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Department of Social Sciences
[Translate to English:] © Christian Teichmann ​/​ sfs

KoSpiRIT – Cooperative games and connectedness-promoting work design for resilient and innovative teams

01/01/2026 - 12/31/2028

Research area Labour Policy and Health , Kerstin Guhlemann, Sonja Kirschall, Dorian Ludwinski, Iris Wroblewski

 

KoSpiRIT logo

Successful interpersonal exchange and good internal social relationships are key factors in the resilience and innovative strength of employees, teams, and organizations. These are ensured by social connectedness as a social phenomenon and psychologically measurable variable. Social connectedness is therefore a potent starting point for resilience-related measures, but as such it has not yet been sufficiently researched for effective practical implementation, even though socially erosive processes of hybridization and flexibilization of work create an urgent need for action. 

Work design and team-building measures that promote connectedness must be based on an analysis of existing relationship qualities and implemented in a tailored manner in order to achieve sustainable success and acceptance by employees. However, no validated instruments are currently available for this purpose. Cooperative games in particular offer great potential that remains untapped due to this desideratum.

In order to make the prerequisites and opportunities for promoting connectedness in flexible work contexts as a basis for individual, team, and organizational resilience theoretically tangible and practically usable, an interdisciplinary network of scientific and practical partners is participating in the development of a toolset for diagnosing social connectedness and recommending suitable work design measures and cooperative games for strengthening it. The toolset will be tested in the IT industry and disseminated across industries via a multiplier network.

The Social Research Center is focusing its sub-project on work design that promotes connectedness and its place in the context of humane work from a sociological and media studies perspective. The aim is to further develop the systemic understanding of resilience, which is gaining ground in research, in a targeted scientific manner and to prepare it for practical application. 

BMFTR

BMFTR logo

Resilience, defined as the ability of companies, teams, and individuals to adapt to the dynamic challenges they face, which need to be identified in a timely manner, successfully overcome, processed with rapid recovery, and used for further development, is in all its facets heavily dependent on functional perception, communication, and action capabilities. Central to this are interpersonal processes of exchange between different perspectives in a suitable organizational climate. An important factor for the sustainability of such exchange processes is the existing degree of social connectedness between colleagues, which is why the quality of social relationships in companies should be seen as key to establishing, securing, and promoting resilience at the individual, team, and organizational levels. However, there is a double desideratum here in that, on the one hand, social connectedness as a potent starting point for resilience-related measures for effective practical implementation has not yet been sufficiently researched scientifically and operationalized, and on the other hand, existing practical aids for its development often do not have the desired effects due to a lack of case-specific suitability.

Existing recommendations for promoting social cohesion among employees focus, among other things, on spatially connecting work design measures such as smart working or team presence days, as well as team-building events and (cooperative) team games. Although these measures have the potential to promote connectedness, cooperation, and creativity, the practical experience of the IT companies involved in the project and the consulting practice of the project partner AuG show that team-building measures with an event or game character tend to meet with resistance among employees, and that work design measures tend to promote the expansion of existing connectedness rather than its development between groups that are still distant from each other. With regard to counteracting differences and distances in increasingly diverse and distributed workforces, improving social relationships, and thus increasing the resilience of employees, teams, and organizations, there is a lack of tools for differentiated and tailored recommendations of existing measures that contribute not only to the development and maintenance of work-related connectedness, but also to its creation. According to the project's initial thesis, in order to achieve the desired effects and be accepted by the workforce, both playful team-building and work design measures must be selected or designed more decisively according to the degree of connectedness that exists between employees and the forms in which they work together.

On a scientific level, the project aims to supplement, differentiate, and model the existing overlaps between psychological research on connectedness and loneliness and applied research on human-centered work design and game-based learning. The resulting model will be used to further develop these existing aspects for the analysis and promotion of resilience in a scientific manner and to deepen them in an application-oriented way. This connection should enable a detailed and practice-oriented understanding of work-related forms of connectedness and relationship qualities as resilience factors in various forms of collaboration and at various career-related levels. The central scientific result is thus the linking of resilience concepts with a) novel findings on the connection potential of various constellations of cooperation in organizations, b) work design measures specifically tailored to these constellations, and c) cooperative games appropriate to the respective existing level of connection.

