27 Apr Not using gamification for employee engagement yet? Here’s why you should.
The question for most organisations in 2016 isn’t “are you using gamification”, but “how”? How are you using gamification to engage employees? Or attract talent? Or boost productivity?
Workplace gamification and employee engagement are a natural fit
A 2015 survey found that 78% of employees are now using game-based motivation at work. Of those, more than 91% say gamification increases engagement, awareness, and productivity.
Which is quite a big stat, as I would guess that many employees using gamification aren’t even aware of it. It’s become a natural part of their daily work processes.
At Healthworks, we use gamification within our Activate platform. The whole platform is a gamified experience which rewards employees for taking responsibility for their wellness. This not only drives more engagement in your wellness initiatives, but also in your business and HR initiatives such as L&D, change management programs and corporate values.
What is gamification?
“The thing you have to make clear to people is that it has nothing to do with games. Gamification is about driving business objectives and motivating people through data,” says Rajat Paharia, author of “Loyalty 3.0: How to Revolutionise Employee and Customer Engagement With Big Data and Gamification”
Gamification is often defined as the use of game mechanics to alter behaviour. It’s not about giving employees a fun game to play, but about applying the techniques used in games to a workplace setting. Game mechanics include points, rewards, levels, badges, competition, stretch targets and social interaction.
These game mechanics tap into universal human needs – to feel competent, to feel a sense of purpose, to understand where you are and why.
Business benefits of gamification for employee engagement
It’s not hard to see why gamification is so popular, as the premise is enticing: Reward employees for the behaviours you want them to exhibit, and see their behaviour change accordingly.
In theory, gamification lets you reward high performing employees to skyrocket their engagement further (and encourage them to stay and strive), and motivate under-performing employees to try harder. Getting that “gold star” for effort can certainly go a long way to make a long day easier for employees.
Your kindergarten teacher used those gold stars to reward the behaviour she wanted to see – sitting nicely on the floor, packing away, listening with both ears, not hitting. These things created a nicer classroom, where it was easier to learn and everyone felt safe.
The workplace is really no different. We still want to create an environment and culture that’s conducive to learning and where everyone plays nicely together and feels safe to try new things. We use grown up words: Collaboration, Innovation. We talk about “corporate values”, “shared goals”, “pillars”.
Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation are still essential to help employees get through the messy or boring bits, and strive for the highest in the challenging bits.
But beware: gamification pitfalls
However, employees aren’t kindergarten students, and our rewards systems need a bit more sophistication.
Some employees aren’t motivated by gold stars – they just want their paypacket and they want to get the job done and go home.
And for others, the gold stars they crave aren’t the approval of an authority figure, but rather a sense of meaning, of feeling they’re doing something worthwhile.
So how can you make gamification work to engage your sophisticated, diverse employees?
Successful gamification requires alignment
There needs to be a sweet spot between what your business wants, and what your employees want for themselves.
There has to be a clear benefit or employees. Rewards for working faster won’t fly if employees believe the reduced quality will make them look bad. Likewise they’ll never really embrace a Corporate Value that they don’t believe is authentic.
Gamification of wellness
It’s easy to see why wellness is perfect for gamification. There’s a clear WIIFM for the employee (feel better) and a clear organisational outcome (improved productivity and engagement).
Use of gamification can include challenges, leaderboards, points, badges and levels – all reinforced with real-life recognition such as small presentation ceremonies.
Beyond the game of a step challenge, a good wellness platform can gamify the whole wellness program over a year. Employees get badges for getting flu vax, reading key articles, completing an online health assessment, doing a mini challenge, or taking part in team events, or logging their healthy behaviours.
You can reward the employees who are already healthy, and help inspire others to make a change.
The most successful clients are those who embrace the gamification and make it work in the real world. They pit managers against team members, marketing against IT in the step challenges. They use it to amplify and gamify their existing systems such as onboarding, or employee benefits. They use the points and badges as indicators, and then reward employees IRL (in real life) via a morning team or handshake with the CEO.
Want to see gamification in action on our Activate platform? Email us or call us on 1300 90 10 90.
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