It can be a full-time job to keep staff members engaged and motivated. When employees are motivated, the workday goes quickly, their excitement is contagious, their clients are well-cared-for, and the business prospers. Any effort an organization makes to increase motivation and involvement is worthwhile. Finding tools that inspire workers in a way they appreciate and even look forward to is the difficult part.
The solution might be gamification. Digital or traditional workplace contests or games are used in this new employee engagement trend to reward employees for their hard work engagement. Gamification enables employees to mark accomplishments, receive badges, advance in status, or win prizes. You can put them up to encourage employees to develop their skill sets, outperform their own records, or compete against one another. Only your (and your employees’) imagination can limit the gamification possibilities.
How companies utilize gamification
We’ve talked extensively about the benefits of gamification in training, but that’s only the beginning. Gamification can be useful for involving staff in a range of activities, such as:
- Customer service/customer satisfaction
- Sales
- Inventory management
- Team building
- Project management
Businesses frequently engage in gamification without even recognizing it. Let’s take the scenario where you are the concession stand manager at a movie theater and want to boost the amount of popcorn upsells. To encourage your employees to upsell, set up a contest with a prize for the cashiers who sell the most popcorn in a particular month. Even if your point-of-sale system doesn’t support gamification, you can still keep track of each cashier’s large-popcorn sales and provide your team with regular updates on who is in the lead.
Of course, there is technology available to make gamification an even more essential component of the employee retention experience if you want to get the most out of it. Modern eLearning, customer relationship management (CRM), point-of-sale, and other systems are incorporating game mechanics. Such game mechanics include badges, point systems, and leaderboards.
Resourcing 360, a state-of-the-art learning management system, even integrates games into the educational process to aid with student memory. If your team employs any form of corporate software, there’s a strong chance that some level of gamification can be enabled or that an alternative software can deliver the gamified features you’re looking for.
How to use gamification to boost employee engagement
Gamification in the workplace has many benefits that can raise talent retention and employee engagement levels. It can be applied to strengthen and support:
- Employee onboarding
- Ongoing training and skills reinforcement
- Team building
- Company goals and KPIs
- Employee career development
But it only works if you follow a few golden rules:
- To appeal to various personalities and motivations, use a diversity of game mechanics. Leaderboards, badges, and social features are a few examples. Resourcing 360 employs a number of game elements in addition to actual gameplay, and users who prefer to concentrate on the learning materials can turn off the games entirely. The experience is completely individualized for each user.
- Reward staff with genuine benefits and awards (if your company culture permits). It won’t be nearly as motivating if the prize is just the ability to gloat. We’ve observed 15% greater participation rates among teams working for tangible rewards like incentives, flex time, or preferred parking among our own clients.
- Make it both social and competitive. The most effective game mechanics occur when staff members can cooperate while engaging in friendly rivalry. Gamification should foster social interaction and a sense of community.
- Give immediate feedback. Using badges, progress reports, digital graphs, or other visual aids, players should be able to view their progress in real time if they’re using gamification software. If you’re holding a non-digital game or contest, you should keep participants updated via a website, an office whiteboard, or other accessible media.
Whatever objective you’re aiming to accomplish, the secret is to incorporate friendly rivalry and other game features. These initiatives will maintain staff interest because:
- Gamification can inspire workers. It all comes down to talent retention. Gamification appeals to people’s intrinsic impulses for incentives or extrinsic motives. But as staff members succeed using the game principles, they also feel an inherent fulfillment, and a sense of pride in themselves.
- Gamification strengthens a sense of mission. To come to work engagement every day and perform the same responsibilities can get boring. The bigger organizational objectives can cause employees to feel alienated. Gamification may provide employees with a sense of enthusiasm and fresh purpose when used appropriately and in conjunction with the company’s KPIs.
How not to use gamification
There are ideal practices for gamifying employee engagement, but you should also be aware of certain bad ideas.
- Don’t make it a requirement. At least not in the workplace, not everyone enjoys playing games and competing. Team members who only want to do their work engagement may object to the idea of forced gaming. Allow folks to choose not to participate.
- Use positive reinforcement instead of negative reinforcement. Employees will have a bad opinion of the game mechanics if poor game performance is linked to actual consequences in the workplace, contradicting the initial goal of employing gamification. The gaming itself should always be enjoyable, even though you want to make sure that everyone stays responsible. Axonify uses casual gaming in part because of this. Axonify games to aid in learning, but you don’t need to be proficient at them to benefit from training. You could even decide not to play at all and just concentrate on the information.
- Avoid creating games that have no function. Gamification is most effective when used to support a goal. Reinforce is the key term. The gaming experience shouldn’t be the major activity; rather, it should complement the main activity, whether it be team building, sales goal-achieving, or employee training. The primary action or goal would be to sell more popcorn, using our earlier movie theatre scenario as an example. The upselling competition would help to further that overarching objective.
- When discussing delicate subjects, don’t be careless. The gamification of training programs is highly relevant here. If you’re offering sensitivity training, sexual harassment training, or any other kind of training that deals with the delicate subject matter, you don’t want to diminish it by throwing in some race cars and bright space aliens.
