Gamification at Workplace: Everything HR Needs to Know
Elements of gamification have found places in our personal lives through different ways. One of the most common examples is the customer loyalty industry where customers can earn digital points and rewards once they achieve the set criterion. This is very common in the aviation and retail industry where flyers earn points on miles and shoppers earn points for every time they shop; all of which are redeemable towards certain goods or services.
This same concept is going a long way in organizations in the learning space, employee engagement as well as in the recruitment industry. Gamification is also getting popular as a valuable technique to change the behaviour of the employees at the workplace.
What is gamification?
Gamification is the implementation of game elements in a non-game context such as at the workplace where point scoring, winning rewards, maintaining of leaderboards, encouraging competition, etc. are deployed as ways to inculcate the desired behavior or results among employees. It can also be used to enhance employee engagement, simplify the learning and in employee training.
According to a gamification survey, 80% of employees enjoy the use of gamification software, 87% employees feel more productive, 84% feel more engaged and around 82% feel happier at work.
If gamification is done right, this can help to achieve all the key organizational objectives.
Here are some of the obvious benefits of workplace gamification:
- Promotes friendly competition
Employers can infuse a sense of competition amongst employees and motivate them to perform better. A leaderboard can help track the milestone achieved or to maintain a score board.
- Makes rewarding more transparent
Employees tend to perform better when there is continuous feedback and rewards involved. A gamified framework helps keep this process more transparent to employees.
- Imparts a sense of achievement
With healthy competition between employees and continuous winning bring fulfillment and a sense of achievement.
- Real time feedback
The scoring and leaderboard element help employees get real time feedback of their performance.
Here are 6 ways in which your company can deploy gamification in the workplace:
1. Gamification to boost employee performance
One of the best ways to use gamification at the workplace is by introducing it for increasing or upgrading employee performance. Salesforce is one such great example which launched a game-based learning to enhance their employees’ performance by introducing the ‘Big Game Hunter’- a program to shoot up the use of its complex CRM system as well as to increase employee engagement between its sales representatives. The employees started off as learners but soon found their way towards rewarding statuses as they were now becoming pros at their new CRM features. The outcome of this program was a great success as the compliance increased by over 40% among customers.
For your organisation, identify a low performance area and explore how it can be gamified to boost employee performance.
2. Level up the Employee Engagement with gamification
Gamification has become very common when it comes to employee engagement as research has proven time and again that engaged employees are more productive employees.
Keeping in mind their knowledge management objective, Accenture, with a use of gamification encouraged behaviour of sharing important pieces of content among peers. Employees earned points for sharing blogs and re-usable documents with their peers; for completing their online profile and for sharing content, etc. The accumulated points were converted to rewards and this led to increase in productivity, explosion of innovative ideas and Accenture excelled at their engagement process.
Here’s another interesting case study; one of our clients introduced an employee engagement platform – Buzzz in their business divisions in India as their offices are scattered in different location within India with maximum employees doing field work. They found that it was becoming difficult to connect and engage employees with company values and were looking for a platform to unify their company culture, increase employee engagement and communicate with them regularly. The adoption process was smooth and quick as the platform has an amazingly simple user interface. It was unbelievable to see the brand’s employee engagement boost by 70.5% and their happiness score increased from 0.6 to 1.1%, in the first two months. The gamification elements like leaderboard, badges and points helped them to keep their employees engaged and created a culture of appreciation as well as the news section helped them to communicate and reach each and every employee at the same time.
Discover the gaps between your company and employee’s engagement and explore what gamification element can help level up your employee engagement.
3. Gamify your onboarding process
Onboarding in Human Resource is a process of introducing newly hired employees into an organization by passing on the necessary information, knowledge and behaviours to the new joinees and making them an insider.
A great example is of Deloitte where they created a video game which gave a virtual office tour to the new employees. The process began with an arena at the airport where visitors (new employees) are allowed to choose their destination like Hong Kong, Beijing or Shanghai then the visitors fly to that city and arrive at their local Deloitte virtual office, where they can engage in a conversation with the employees and learn more about their office culture.
For your workplace, map your onboarding process in detail and explore ways to introduce gamification to accelerate the onboarding activity.
4. Make your learning & development more fun and interesting
Leaning and development is of utmost concern to the organization, especially HR. To have your employees up to date with the latest tools and platforms as well as the required skill is a must. But having every employee undergo the learning process by using the old school way is a little tricky.
Cisco addressed this problem where they started using gamification principles in one of their social media training to build this new skill set. The training was divided into departments where the marketing team learned to use Twitter as an extended service to their customers, Sales team were trained to use LinkedIn to reach their new customers and the HR team learned to use LinkedIn to search for candidates.
They measured the learning process by having three different levels of certification and earned badges for completing different challenges.
Does your workplace have a good percentage of millennial’s? Review your learning and development activity and think about gamifying trainings to make them fun yet constructive.
5. A cool way to train new employees
One of the crucial aspects of organization success is having the right training and onboarding process for the new employees. Having the new employees go under the entire induction and training process could be a little difficult in the beginning. Gamification is an outstanding way to train new employees.
To tackle this situation Deloitte introduced gamification at the workplace to train their employees. They digitalized and gamified their training where the newbies had to team up with other new joinees and learn about privacy, ethics, compliance, and procedures online. They embedded gamification elements like badges, leaderboards and missions to engage the new employees.
For your organization, recognize the gap in the knowledge and understanding of your company culture amongst new employees and identify ways to gamify and make it effective.
6. Game up your internal communication
To have a smooth functioning at different levels in the organization, it is important to have regular feedback and communication as a lack of internal communication can lead to disengagement.
Target introduced a non-digital way to communicate real time with their managers as it was noticed that the cashiers were rarely receiving feedback from their line managers.
To tackle this situation, the company decided to enable cashiers to play a game when checking out items for customers. With the gamified system, a light was installed at the cashiers post, the red and green lights that blinked showed that the items were scanned optimally. This helped the company to boost internal communication as well as their employee engagement as before this concept, the cashiers were unaware of how effective their communication was with the manager.
Find the flaw in communication at different levels in your organisation and learn how gamification can help bridge the gap and game up your internal communication.
Apart from the above ways a company can also deploy gamification for their recruiting process as well as to increase their employee retention.
The important key to a successful execution of workplace gamification is to first understand the need and objective. Gamification doesn’t mean to simply turn the workplace into a game, but understanding the psychology of your employees to motivate them, drive engagement and improve the business results. It can be used by HR and the organization to attract young talents, educate employees, optimize workflows and retain employees.
The adoption and execution of gamification can be easy for one organization and a struggle for another depending on the objective, number of employees as well as the mode of execution. A digital platform can be easy to implement as it is hassle free and less space bound.
Buzzz is a comprehensive platform which can be used for employee engagement, learning and development, for communicating with employees, for recognizing and rewarding and much more. It offers gamification elements like leaderboard, badges, points and scores, levels and more. To know about our platform and to understand how you can use gamification at your workplace – Book a Demo.