Gamification is a popular method for making the user experience more engaging and enjoyable. Over the past decades, gamification has entered almost every people’s engagement process including the workplace. Managers are realizing that internal gamification can promote employee loyalty, productivity, and engagement.
Businesses have discovered that by incorporating game elements into the standard employee-manager dynamics, employees are more likely to stick around, especially in a remote setting. Here’s how to use gamification to benefit your employees.
What Is Gamification?
Gamification is the process of incorporating game elements into non-game activities such as working or studying. Gamification in the workplace can boost employee engagement, satisfaction, and retention. This is particularly crucial for businesses with a remote workforce who want to provide a positive employee experience.
Benefits of Gamification
Gamification has enormous potential benefits for any workplace, particularly when used in workforce training. Gamifying employee onboarding and introductory training can reduce employee turnover and create a more engaged workforce.
Gamification could be especially beneficial for the remote workforce. Gamification can instantly connect the dispersed workforce around a single point of reference everyone can relate to.
1. Makes the learning process enjoyable and engaging
Gamification techniques such as interactive visuals and infographics can help people retain up to three times more information than they would otherwise. Gamification increases a person’s willingness to study and learn more enjoyably and interactively.Getting personally interested in the content is a significant barrier to learning. Pacing is provided by gamification, allowing students to process information comfortably.
2. Reduces employee stress
Gamification, according to employees, makes them happier and more productive at work. Stress contributes to negative work environments, an unhappy workforce, and increased job dissatisfaction.Employee performance improves when employees are less stressed and more relaxed. Gamification in the workplace can significantly improve employee outcomes.
3. Attracts a younger workforce
When it comes to onboarding a digitally native workforce, gamification is especially effective. Younger generations have distinct motivational and behavioural patterns, necessitating a set of techniques that better align their learning and skill development styles with business goals. Gamified onboarding is a natural, enjoyable, and effective solution for a changing workforce.
Where to Use Gamification?
It is always more fruitful to focus on the areas where gamification has a greater effect on the desired outcome. Gamification systems can help an organization in a variety of ways:
1. Development and Learning
Games can help both new and experienced employees learn new skills. Gamification of learning platforms has the potential to improve retention and results.
2. Customer Service
Gamification achievements and rewards can motivate employees to provide better service to customers. They also encourage employees to share new solutions and ideas with their colleagues.
3. Improving Sales
Gamification can boost salespeople’s collaboration. It rewards not only the final sale but also all the steps that lead up to it.
4. Teamwork
Games can help teams share information and learn from one another even if they are in different offices around the world.
5. Marketing
Employers can encourage employees to share company information on social media.
6. Inventory Management
Gamification encourages efficient processing and shipping.
7. Human Capital
HR professionals can use gamification to track performance reviews, develop leadership skills, provide peer appreciation, engage applicants, and increase referrals.
8. Product Development
Games can help employees finish projects on time, collaborate more effectively, and be more efficient.
9. Creativity
Employers can reward employees who come up with novel ideas.
10. Corporate Culture
Gamification can help promote the company’s culture through various projects and programs. It can assist employees in identifying opportunities to participate in shaping the company culture. Furthermore, it can improve access to information about the company and its values.
Why Does Gamification Fail & How to Avoid Failure?
Gamification in the workplace frequently fails due to internal communications’ inability to connect gamification in the workplace to their company’s business objectives. Furthermore, many managers fail to listen to their employees’ unique needs and motivations.
This often results in gamification projects that are not valued by the employees.
Internal communications professionals and business leaders should keep the following tips in mind to ensure their gamification efforts truly create engaged employees:
- Define the goals and objectives you hope to achieve by implementing gamification in the workplace. Do you want to increase employee engagement? Attained specific business objectives?
- Learn to listen to and comprehend your employees’ specific needs. What motivates them? What drives them?
- Create a gamification program that is tailored to your employees’ specific skills and motivations.
- When implementing gamification in the workplace, make sure to communicate the activity’s purpose to your employees.
- Experiment with the gamification process. Analyze what works and what doesn’t and adjust your gamification strategy as needed.
Ensure that all internal communications about the gamification process truly measure and gauge employees’ reactions.
Are they reading the emails you sent about implementing gamification in the workplace?
Are they reacting?
You can determine whether your employees are on board with the idea in the first place by measuring employee communications with email tracking tools.
Things to Keep in Mind
Gamification is effective when used correctly, but it can backfire if used incorrectly. It is critical to foster a healthy sense of competition, but not so much that your employees become demotivated. Sims reminds employers that people learn at different rates and that competition can be discouraging for those who don’t progress as quickly.
Another issue to be aware of is employees becoming complacent with your gamification program and settling into a consistent, comfortable routine.
It is critical to introduce new internal contests and real-world rewards regularly to reignite excitement and boost employee motivation; otherwise, you risk a fall in employee engagement and overall performance.
You should also exercise caution when using external incentives such as gift cards and products. While these things are nice to include as a perk or contest prize on occasion, using them as your sole incentive sends the wrong message about why people should be motivated to do a good job.
Employees aren’t training for a gift certificate; they’re training to add professional skills for long-term advancement. True business gamification emphasizes intrinsic rewards and benefits. It assists employees on their long-term path to greater success.
Draft Expert Gamification Programs
Gamification is a popular approach for a manager with a remote workforce that can make employee engagement fun. Including game elements in routine workplace activities can boost productivity, especially when combined with immediate feedback and the use of public recognition and rewards to further motivate a changing workforce with help of RewardPort programs which will provide you features such as scratch cards, spin the wheels, and slot machine pop-ups.
