The game changing approach to quality of working life (QWL) that maximises employee potential

Quality of working life (QWL), sometimes called quality of worklife, refers to how positive or negative someone’s working environment is. There are numerous schools of thought on precisely what components make up QWL, but from a practical point of view, the distinguishments are arbitrary. In terms of being a real world human resources strategy you can use to improve working conditions, you could look at any aspect of an employee’s working life.

For example, if you’re surrounded by respectful, well-adjusted coworkers, have an appropriate workload, and are encouraged to find balance and meaning outside of work, your quality of working life sounds pretty good. By contrast, if you’re working long hours in a cold dark room, using dangerous, poorly maintained equipment, and not getting a lunch break, your quality of working life sounds like the bottom of the barrel. It sucks.

And yet, from both examples, you can see just how many factors can contribute to your perceived QWL, or lack thereof…

Ultimately, your business’s strategy for approaching QWL should be bespoke, and based on your business’s history and its aims. Factors that you could focus on include, but are not limited to:

• Organisational culture
• Quality of training
• Adequacy of resources
• Compensation
• Work-life balance
• Stress
• Job satisfaction
• Environment and safety
• Opportunities for advancement
• Employee health

The nature of your business, the industry you’re in, and your people’s specific roles will be what shapes your particular approach to QWL. As QWL is looking after your employees, you can consider it related to, or even a part of, a broader corporate social responsibility strategy (CSR).

Gamification: getting the best out of your employees to be the best versions of themselves

Gamification is the use of game mechanics to enhance user engagement. If you want to influence employee behaviour, make training more effective, or even identify talent through the recruitment process, you’ll be able to find numerous examples of corporate gamification being used to great success. In fact, gamification has some ancestral DNA in the American workplace’s hunt for productivity.

It was noticed that office employees could go through their 35 to 45 hours a week at their desk doing the bare minimum to get by, and yet sales of sports equipment were increasing; as weekend warriors, they were willing to push their bodies to the ragged edge of physical performance on the local squash court, or apply yips-inducing amounts of pressure on their minds to make the decisive shot on the local golf course. The takeaway? Reroute that hunger and drive to win from the local gymnasiums to the boardrooms by applying game mechanics. Charles Coonradt would write The Game of Work in 1973.

The modern workplace and the highlighted importance of QWL

The 60 to 80 hour power executive vibe has been rejected by the modern worker. There’s nothing cool or impressive about burning yourself out or having nothing outside of work anymore. If you’re not saving lives, creating a legacy, or building and running your own business, the notion is just kind of sad. Even the workplace as a concept has been rejected, with a lot of workers more receptive to the work from home model, or at least a hybrid arrangement.

It’s also generally accepted now, from the top of an organisation to the bottom, that crazy working hours and workloads are a false economy as they so frequently just lead to employees making mistakes, underperforming, becoming disengaged, and eventually quitting. As obvious as it may seem now, it’s also generally accepted that happy, healthy workers are more productive, more resilient, and more capable, so it’s in every employers’ interest to invest in the quality of working life of their people.

Gamification’s role in improving QWL

Most workplaces have a physical environment that’s up to legal code for their employees to work in, but even if your teams are in a state of the art office suite and have all the coffees and snacks they could want in a day, real improvements to QWL go beyond environmental factors.

The fact is, a lot of QWL comes down to their own internal operating systems: people can become a product of their bad habits. They get away with things until they don’t. The collective ultimately creates the culture, and that greatly affects everyone’s QWL.

For positively influencing behaviour and promoting collective wellbeing

For example, if a group of employees within your teams were being unknowingly marginalised, inconvenienced, or even persecuted by the majority, this will have a negative effect on their QWL. By creating a gamified piece of content for everyone to engage with, you can foster discussion and awareness, and ultimately influence everyone to be more respectful of one another. Games can encourage people to play a role, and to consider a simulated point of view.

For another example, everyone knows that on paper, they should get 8 hours of sleep a night, and not look at screens or eat around 2 hours before going to bed, but so many people claim there’s “not enough time,” and that they’re consistently exhausted during a working day, drip-feeding on coffee to survive, and having their home life suffer as a consequence.

