Abstract:

The Covid-19 pandemic was indeed a global game changer. It impacted literally every part of our lives. The most notable part for most of us was the switch to remote work and collaboration. As meeting rooms were exchanged for Zoom calls and office spaces for our living rooms, we settled in to study the impact of remote working on our workforce. Initially the data coming in where excellent. They showed up to 60% productivity jumps, more free time for employees. Meetings were suddenly starting on time, and we saved on average more than 1 hour of our daily time commuting from work and back. Companies started to cancel office leases and where slowly planning migration to permanent working from home environment. However, as the pandemic drag on problems started to emerge. Mainly integration of new employees into the working process became a huge problem and drop our rates for new employees surged by as much as 30%. The main reason lack of communication, team interaction and personal oversight. New employees where missing the presence on the workplace, they failed in getting to know their new colleagues and felt lost under the load of new work left with just online calls to provide guidance. With first remote freshman arriving University of Comenius was facing the similar problem. To measure the effectiveness of various online integration tools and methods we have designed a scientific experiment in which we tried to measure the level of student integration achieved with the help of the most rapidly growing entertainment activity of our current time: gaming. In our experiment we have randomly assigned 60 students to 8 member teams. Over the course of two weeks two online classes where conducted. The experimental group of students that have never ever met physically in their lives was tasked with playing what during the pandemic became the most streamed game on twitch.tv platform Among US. A game oriented at cooperation that forced students to personal interaction and communication. At the conclusion of our study we found out that students noticed significant increase in trust between the team members. Students further rated that interpersonal communication int the team improved rapidly during the two weeks. In our article we aim to further analyse the impact and improvement of team abilities and cooperation in a remote team via introduction of computer games as a teambuilding tool.

Keywords:

Computer games, cooperation, team work, remote work, covid 19.