If you’re looking for ways to keep your employees motivated and engaged with their work, you might be considering gamification. Here’s everything you need to know about gamification, and whether it could work for your business.
What is gamification?
Gamification is the idea that if you can incorporate game mechanics into non-game scenarios, you can encourage and motivate customers and employees to continually engage with your work, or your product. The theory is that by adding in these game mechanics you can drive higher productivity, or give your customers or employees a higher sense of achievement.
If you’ve used an application like Duolingo, you’ve experienced gamification in action. Duolingo rewards you for continuing to engage with the application; learning new words, practicing putting sentences together, and completing lessons provides you with XP, as well as a timed score, and a percentage of how many words you get correct. These kinds of game mechanics have proved incredibly effective at getting users to continually engage with the app.
These game mechanics might include things like;
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Streaks (e.g. a record of how many days in a row you have engaged with a certain application, or completed a certain workload)
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Leaderboards (e.g. tracking how many jobs an employee has completed, or how many tasks a user has finished against others)
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Challenges (e.g. encouraging staff or customers to complete a certain kind of job or , in exchange for an achievement)
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Badges (e.g. a badge awarded to staff or users for completing something in a certain space of time, or completing a certain number of assignments)
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Points (e.g. awarding users or employees for completing tasks with points)
What’s great about gamification?
Gamification can be a really effective way to incentivise behaviour, and one of the reasons it is so effective is because it provides recognition. Employees want to feel like their work is being acknowledged, appreciated and recognised by the organisation, and gamification repeatedly offers that acknowledgement with things like points, experience and badges.
When gamification is done well, your users or employees understand their goals, and track their progress throughout a certain task. Large projects can be broken down into a series of smaller tasks, which help staff to feel that they’re moving through the project more quickly. There can be a positive effect on your workplace culture and the social aspect of your business, whether that’s through friendly competition or collaboration to reach a common goal.
The issue with gamification
Although gamification sounds great in principle, how you implement gamification into your business really matters. One of the main issues that businesses can encounter with gamification is incentivising the wrong behaviour, which results in unintended consequences.
For example, a company that creates different products may decide to implement gamification to encourage their employees. The production line now tracks how many products each user completes, which is great for encouraging higher productivity and output for employees.
However, this gamification doesn’t differentiate between a more complicated product that takes an employee an hour, and an easier product that takes an employee ten minutes. This could result in users becoming demotivated when working on more complicated products, as their work doesn’t result in as many points. In addition, employees have been encouraged to work faster, which could result in a lack of safety precautions being taken.
Could your business benefit from gamification?
If your business is thinking about introducing gamification, you need to consider the following:
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What behaviour are we trying to encourage? (learning new skills, helping other employees, improving proficiency?)
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What unintended consequences could this have? (could this discourage safe working practices, or quantity over quality? If so, how could you counter this?)
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What rewards are we going to use? (are you going to offer real work rewards, or achievements like points and badges?)
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How will we keep people engaged? (How easy is it for employees to start using these features? What can we do to keep their motivation up, and focus on the long term rather than the short term?)
Businesses thinking about gamification should also consult their employees, and find out what would most benefit them. Ask your staff what they need, and what they would prefer from gamification being implemented, and encourage them to feedback their experiences to you. This can make the difference between a short-term gamification model that fizzles out, and a long-term gamification model which pushes your employees to fulfil their potential.
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