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When you want your workforce to operate more productively, and engagement has been shown to have positive effects on productivity, it makes sense that you would want to actively promote activities that have been shown to improve engagement. One approach that many companies and organizations are now embracing is gamification. Let’s discuss the concept of gamification, and how it might benefit your business.

For starters, it may help to get some more context into what gamification is, exactly.

Understanding Workplace Gamification

At its core, gamification is the philosophy of making rote processes and tasks more engaging by taking the components that make games fun and integrating them into these tasks and processes. In theory, this will result in a more content workforce, and a more successful business, and there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to support how effective this approach can be.

For just one example, one only has to turn to the many different educational applications and computer software titles available today. Concealed behind a fun story and the colorful characters driving the plot, the game’s mechanics actively encourage learning by requiring the young player to complete activities designed to improve their skills in mathematics and grammar. In this way, the learning process becomes more fun, motivating the children playing the game to continue doing so.

The same approach can be found in many applications aimed towards adults--specifically, adults in the workplace.

Gamifying the Workplace

One of the best things about workplace gamification is how easily it can be applied to someone’s processes at any level. For example:

• Training processes can be gamified by using learning portals that introduce new recruits and veterans alike to basic workplace requirements and procedures.
• Gamified achievements and rewards can be given to employees for accomplishing more and sticking to set procedures.
• In the game format, feedback and contextual correction can be given live, allowing your employees to experience real-time training benefits.

Of course, we also have to discuss the benefit to the well-being of your employees that gamification can bring. Many companies have elected to gamify the health status of their employees over their daily tasks. This has helped to fight the impacts that a sedentary job has been shown to have on an employee’s health. With healthier employees, companies also see decreased absenteeism, as sick days become less frequently needed.

Finally, gamification is hugely beneficial to team building. Look at how popular eSports have become amongst companies, with coworkers forming teams to play together as a group. Sure, this makes them a more cohesive and communicative team, but the real benefit comes from the engagement your team will feel as a result of these games. Ideally, it is an employee who is left to organize and manage these activities, making the results much more organic.

While eSports are a little out of our professional wheelhouse, we can assist your company’s productivity with numerous IT solutions and other strategies! To find out more about what we can do for you, reach out to us at (516) 403-9001.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, as the saying goes, but is this really useful advice if you’re trying to keep Jack, Jill, and the rest of your team engaged in the workplace? As it happens, it is! Let’s explore how you can use gamification to your business’ benefit.

First, it will help to establish exactly what gamification is.

Understanding Gamification

In its most basic terms, gamification is the process of taking one of your run-of-the-mill procedures and adding perks and other motivating factors to make it an engaging activity that your employees are motivated to do to the best of their ability.

This concept isn’t a new one. Consider the “employee of the month” tradition many offices will adopt. All it is, is a means of creating a bit of healthy competition between your employees to encourage them to compete with one another. Lately, the concept of adding game-like elements to the workplace has been expanding in more and more industries, and is now present even in the biggest enterprises.

Why? Psychology, if you can believe it.

How Gamification Works

There are certain factors that human beings tend to find more motivating than others. A few big ones are being recognized, competing with others, and the promise of a reward in exchange for their efforts. It just so happens that turning tasks into games is so effective because doing so incorporates all three of these factors into your operations.

This has been proven so effective, the likes of Google and the United States Army use gamification pretty regularly - Google to help minimize travel expenses by allowing them to keep any of the allocated funds for a business trip that have gone unused, and the Army as a recruitment tool.

How You Can Use Gamification in Your Business

There are multiple options that someone interested in gamifying their workplace has to consider. There are many programs and solutions available for different industries and applications that may be a worthwhile investment for you to make.

If you’d prefer to just dip your toe in and experiment with DIY gamification tactics, it isn’t difficult to do so. You could try distributing random cards to people as they accomplish goals and reach milestones, and see who can “draw” the best poker hand. You could do the same, but in a raffle format for some fun prizes every so often.

The key is to introduce those factors that can lead to a task being translated from a chore, to a game. 

Have you ever experimented with gamification in the workplace? What did you find most effective about it? Share your thoughts and ideas in the comments!