Gamification Elements That Can Boost Employees’ Engagement

The global gamification market is expected to touch $22,913.0 million by 2022.

-P&S Market Research

Gamification upshot into a prompt success. Organizations whose strategies include gamification techniques are going to sustain their employee participation for the longer period of time. It increases organization’s productivity, employee adherence, and customer satisfaction. The Gamification Research Network says “Gamification primarily aims at increasing users’ positive motivation towards given activities or use of technology, and thereby, increase[s] the quantity and quality of the output of the given activities.”

There are various industries who have embraced this concept and used this game mechanics to increase their efficiency. Gartner recognized how the “UK Department for Work and Pensions” had implemented the mechanics in their most recent report. According to Gartner, “The Department for Work and Pensions created an innovation game called Idea Street to decentralize innovation and generate ideas from its 120,000 people across the organization. Idea Street is a social collaboration platform involving game mechanics that includes points, leaderboards, and a “buzz index.” Within the first 18 months, Idea Street had approximately 4,500 users and had generated 1,400 ideas, 63 of which had gone forward for implementation”.

The primary focus of a company should be to engage their employees and customers efficiently and rest everything will fall in place. These techniques take actions and perform the most solid way to secure the feedback of their employees and customers. Incorporating game elements such as rewards, badges, trophies, rules, target, feedbacks, etc., can aid your enterprise to untangle the real-time challenges. And of course, using the right technology makes gamification more effective, more efficient and easier to deploy and manage.

Karl Kapp, Gamification analyst and consultant said, “originally, gamification was mostly about points, badges, and leaderboards, but it has changed to include additional game elements such as story, feedback loops, and the freedom to fail.”

Let’s see how implementing gamification can benefit your business.

Effective training

One of the basic elements that you get by integrating game mechanics into your workforce is effective training. It will turn your normal everyday training into a fun, more engaging and more interactive activity for your employees. The benefits are indicative of how gamified training has inspired employees, enhanced their productivity while growing their knowledge. Forbes report states, according to The Federation of American Scientists (FAS), games are a powerful learning tool, resulting in 20% increase in player confidence, 90% improvement of learning retention, and 300% lift in task completion.

Focused behavioral change

Employee experience is a foremost priority of every enterprise. It’s often mistaken by leaders that competition is the most powerful process to motivate their employees. When you look into the bigger picture this isn’t the correct motivation process. Maybe to some extent presenting your employees’ performance in the leaderboards will motivate some of your employees but others will not. You’re simply running a campaign which is driving sales for your company.

Therefore it imparts an additional inspiration for an organization to have a focused behavior. So, when you have gamified behavior throughout the enterprise and if you’re able to measure them, you can make the toughest assignment into an easy one for your employees. Gabe Zichermann, an author, and CEO of Gamification Co. said, “the last mile is getting the consumer and employee to change their behavior. Gamification gives us a roadmap for how to do that. If you can engage, inspire and delight people, they will feel more empowered to make changes at work and in the world.”

Better engagement

What is the real game behind gamification? Game mechanics that are used in a business operation to encourage employees, manage behavioral change, and drive effective training leads to a better engagement.

Gamification design is focused on a more personalized employee experience, that gives employees a fair opportunity to evaluate and improve their performance. And when they see their individual performance improvement it drives better engagement in the workplace. As per LiveOps study, adding gamification increased 8% of their sales, reduced call times by 15% and increased their customer content by 9%.

Ford Canada Gamification Success Story

Brian Burke, a consultant with the Gartner Group and author of Gamify, defines gamification as the use of game mechanics to engage and motivate people to achieve their goals. Gamification is one husky approach employed by a company which is still in its introductory phase in the digital world and we are yet to explore its potential. Automobile manufacturer and seller Ford Motor Company of Canada initiated gamification for their employees in the training system to upskill them about the advanced technologies, current models, sales, and so on. Gamification approach boosted their employees’ engagement to 47% and the actions per user by 100% within 5 weeks, as per Yu-Kai Chou report.

Implementing gamification in a workplace has changed the entire work culture of an organization. Also, it has helped employers to build a healthy environment by energizing employees to stay fit, such as wearables tracker. The device allows employees to initiate health-related activities for themselves plus employers can offer healthcare benefits like insurance as per the data received from the tracker.

By 2020, 40% employees can cut their healthcare costs by wearing a fitness tracker.

-Gartner

Although it is enhancing productivity, you must always be willing to experiment even if you don’t get the desired outcome. Everything has its limitations and deadline, and this includes gamification too. Gamification originality can also fade away like Pokemon Go or any other trend in the market. But for now, it makes sense to invest in gamification, so, have a solid design prototype, as Gartner predicted 80% of corporate gamification efforts will fail because of poor design. Identify your constraints and your objectives before starting with gamification for your enterprise. You need to be prepared to control inflation and we believe that every enterprise in the next street will have an element of gamification in their business systems and in their company’s vision. This will be straight away chained to employees’ performance.