The technical objectives lie in the participatory development, testing, and validation of a practical tool for diagnosing and describing social connectedness within and between teams, and the derivation of evidence-based measures for strengthening relevant dimensions of social connectedness as a key factor for the (further) development of individual, team, and organizational resilience. The tool shall be realized in form of a web interface (as a query tool with a stored database) with accompanying materials to support operational application. Specifically, the toolset should include the following functions and enable the following areas of application:

1. Analysis of connectedness within the company/team structures

2. Setting appropriate development goals for team cohesion

3a. Selection of appropriate work design measures

3b. Selection of appropriate cooperative games to build cohesion

4. Use of the above steps as a continuous improvement process within the framework of occupational health management/workplace health promotion or HR activities

Associated partners: 

  • Unternehmerverband Norddeutschland Mecklenburg-Schwerin e.V.
  • Offensive Mittelstand
  • Zukunftszentrum MV+

As a joint project of the funding initiative “Working Practices for Creativity, Innovation, and Resilient Value Creation (AKIRes)” within the BMFTR program “Future of Value Creation,” the KoSpiRIT project pursues a dual objective. The prerequisites and opportunities for promoting social connectedness in flexible, hybrid work contexts as a basis for individual, team-related, and organizational resilience shall be made both scientifically tangible and practically usable. 

With this approach, the project aims to enable SMEs in particular to build and develop the connectedness of their employees in challenging constellations and working relationships in a targeted manner, thereby strengthening the resilience of employees, teams, and organizations. SMEs are to be provided with a manageable toolset for assessing their needs and opportunities with regard to strengthening the cohesion of their workforce and thus their own adaptability in times of skills shortages, diversification and scattering of teams.

The central result is a toolset for companies and inter-company actors that supports the differentiated analysis of social relationships in various work constellations, identifies suitable development perspectives with regard to resilience-promoting elements, and enables the selection and implementation of the most suitable work design measures and cooperative games to strengthen connectedness in order to make resilience-related measures more tailored, more acceptable, efficient, and sustainable. The toolset incorporates the results of scientific research, project surveys, practical testing, validation by accompanying experts, and evaluation, which are carried out in a participatory manner in the science-practice network over the course of the project. The toolset will be implemented as a web application and made available to company and inter-company actors.

KoSpiRIT is divided into five project stages: mapping, modeling, testing, transfer, and dissemination (see Figure 1). The mapping phase serves to lay the foundations for building resilience in companies by promoting connectedness through work design measures and cooperative games. This is done by conducting a scientific and practical inventory and field sketch of usable criteria, possible measures, games, and experiences with them. The objectives of this phase are 1) scientific assessment from the perspective of various occupational science disciplines and method development, 2) practical assessment and field sketching of practices in companies and the consulting landscape, 3) the inventory of cooperation and connection structures in the two partner companies from the IT industry, and 4) the creation of an overview of suitable cooperative games.

The modeling phase transfers the mappings and other results of the sub-work packages from the mapping phase into an integrated overall concept. In the process, problem constellations consisting of forms of connectedness, cooperation structures, and framework conditions of work are modeled with assigned connectedness-related development needs, and typologies of problem constellations existing in operational practice and addressed by design measures are formed. On this basis and via the typified development goals, the problem constellations identified at the company and inter-company level are finally matched with a) game-based prevention and intervention offers and b) work design measures that promote connectedness (cooperation-connectedness-intervention matrix). Various perspectives from science and practice are thus participatorily integrated to create an initial draft tool that can then be tested in companies and in cross-company consulting practice. 

The next phase then involves testing the draft tool in companies and across companies for validation and further development. The draft should be usable by individuals within the company (e.g., managers, occupational health management) and enable a description of the framework conditions of work, the cooperation structures, and an assessment of connectedness. On this basis, it should provide recommendations for possible interventions in the form of cooperative games and work design measures that promote connectedness, supplemented by implementation guidelines so that they can be thoroughly tested. This will be accompanied by an evaluation of the use of the tool, which will focus on the work design measures and cooperative games recommended by the tool as well as the usability of the digital tool design (process evaluation).

The transfer phase focuses on consolidating the results as databases of work design measures and cooperative games that promote connectedness, including relevant practical guidance and transfer materials as inventories for the project, as well as the subsequent development and finalization of the digital tool, including individually usable databases with collections of analysis tools as well as work design measures and cooperative games that promote connectedness and resilience.

The dissemination phase includes communicating the results to the scientific community throughout the entire project period and establishing the developed tool with a web application and overviews of the measures and cooperative games with accompanying implementation instructions and recommendations in operational practice—both directly in the project companies, which integrate them into their occupational health management and personnel development, as well as indirectly through the consulting practice of PAG and dissemination via the multiplier network expanded during the project.