CSR: could gamification bring your policy to life?
Resources
When it comes to demonstrating their corporate social responsibility (CSR), businesses are finding themselves under more pressure than ever. An increasingly socially conscious workforce with greater access to information than previous generations has new priorities regarding employment. This means it’s important for human resources (HR) departments to be creative with their CSR policies. They need to be measurable, effective, and perhaps above all, something that their employees can understand and engage with.
After salary and working environment, research indicates that an employer’s corporate social values are one of the key considerations for a lot of prospective hires when choosing a new job. An organisation’s CSR policy, or at least how it’s perceived, now holds enormous weight when it comes to attracting and retaining qualified talent.
If this is a challenge your organisation is facing, or you’re looking to innovate the CSR aspect of your brand, gamification could be a great tool for not only formulating your policy, but also creating engagement with your stakeholders and bringing it to life.
Defining corporate social responsibility and its positive effects on a business
Corporate social responsibility is defined as “a self-regulating business model that helps a company be socially accountable to itself, its stakeholders, and the public.” It’s quite a broad term, and can vary significantly from industry to industry, but typically takes the shape of sustainability related practices and pro environmental initiatives with some marketing budget allocated to publicise any positive effects. It ultimately boils down to an organisation being conscious of their impact, and contributing positively to the societies and environments they touch through their operations.
To engage and invest in socially responsible practices, and to use the relevant communication channels and marketing strategies to adequately publicise them, can help an organisation on multiple fronts. As mentioned earlier, employees are starting to look for their employers to have and to act on values aligning with their own. Consumers, similarly, are now more clued up on exactly how goods and services are delivered. From a B2B perspective, ethically focused organisations will exercise a preference for working with companies that reflect their own policies, or at least don’t contradict them. Public perception of a business can be made or shattered as the newsworthiness of sustainability and ethics appreciates in value.
It probably isn’t news to anyone that the businesses treating their workers fairly, delivering on pro environmental initiatives, and giving back to local communities will be looked on favourably – but what if nobody knows about all the good work your business is doing? This isn’t to say that your company’s CSR means nothing if your stakeholders don’t know about it. Rather, this is to suggest that if your stakeholders know about your CSR, and more importantly, are engaged with it, and can get behind it and contribute to its direction, it could be far more effective.
Gamifying your corporate social responsibility communications
Gamification is the discipline of applying game-like mechanics to non-game contexts, or areas that we typically don’t consider to be playful. In the business world, this means replacing more traditional forms of content with interactive, digitised components. A more interactive, gamified approach to certain tasks can be more effective than legacy methods when it comes to fostering engagement and motivation among teams in pursuit of specific goals. Applying the principles of game mechanics to serious topics like environmental initiatives and sustainability can tap into stakeholders’ intrinsic motivations. This can help them better engage with particular causes and issues. It’s also an innovative way to keep your teams, customers, or B2B clients informed of progress and updates.
Frankly, a company-wide email inviting every employee to donate five pounds to a charity they didn’t choose for casual dress Friday, or the generic, unengaging company newsletter that talks about buying carbon offsets is wildly out of date. The actions of today’s CSR policies need to speak louder than yesterday’s, and they need to be heard by every member of the organisation. With that in mind, think of gamification as a microphone.
Bring stakeholders along on every step of your CSR journey, from choosing causes, to actioning change
The potential of gamifying CSR can start at your policy’s foundation. This is especially useful if your business is in the process of re-envisioning, or refocusing their policy and approach.
It could all begin with a brainstorm to decide on a direction to take. By carefully tailoring a Quiz or Survey to social or environmental issues relevant to your industry, you can make your stakeholders a part of those early conversations. These games can be reworked at any stage to re-evaluate your policy, assess subsequent gamified approaches, and identify areas for improvement.
Drimify has a range of question and answer-based games that could be used at various stages of promoting a CSR policy, or even evaluating an existing or outgoing one. An organisation is its people, so reflecting their values into a company’s corporate outlook is an important step towards implementing a successful CSR policy.
Educate, engage and prosper through a gamified approach
Once you know what values your employees share and what causes they support, and you’ve decided on how your organisation will positively contribute, you can again look to create engagement with your workforce through a gamified approach.
A number of the games in Drimify’s catalogue could be employed to communicate news of your CSR efforts. They can be used to educate teams more on related issues, or even invite them to compete for a bigger say in the policy’s direction. This could be done by introducing games featuring more competitive aspects, like points and a leaderboard.
Once you have a clear understanding of your company’s CSR policy, and you’re looking for ways to educate and engage your workforce, you could look at our Dynamic Path™ option. It allows you to combine any of Drimify’s games into modules of a longer, more narratively engaging experience.
Bring your policy to life with the expertise of Drimify
If you’re considering innovating your organisation’s approach to corporate social responsibility, gamification really is a compelling direction to go in, especially as the modern workplace adjusts to having teams working remotely from different locations. As a HR department or a corporate communications team, gamification gives you a whole new toolbox with which to communicate with stakeholders about your CSR projects. A gamified approach presents far greater potential for buy-in and engagement than traditional communications methods.
We offer a range of support packages designed to help you meet your goals. If you need advice or help overcoming any challenges in gamifying your CSR communications, don’t hesitate to contact us directly to discuss your project.
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