely have played poker in some form due to its widespread popularity and will associate the agile card game with standard poker. Though the game is very different, they will recognize aspects of the agile game, such as accurately gauging outcomes in order to get the desired result. While not as competitive as poker, Planning Poker invites players to understand the other players and use strategy in their estimations. Team leaders can add a competitive edge to the game by splitting the players into different teams, and the team that can best argue that their average time is the most efficient wins. As a collaboration exercise, Planning Poker succeeds because it encourages both individual thought and teamwork.
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