Gamifying your workforce: How to make employee engagement fun?
Gamification is a popular method for making the user experience more engaging and enjoyable. Over the past decades, gamification has entered almost every people’s engagement process including the workplace. Managers are realizing that internal gamification can promote employee loyalty, productivity, and engagement.
Businesses have discovered that by incorporating game elements into the standard employee-manager dynamics, employees are more likely to stick around, especially in a remote setting. Here’s how to use gamification to benefit your employees.
What Is Gamification?
Gamification is the process of incorporating game elements into non-game activities such as working or studying. Gamification in the workplace can boost employee engagement, satisfaction, and retention. This is particularly crucial for businesses with a remote workforce who want to provide a positive employee experience.
Benefits of Gamification
Gamification has enormous potential benefits for any workplace, particularly when used in workforce training. Gamifying employee onboarding and introductory training can reduce employee turnover and create a more engaged workforce.
Gamification could be especially beneficial for the remote workforce. Gamification can instantly connect the dispersed workforce around a single point of reference everyone can relate to.
- Makes the learning process enjoyable and engaging
Gamification techniques such as interactive visuals and infographics can help people retain up to three times more information than they would otherwise. Gamification increases a person’s willingness to study and learn more enjoyably and interactively.
Getting personally interested in the content is a significant barrier to learning. Pacing is provided by gamification, allowing students to process information comfortably. - Reduces employee stress
Gamification, according to employees, makes them happier and more productive at work. Stress contributes to negative work environments, an unhappy workforce, and increased job dissatisfaction.
Employee performance improves when employees are less stressed and more relaxed. Gamification in the workplace can significantly improve employee outcomes.
- Attracts a younger workforce
When it comes to onboarding a digitally native workforce, gamification is especially effective. Younger generations have distinct motivational and behavioural patterns, necessitating a set of techniques that better align their learning and skill development styles with business goals.
Gamified onboarding is a natural, enjoyable, and effective solution for a changing workforce.
Where to Use Gamification?
It is always more fruitful to focus on the areas where gamification has a greater effect on the desired outcome. Gamification systems can help an organization in a variety of ways:
- Development and Learning
Games can help both new and experienced employees learn new skills. Gamification of learning platforms has the potential to improve retention and results.
- Customer Service
Gamification achievements and rewards can motivate employees to provide better service to customers. They also encourage employees to share new solutions and ideas with their colleagues.
- Improving Sales
Gamification can boost salespeople’s collaboration. It rewards not only the final sale but also all the steps that lead up to it.
- Teamwork
Games can help teams share information and learn from one another even if they are in different offices around the world.
- Marketing
Employers can encourage employees to share company information on social media.
- Inventory Management
Gamification encourages efficient processing and shipping.
- Human Capital
HR professionals can use gamification to track performance reviews, develop leadership skills, provide peer appreciation, engage applicants, and increase referrals.
- Product Development
Games can help employees finish projects on time, collaborate more effectively, and be more efficient.
- Creativity
Employers can reward employees who come up with novel ideas.
- Corporate Culture
Gamification can help promote the company’s culture through various projects and programs. It can assist employees in identifying opportunities to participate in shaping the company culture. Furthermore, it can improve access to information about the company and its values.
Why Does Gamification Fail & How to Avoid Failure?
Gamification in the workplace frequently fails due to internal communications’ inability to connect gamification in the workplace to their company’s business objectives. Furthermore, many managers fail to listen to their employees’ unique needs and motivations.
This often results in gamification projects that are not valued by the employees.
Internal communications professionals and business leaders should keep the following tips in mind to ensure their gamification efforts truly create engaged employees:
- Define the goals and objectives you hope to achieve by implementing gamification in the workplace. Do you want to increase employee engagement? Attained specific business objectives?
- Learn to listen to and comprehend your employees’ specific needs. What motivates them? What drives them?
- Create a gamification program that is tailored to your employees’ specific skills and motivations.
- When implementing gamification in the workplace, make sure to communicate the activity’s purpose to your employees.
- Experiment with the gamification process. Analyze what works and what doesn’t and adjust your gamification strategy as needed.
Ensure that all internal communications about the gamification process truly measure and gauge employees’ reactions.
Are they reading the emails you sent about implementing gamification in the workplace?
Are they reacting?
You can determine whether your employees are on board with the idea in the first place by measuring employee communications with email tracking tools.
Things to Keep in Mind
Gamification is effective when used correctly, but it can backfire if used incorrectly. It is critical to foster a healthy sense of competition, but not so much that your employees become demotivated. Sims reminds employers that people learn at different rates and that competition can be discouraging for those who don’t progress as quickly.
Another issue to be aware of is employees becoming complacent with your gamification program and settling into a consistent, comfortable routine.
