Happy employees will always be more productive. Staff who like their jobs perform better, work harder, and stay with a company longer. Therefore, we need to look at ways to make work more fun and enjoyable. Gamification is one technique employers can use. By tapping into the competitive spirit and hunger for recognition, gratification, and feedback we all have, gamification can help you engage employees, improve productivity, and reduce staff turnover.
What Is Gamification?
Gamification is turning the operations, processes, and competition of gaming into a system that encourages participation and loyalty. The idea is to take something business-focused and make it fun, driving better engagement with your employees, vendors, and customers while creating a community in which everyone is driven to get involved. You can use games to encourage sales teams to close more deals, help desks to answer more calls, or customers to buy more products. When done right, it will get you faster results and even win you more long-term clients.
The Five-Step Process
To set up gamification in your workplace, follow these steps:
- Identify goals for each employee and department you want to reach.
- Determine the changes in skills and behavior required to reach your goals.
- Design the game around your employees.
- Make the purpose of the game clear to employees through weekly reinforcement and transparency.
- Distribute rewards on a timely and consistent basis.
Make Sure It’s Fun
Please don’t forget to make your game fun, or else all your effort will have been for naught. Involve employees in the process from start to finish. Consider creating a small group to present and beta test ideas, and then to serve as advocates for the game after it’s rolled out. Try to keep all your communication about the game positive and encouraging. Share the results with the team and point out the top producers. You’ll be surprised how reliably peers will poke at the low producers, so you won’t have to.
When executed well, gamification can generate impactful results across an organization. It will give your business a positive boost while also making work more fun and enjoyable for your employees.
James Kernan serves as a principal consultant for Kernan Consulting and provides coaching, advising, and mentoring programs to business owners and leaders. The company offers one-on-one coaching, peer groups, and training as well.
