Gamification in business: create engagement with your colleagues through play
Gamification is a popular approach for making client experiences more enticing and amusing, but it is also applicable in the world of business among colleagues. Introducing games boosts employee morale and aims to promote employee loyalty and engagement by making work processes fun and rewarding. When working remotely or delivering training remotely and in the office alike, internal gamification can promote loyalty, productivity, motivation and engagement among employees.
The quality of the gaming experience in the workplace will be the main element in increasing or improving employee engagement — and, by association, client experience — because most people like playing. Here is how you can offer gamification and the mechanisms of play to the benefit of your employees by gamifying your workplace.
Making games successful in the workplace
The key to the success of gamification in the workplace is to know what you hope to achieve by introducing them. Listen to the needs and incentives of your employees to find suitable games and reward systems to put in place in your gamification process. Some people easily adapt to the change, while other people can be more reluctant to accept something new. The best way to introduce gamification is to start with something easy to use, which is fun and entertaining for everyone. This generates interest and motivates people which makes them want to participate and compete. The set-up must let people see that the game is a positive and rewarding progression and that it will have a positive impact on their daily professional lives. It is also important to have a clear, more long-term plan in terms of profiling and future career development.
If the business can convincingly communicate that the experience will be enriching and that it will motivate individuals and the team as a whole, then the experience will have more chance of succeeding. There must be a clear and tangible advantage for the organisation and the individuals who are taking part. Once the team have come around to the idea and for the activities to be fully complete, give feedback for each one so that your employees can share their learning and thoughts. After multiple days of usage, analyse the collected data to bring to light what has worked well (or not so well) to make improvements if necessary. By keeping these basic tips in mind when designing your business gamification project, you are sure to achieve your goals.
Concrete gamification best practices for employee engagement
It is now time to look at how gamification can be applied in an efficient and practical manner in the workplace. Let’s look at how it can be used to improve internal communication, training, employee integration as well as business satisfaction.
1. Employee welcome and retention
After the recruitment phase, games can be used in the integration process to help new recruits to get to know their team, form connections with their colleagues, familiarise themselves with the business’ culture and fill in the gaps in terms of skills to settle in more quickly. New employees are generally apprehensive when they arrive in a new organisation and it takes them time to settle in. A gamified welcome programme for new colleagues with our Dynamic Path™ allows you to reduce the stress and anxiety associated with a new job and to improve the employee’s morale. It helps you make the first days of work a bit easier to manage and to keep people motivated and engaged.
By helping new employees to settle in more quickly, you not only help to put them at ease and get to work more quickly, but you also help to decrease high turnover rates. Gamification is a good way to encourage new employees to complete their first missions and for the business to communicate with its employees after the recruitment process. It gives them a feeling of motivation, personal satisfaction and accomplishment. In addition, rewarding good behaviour accelerates the integration process.
2. Improve skill development and productivity
The more fun we have, the less it feels like working! When it comes to gamification, students learn most effectively via games than through traditional training, and improving skills results in innovative and productive teams. Using gamification experiences to train employees allows you to reduce the time required for implementation, which means that as well as procuring the best skills, you will achieve satisfying results more quickly.
Knowledge quizzes based on topics can help to quantify employees’ learning, for example, and show the areas which may require further training. Gamified training allows you to introduce rewards for achieving fixed key performance indicators, whether it is digital rewards such as points and badges, or material rewards such as gift cards or salary bonuses.
3. Share knowledge between colleagues
Gamification can be used to create a mentoring culture, by improving cooperation between teams and different members of departments who have varied skills and experiences. Cross-functional teams are essential for coordination and efficiency, but it is an area which many organisations struggle with.
Gamification creates a standardised system to share knowledge while encouraging teams to work together by helping different departments to interact and understand each other better. It is a question of bringing teams together to create unified teams. It can take the form of a question and answer forum, using an app about the business’ culture, publishing blog posts or completing gamified missions to earn rewards.
4. Promote group cohesion and team spirit
Gamification in business is also emerging as a pertinent internal digital communication tool. By bringing all employees together through an engaging, fun and innovative medium, gamification creates new connections within teams and aims to strengthen the collective team. Businesses use gamification to promote internal communication, even when they are working from home. The goal is to maintain and strengthen team members’ interest in their values and visions. Employees remain focused on their activity because otherwise tedious tasks become fun thanks to games. When working remotely, new participatory and engaging interactions help to maintain team cohesion.
Gamification at work can also help managers to develop technical skills and soft skills within their team. Working together to carry out a project or achieve a goal during a team building exercise, for example, is an excellent gamification and engagement opportunity. When playing a game, formalities subside and people relax, which gives managers an unfiltered view into the natural abilities to process information, strategise and interact with their peers.
Implementing a game programme at different levels within a business at the level of daily tasks can serve to introduce sustainable changes in the workplace which everyone can invest in. For example, it can be focused on ecological initiatives and include a reward system for recycling and energy savings in one month.
Collaborate with the gamification experts who will support you throughout your business gamification projects and create engagement with your employees through play. Check out our detailed add-on packages, or contact us to talk about your project in more detail with the Drimify team. We are at your service!
Photos by Iakobchuk and Krafted