It is critical to introduce new internal contests and real-world rewards regularly to reignite excitement and boost employee motivation; otherwise, you risk a fall in employee engagement and overall performance.
You should also exercise caution when using external incentives such as gift cards and products. While these things are nice to include as a perk or contest prize on occasion, using them as your sole incentive sends the wrong message about why people should be motivated to do a good job.
Employees aren’t training for a gift certificate; they’re training to add professional skills for long-term advancement. True business gamification emphasizes intrinsic rewards and benefits. It assists employees on their long-term path to greater success.
Draft Expert Gamification Programs
Gamification is a popular approach for a manager with a remote workforce that can make employee engagement fun. Including game elements in routine workplace activities can boost productivity, especially when combined with immediate feedback and the use of public recognition and rewards to further motivate a changing workforce with help of RewardPort programs which will provide you features such as scratch cards, spin the wheels, and slot machine pop-ups.
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How Does Gamification Increase User Engagement
Incentives and reward schemes may be approached in a novel way with gamification. Gamification can enhance consumer engagement and improves relationships.
Gamification strategies are being accommodated by businesses all around the world in their online training program for staff members. Gamification has proven to be a successful strategy for engaging users and getting them excited about your brand, goods, and services. This helps to build stronger relationships with customers and entices them to use your products and services repeatedly.
How Does Gamification Work?
Gamification is often known as the integration of game aspects into company plans. Marketing initiatives like consumer incentives often produce superb results for the user and the brand with gamification strategies.
The concept is that clients and staff would participate in a game-like activity, where they accumulate points through purchases or other desired actions. If they achieve a specific level or objective, they receive incentives like discounts or free items.
Brands now have even more opportunities to include gamification into their outreach initiatives as a result of rising digital engagement. Customers can become involved via the business’ website or through an app, for instance. The use of gamification by companies to engage consumers on social media is another common trend nowadays.
How Does Gamification Increase Engagement?
Customers are growing more skeptical of internet advertising as a result of either being hesitant to divulge too much personal information or having doubts about the promises being made by a business. Customers will like the enjoyable alternative that gamification offers, where they will experience a revitalizing feeling of creativity.
Gamification is a tool that brands may employ in many innovative ways to engage users or customers in interesting activities. Gamification simplifies the connection between action and reward for the users. Customers are more likely to purchase a product or engage in an activity for a clear reward.
When an incentive or reward is included as an outcome, the final product becomes more enticing. Gamification can be incredibly successful at keeping customers engaged because it appeals to their need for accomplishment and competitiveness.
Customers that take part in gamification feel more powerful and in control than they would if they were being fed into a brand’s marketing plan. They also understand how important it is to the brand that they are satisfied since the business went the extra mile to provide a superior experience.
Advantages of Gamification
Gamification allows users to advance through several “levels” of the activities depending on their effort and actions. Incentivized activities can include purchase, review, personal feedback, social sharing, etc. Users can experience a sense of satisfaction after completing these tasks and gaining the prize points.
Adding gamification to client engagement initiatives has several key advantages, including:
- Increasing user interest and involvement
- Boost awareness of your brand
- provide the business with useful client data
- Boost client retention
- Maintain relationships with consumers
- Use incentives to reinforce a behavior
Simply said, gamification raises user engagement by providing clients with distinctive and enjoyable methods to engage with their preferred companies.
Gamification In Action
What evidence is there that gamification is effective? Major corporations like Starbucks and Dominos are just two examples of the many businesses that are using similar strategies, and the outcomes have been good.
By using the Starbucks mobile app, Starbucks incorporates gamification into its rewards program. Two Stars are awarded for every $1 paid when a consumer uses the app or a registered Starbucks Card to pay for their order. Customers receive free things when they hit milestones like 25 or 50 Stars. This arrangement is an excellent illustration of how a business can utilize gamification to keep people interested in its applications and goods.
Another excellent example is Domino’s Pizza. A “Slot Machine” option was added to their mobile app a few years ago, allowing customers to shake their phone to have their pizza toppings automatically selected if they were unsure of what they wanted. Customers are more likely to want to share a novelty-driven gamification feature like this with their friends and family.
The way people engage with companies is continuously changing thanks to gamification. Improved mobile app design and AI-driven marketing methods are just two examples of the new technologies being offered that further strengthen these approaches.
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Gamification of your loyalty program – Is it possible?
What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear the word ‘Gamification’? Though it is seen as a game-changing tool for brand promotions, there is more to it. Yes. Gamification, as we know is an emerging trend and some of the brands have already been using consumer loyalty programs as a part of their marketing strategies. In the context of brand promotion, gamification has become an integral part of the marketing structure with an increasing number of reward programs.
Gamification is not complex as it may sound. It only intensifies the value to an existing marketing program by using data-oriented engagement techniques to capture a customer’s attention.
Before we look at the possibilities of gamification in loyalty programs, let us go through the types of Gamification.
