Driving higher levels of employee engagement is becoming a major challenge for organizations worldwide. One strategy for enhancing employee engagement is implementing gamification.
Organizations can use it to motivate and empower their listless workforce to enhance productivity and performance efficiency.
Research has shown that gamification in organizations can enhance engagement, productivity, and happiness of the workforce by more than 80%.
Contrary to popular belief, gamification is not about turning a workplace into an arena for playing games.
Gamification is about using elements of gaming in a non-gaming environment such as business to drive workforce engagement.
It focuses on human psychology as a means of driving engagement and uses technology to apply it in a business environment.
It taps into common motivating factors such as recognition, competition, and rewards and leverages various game elements such as collaboration, opportunities, and progression.
Gamification is one of the few engagement strategies that can be used across key areas within an organization.
Implementing gamification can provide great benefits for organizations.
Hence, it is a popular choice for transforming workplaces with many millennials.
The most important of these benefits are listed as follows:
1. It offers real-time feedback, as employees don’t have to work toward annual goals. Instead, they can work toward real-time, measurable, meaningful targets like a game.
2. Gamification helps to eliminate fears of favoritism by making the system transparent using gaming scoreboards and leaderboards.
3. Since psychology is integral to gamification, it makes work-life more enjoyable, as if the employees are playing a game.
Implementing the concept of gamification within a business environment is slightly more complicated than creating a rewards program.
Organizations should design it strategically to cater to the distinct employee dynamics within a specific work environment.
That is why it is essential to consider the following critical steps for successful implementation:
1. Understanding employee needs
2. Establishing the business case
3. Ensuring the involvement of all stakeholders
4. Measuring progress – repeat and refresh
Implementing an engagement strategy with gamification requires careful assessment of employees’ needs, goals, preferences, aspirations, and behaviors.
Obtaining this information provides an organization with the necessary insights for identifying issues that gamification needs to address.
This, in turn, helps the organization to clearly define the basic framework for designing and implementing the concept.
Organizations must also define employee behaviors concerning the processes for effectively integrating gaming elements.
Establishing a robust business case is essential for successfully developing and implementing a gamification program at the workplace.
Hence, this requires proper identification of organizational goals for gamification, the key metrics, and the business impact.
Therefore, organizations need to define the expected changes in employee motivation, behavior, and attitude that the program should bring about.
This is essential for defining KPIs relevant to the gamification process and the expected return on investment.
Implementing the gamification program requires the contribution of various stakeholders within the organization.
So, ensuring the active involvement of various stakeholders is essential to achieving the desired outcomes from the implementation of the program.
Hence, for this, the organizations need to align the program with the organization’s core objectives.
Importantly, employees, who are the most significant stakeholders in the process, should be aware of the program’s expectations.
Also, measuring the outcomes of implementing the gamification program through various pre-defined KPIs is essential for ensuring its success.
Project leaders also need to interact with various stakeholders to understand their experience with the program correctly.
This information and the program KPIs can be used to fine-tune the program.
Hence, this approach of repetitive feedback and refreshing the program can help organizations maximize their potential.
When done right, workplace gamification has the potential to create the outcomes that it promises in the form of changed behaviors and attitudes, significant improvement in employee engagement, and a rise in productivity and efficiency, leading to business growth.
Lead author: Sagar Chaudhuri, the Co-Founder and CEO of HiFives. He is an HR Tech Evangelist with over 25 years of corporate and entrepreneurship experience. In the past, Sagar has worked in leadership roles with companies such as Genpact, Infosys, and ICICI Bank. He has an engineering degree from IIT Kharagpur and an MBA from IIM Lucknow. Connect on LinkedIn
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