Five ways businesses can implement gamification to boost employee productivity

Gamification first started as a popular method to make customer experiences more engaging and fun - due to its success, the strategy is now filtering through to the workforce.

By adding elements of games to the standard employee/manager dynamic, businesses have found that staff retention rates are higher, especially in remote working settings.

In fact, a recent study revealed that 88% of employees who participate in gamification felt more productive and happier at work. It also helped to lower stress levels as a result.

What is gamification?

Gamification adds game design elements into non-game applications and uses competition, points, achievement, rules of play and status to encourage actions through positive feedback.

Gamification is based on finding out what motivates people to perform by turning something that’s typically tedious or mundane into a more thought-provoking activity.

To help, Neil Draycott at Business Systems Limited has pulled together five ways managers can put gamification to the test for their employees:

Training

Gamification works effectively in employee training because it’s one of the most natural ways for people to learn.

However, this tactic can backfire if it's applied incorrectly so it’s important to establish a healthy level of competition whenever it’s implemented; otherwise you’re at risk of demotivating your employees instead. 

There are many different ways you can gamify training. Instead of training employees through formal presentations or manuals, you could look to create mini-courses online that include characters, quizzes or a scoring system.

By introducing more interactive elements to training, it will help to boost participation and engagement, resulting in learning time that is more productive. 

Rewards and feedback

Once a platform for online courses and training has been established, it’s a good idea to think about what kind of incentives you’ll create to encourage employees to complete them - without being constantly reminded to do so. Offering rewards is a good place to start and this could be with anything from a certificate to financial prizes, gift vouchers or even just having bragging rights at the company.

Also, with set rewards in place, it will encourage employees to pay more attention during training sessions and motivate them to achieve a high score, as opposed to rushing the test to get it over with quickly.

As well as rewards, notifying employees with consistent and regular feedback helps to guide progression and create a wider sense of achievement. There are many different ways to deliver feedback on progress but it should always involve some form of measurement.

For example, feedback could be used to congratulate an employee for hitting a milestone or key target, or to communicate the next steps that are required to reach the next level up.

Challenges

Introducing strategic challenges are useful to make sure your team is not getting through work on autopilot mode.

Ultimately, gamification is all about user engagement and challenges help the process to feel less robotic; forcing participants to pay attention and be engaged in what they’re doing.

Add social features to tasks

Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter have gamified by adding features such as likes, comments and shares and by doing so, it’s made these platforms more entertaining for people to use.

In a similar way, companies can add social features to work tasks to make them feel more fun and creative for employees.

Recruitment

Gen Z have grown up around technology and as a result, are more conditioned to attain information instantly. Typically, this younger age group thrives in situations that enable them to develop new skills and feel comfortable learning in digital environments at a quicker pace, versus older generations.

For this reason, gamification is ideal for recruiting, onboarding and providing ongoing training to younger generations so it’s a good idea to test this out if your company is looking to bring in fresh, new talent.

One example on how to gamify recruitment is to create a series of riddles to answer as part of the application stage. This will help employers to identify the applicants who have the specific skills and talents the job will require.