5 Benefits Of Gamification For Enterprises

Gamification is fast emerging game based techniques to boost employees. Enterprises are adding this techniques in the training process to increase the learning engagement and focusing more on satisfying their employee by creating positive competition among co-workers which helps in reducing attrition. Adding interest or fun at work is a good way to create happy and more engaged employees and help enhance workplace productivity.

What Is Gamification?

“A game is a form of play with goals and structure.”– Kevin J. Maroney

Gamification is the process of applying game principles and mechanics into non-game environments. It isn’t about designing games, it’s about adding elements of gaming into a business activity to increase engagement, motivation and participation for better performance management.
How gamification is benefiting enterprises? And the reasons why you shouldn’t delay deploying an enterprise gamification program are-

1. Boost Employee Engagement

Good enterprise gamification is focused more on personalized leaderboards and benchmarks for the employee, which helps employer to use unbiased and accurate information in order to assess the performance of their employees. This will motivate the employee, letting employee know how they are doing. Employees who feel their hard work is valued and engaged in something entertaining are always happier than those who interact a little or not at all, throughout the day. Creating a workplace that promotes fun activities will help maintain a high-caliber workforce. In addition to that, recognition is another element of employee satisfaction and well-being. Gamification allows to monitor which employee has made substantial improvements from last few weeks. Gamification allows you to take notice and recognize those employees who make real progress. Recognition is the key ingredient to be satisfied.

2. To Know The Customers

Enterprise gamification helps organizations to collect accurate customer data. For example; whenever a user visits a website, the platform asks the user to login with a valid email id or social credentials. Each user interaction is associated with clicks, badges, points and achievements which generate valuable customer information and insights for the companies. Once we have generated a large amount of data, it needs to be analyzed correctly which will help the company to figure out how to build a better business and engage in that. Some gamification vendors offer analytics as a part of their product. For example, Badgeville offers the Behavior Analytics software to measure customer engagement, growth, behavior, and  user activities. Bunchball has Nitro Connectors, a product that connects their gamification platform to enterprise software such as SharePoint or Yammer to collect activity and behavior from employees.

By implementing gamification, employer will also be able to collect objective performance data, employee’s productivity and gather valuable data for the company. Employees will be rated based on the real, hard data instead of what is being said about them or a post-facto manual leaderboard. Appreciating employee can motivate them to work hard, and this automatically will be shown in numbers.

3. A Vehicle For New Product Launches

Gamification can also be used as a tool to introduce new product in a creative way, like giving a free trial of a new product can let the customer test out the product. Company on the launch of a new product gives a 30-day free trial for the customers to know the benefits of having that product. Also, do an onboarding program like LevelUp by tasking them with assignments where they can earn points and badges upon completion of certain level. 

For example: Jillian Michaels encourages users to stay on track with her fitness programs using gamification techniques for a number of fitness challenge. With a multitude of challenges to choose from, users can select a program that’s most closely aligned with personal goals and lifestyle. Each challenge uses its own set of gamification techniques, such as contests and prizes, badges, partner and group challenges. Many companies also give discounts on products in exchange for a person’s email address, for example, if the company’s goal is customer engagement, than offer rewards like 10% off on some items on subscription. However, we also need to make sure it’s for the right audience. Otherwise users might get the 10% off and unsubscribe.

4. Feedback To Solve Business Problems

Companies use customer feedback as a sounding board to make required changes and decisions for future growth. Gamification can be an avenue to crowdsourcing if the company uses the customer feedback and tries to solve the issues. For example: companies like Allstate and GE have turned to crowdsourcing to help them come up with answers to complex business questions.Similar way internal feedback also plays an important role too. When the feedback to employees are given timely and regularly, it gives an opportunity to correct the issues and enhance a sense of control and mastery. For example: If the employee is struggling on a certain measure, can be notified so that it helps in solving the issue immediately. Feedback will help business to understand how they did yesterday and how are they doing today and how those measurements fit with the goals they want to reach.

5. Performance Management

Gamification helps employees to get a sense of progress on their own by creating a sense of mastery, because gamification allows employees to keep a track and record of their work. Also gives work-related satisfaction by giving opportunity for an employee to feel that they are mastering on what they do. Using gamification analytics, the employer can optimize the area of difficulty that an employee in facing at work. When done right, gamification allows employees to track down their performance at work through personal benchmarks and giving rewards for specific tasks which will motivate them and increase the participation.

Gamification in the enterprise has the potential to produce remarkable benefits. It is a tool that has to be managed with great care and needs to be focused on intrinsic motivations of users to leverage more from it and optimize its effectiveness.