1. Progress tracking
This is undertaken to make people stay loyal to the brand by helping them keep a track of their performance in loyalty programs.
For example, an online program which has users to sign up for a course includes a system to track their progress until their final objective is completed. This encourages their potential leads and customers to use more content.
2. Reward level
This is an advanced version of a basic reward program. For instance, users can earn stars to win rewards at different levels of the program. Once a customer gets a specific number of stars, they become part of a special membership program where they are entitled to receive benefits throughout the year.
Now, this brings us to the possibilities of using gamification in loyalty programs and its subsequent benefits.
This is an advanced version of a basic reward program. For instance, users can earn stars to win rewards at different levels of the program. Once a customer gets a specific number of stars, they become part of a special membership program where they are entitled to receive benefits throughout the year.
Now, this brings us to the possibilities of using gamification in loyalty programs and its subsequent benefits.
- Firstly, it increases sign-ups for a program
- It increases product sales and revenue with continuous participation
- It encourages a customer’s willingness to be a part of loyalty rewards
- It brings more brand advocates who eventually become influential marketers
There is more possibility of bringing gamification to the loyalty programs as general human behaviour is tied to motivational factors. In other words, the user gains extensively through repeated efforts. If you want to retain your customers, gamification can help al it adds excitement to improve your brand’s marketing strategy.
Gamification in loyalty programs acts as catalysts to make users spend more time and effort to reach higher levels. This is probably one of the reasons why repeated discounted sales are often considered as the primary objective of a loyalty program. It makes it easier for users to express their appreciation, aiding the brand’s marketing goal. The extended reach will amplify your brand’s social worthiness along with the online ad spends.
Hence, yes gamification is possible. In fact, it brings a brand closer to its sales goals.
Whether a brand’s consumer wins a prize or gains maximum out of it, the game design inputs put in a marketing strategy brings positive feedback looping new customers. When a brand offers more than just amazing products and services with a sense of gamification in their loyalty programs, customers are sure to love the experience and be willing to come back.
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Benefits of Sales Gamification to Boost Sales
Gamification, the use of game mechanics in a non-game context to drive engagement, is becoming a standard practice in marketing and loyalty programs. The basic premise of gamification is that it uses game mechanics to leverage a participant’s sense of challenge, competition and reward to educate change attitude or behavior to inspire action.
Effective customer loyalty programs are now powered by gamification, which moves engagement beyond the transactional to create deeper, data-driven and more valuable customer relationships. To a large extent, gamification leverages the same tactics of video games and their ability to get players addicted to virtual rewards. Successful gamification finds ways to turn tasks into a competition amongst players or customers by building mechanisms for achievements and public competition.
Few pointers that businesses need keep in mind when implementing gamification:
- Set a clear goal and that goal must be aligned to the marketing or loyalty. There must be a finish line in sight, so customers know exactly what they need to do to achieve that goal.
- Decide what customers should do to progress in the game. Tasks to be aligned with the behavior you want to reward. This could include simple things like sharing the content on social media.
- Recognition is a big motivator in successful games, so it’s important to show customers how they are progressing towards earning a reward. That means structuring the levels such that they seem achievable. Leader boards can play a great part in the recognition part.
- Reward participation. Reward new members bonus points for just signing up.
- Games need to be fun and a delight to play. A very effective gamification technique is by giving a random reward or freebies at unexpected times. This will give the customer enjoyment beyond the free item.
Peppers & Rogers Group has created a proprietary methodology called the “E7 framework” as a holistic approach to both drive usage and derives benefits from gamification.
Simply stated Increase ENGAGEMENT by EDUCATING, ENERGIZING and EMPOWERING the customer while ensuring EARNING for the client, ENJOYMENT for the user and EVOLUTION of the customer relationship.”
Simply stated, “Increase ENGAGEMENT by EDUCATING, ENERGIZING and EMPOWERING the customer while ensuring EARNING for the client, ENJOYMENT for the user and EVOLUTION of the customer relationship.”
The framework balances increasing customer involvement with creating business value at each point.
Loyalty drivers:
Educate: Inform customers of products, processes, and events.
Energize: Stimulate interactions and guide customer use of more services and products.
Empower: Transform customers into proud brand ambassadors.
Earn: Create value through increased awareness and customization.
Enjoy: Users have fun and stay engaged with the program.
Evolve: Understand customers much more than through traditional CRM systems.
Gamification has its biggest impact in ensuring customers keep coming back. In addition to points for purchase, providing users with a sense of achievement and competition to keep them engaged provides real retention benefits. While gamification is a very effective tool, practitioners need to take care to use it in the correct context, and not overuse it. Gamification can be integrated to transactional behavior where it is possible to measure the direct impact of gamification on turnover. It is for this reason that gamification is playing an increasingly bigger in loyalty strategy.