Gamified content could run them through the life hacks and habit forming tricks that can help them build healthy routines, and improve their overall wellbeing – which in turn gives you a happier, healthier, more productive worker who’s less likely to miss work days to sickness, and less likely to look for another job because they can’t handle the mental or physical workload.

Similarly, you can create gamified content to retrain people in soft skills and time management, so they’re able to complete their work more efficiently, and not have to rush as hard, or experience as much stress

A blow-by-blow example of gamifying QWL

Let’s assume your business has nice premises, or your work-from-home infrastructure is well-tested, and there’s no obvious or immediate areas that you can see that need to be improved. Let’s assume that on the surface, everything looks harmonious. You know what I’m going to say: just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean you can assume the QWL is all good and you can stop there.

You need to audit your teams to establish how they view their QWL. Now sure, in a big enough business you’ll get the odd person with a Cinderella-complex who’ll never be happy, but by auditing your entire team you may be able to identify common issues to address, or identify individuals with isolated concerns or suggestions that are valid.

Audit how your team views their QWL

The first step would be to create a Survey, which you can easily do on the Drimify gamification platform. You can ask from the to rate how they view their quality of working life based on several different aspects: opportunities for progression, day-to-day atmosphere, stress levels, safety, etc. Additionally, you can include a final question or 2 where you ask them to explain any concerns they have about their QWL, or areas they would like to see improve.

Assess the most essential areas and make a QWL road map

Now, if your Survey brings up 1,000 different valid areas for improvement, you obviously can’t take them all on in one go. You’re going to need to prioritise. What needs to be prioritised will of course be conditional on the options, but you need to consider what’s the most serious, what affects the largest number of people, and what you can control – probably in that order or importance.

Create immersive campaigns to tackle the issues and create positive change in your workplace

Let’s say from your audit, the most commonly brought up issue was stress management. Let’s also assume that you can’t just lighten everyone’s workload due to operational requirements, and that you know there are optimisations that can be made in people’s work processes. It’s time to use Drimify’s Dynamic Path™ format to create a multi-level experience that can upgrade everyone’s internal operating systems to better handle and reduce stress.

All the secrets to productivity and efficiency on an individual level are out there in the world if you want to find them. Everyone has 168 hours in a week and numerous conflicting responsibilities, people just use them differently – even though that’s obvious to say out-loud, sometimes, when it’s pointed out to people, they act as if the ground’s moved beneath them or as if they’ve just woken up from a deep sleep.

The do-delegate-delay-ditch and touch-paper-once time management methods aren’t exactly hard to find either, but you don’t know what you don’t know. If you showed a caveman the wheel, they’d understand it immediately and wonder why they didn’t think of it themselves.

Your employees work through the Dynamic Path™ a level at a time, being introduced to stress management, time management, and efficiency hacks through intermediate videos, then working through a combination of Quizzes and mini games to apply them to different scenarios. Well designed gamification experiences then act as your vehicles for change, and suddenly, your teams are handling stress better as a collective unit, and overall QWL has increased.

If you’re investing in your QWL, make some noise about it

Like we talked about earlier, the modern workforce wants a nice life. Nobody wants to feel like they’re being driven into the ground by crazy workloads and overzealous line managers. A big thing job hunters are looking for when they’re scoping out vacancies, whether they’re aware of the acronym or not, is the quality of working life they’ll have.

If you’ve invested in the QWL of your team, that’s a selling point that you can use in recruitment.

Pro tip: Gamification is the use of play to increase user engagement, that doesn’t stop with your employees. If you really want to communicate with prospective hires and not just tell them you look after your people’s quality of working life, but show them – create external-facing gamified experiences too for a more authentic, branded experience of what working for your business is like.

This also contributes to a seamless transition from job hunter to new hire.

True QWL comes from giving your people real agency

Nobody likes to be micromanaged, so using gamification allows them to upgrade their own internal operating systems on a range of subjects so they can essentially manage themselves. Because the solution works on any modern device with an internet connection, it also makes it an incredibly versatile tool that can be effective for remote working teams as well as onsite teams.

This format can just as easily be applied to improving employee health, providing more effective and repeatable training, and even as a method for identifying talent and aptitude to promote from within, all of which contributes to your employees’ quality of working life, and their job performance as a result.

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