Online Training Is The Name Of The Game

All work and no play can make for boring Zoom business meetings, so Ruben Hamilius is trying to inject some fun into proceedings. The Belgian is co-founder and managing director of Business Games, which is located in Dublin, the Netherlands and Singapore. The company takes the experiential route to skills training and onboarding by organising team games for corporate clients.

Business Games’ clients pay between €50 and €65 per head to have the company organise and deliver games. Around 30 different customisable game dynamics are available, including live quizzes through YouTube, business ownership simulations and an ‘online Olympics’. Customers include Coca-Cola, Enterprise Ireland, Bank of Ireland and Novartis.

Hamilius (pictured) formerly worked with P&G, where he realised there was an appetite for more experiential training events among businesses. He moved to Ireland to set up a Business Games office, attracted by the plethora of multinationals in the capital and the availability of affordable tech talent.

Hamilius (32) started the Irish operation in 2017 and lived in a youth hostel for nine months to keep startup costs low. The business employs 16 people, five of whom are based in Ireland, and around 60% of business comes from companies based in Ireland, with the rest primarily from the UK and France.

The Covid-19 pandemic brought on-site experiential games to an immediate halt but the venture transitioned online smoothly. “We found that we could still deliver the ‘face-to-face’ element of our events virtually over the online tools available, while keeping things live, engaging and interactive,” says Hamilius. “Games based around onboarding employees or improving soft skills such as communications are the most popular.”

Surprisingly, it isn’t the trendy tech companies like Google and Facebook that are the best customers, says Hamilius. “Traditional companies such as banks, telcos and pharma firms are our most loyal clients. They understand the need to innovate and evolve the ways that they teach skills – the old style of an expert in a classroom doesn’t work that well today. Newer tech companies are more used to interactive relations with employees, and they also tend to think that they can handle much of the experiential training themselves.”