Can gamification promote collaborative work?

When assigning high-potential projects requiring multiple inputs, companies are looking for full commitment from their employees to ensure success. In the early phases of a project’s life cycle, that’s not necessarily hard to achieve. When teams of workers first come together to tackle something new and exciting they’re an ambitious young squad with everything to prove, but let them hit a few setbacks, start to find interdepartmental friction, and see a few egos and conflicting personalities clash, and see where they are then. They’re suddenly having a lot less fun. A few months later, and the enthusiasm and passion of a found family has turned into a band of misfits, grinding begrudgingly against a project to push it limply over the line.

Consider also the inherent difficulties in fostering effective collaboration between employees facing more repetitive and monotonous tasks, which don’t classically deliver much fulfilment at their completion. Whether it’s an exciting project that can deliver company growth, or the bread and butter day-to-day operations more entry-level workers perform that keep the lights on, businesses need to find ways to effectively encourage and maintain collaboration and harmony across teams. Gamification, which is the application of game mechanics and elements to different areas to boost user engagement, offers many benefits when it comes to promoting collaborative work among employees.

How do you gamify collaboration in a project?

Corporate gamification has many applications to help businesses, but one especially useful application is in training employees in soft skills. Soft skills are applicable to workers in all professions and all industries, and among other aspects, include teamwork, problem solving, and management, so already, the dots are easy to connect. You can train workers through gamified learning pathways to better interact with others, have better social awareness, and operate with a growth mindset for the good of the projects they’re working on.

By customising a multi-level learning course using the Dynamic Path™ format on Drimify, you can customise a series of Quizzes and other media content to not only educate employees on best practices, but to then pose them virtual scenarios through which to apply them. You could simulate a situation where an employee might disagree with one of their colleagues, or not entirely understand the actions of another member of the team, and they can select a multiple choice answer to indicate how they would respond. The aim of such a game is to educate each individual worker to treat everyone else as they would like to be treated, with the idea that if all employees take the learnings to heart, that there will be more effective collaboration across projects.

This form of gamification is called a serious game – it’s a game with a serious purpose: to promote effective collaborative working among employees. It’s a game that’s not just for fun. The key content to include is not a secret, you’re essentially looking to help every worker live up to being a model employee, and the proliferation of wisdom from books like Turn the Ship Around and Atomic Habits is all in the public consciousness to be cherry-picked and adapted to make businesses better. Thoughleaders and wunderkind CEOs have all their brightest ideas podcasted ad nauseum – the trick is to take what works, run it through how your own business operates, and put it into the form of a gamified experience. While gamification, like all innovative practices, is constrained by budgets, time to implement, and employee buy-in, the potential advantages far outweigh the resource cost to implement. For best results, gamification needs to be implemented long term.

Long term corporate gamification to sustain collaboration

Business best practices and corporate trends are mercurial by nature. The 60s corporate culture was different to the 90s corporate culture, and neither of those time periods could fly in today’s corporate culture. Not only can corporate gamification help businesses adapt to changes in attitudes and generational shifts in the workforce in the long term by generating feedback, but it can be used as a structure through which to sustain and motivate effective collaboration. By implementing a year-round approach to gamifying internally, you’re putting in place what’s known as a “hard system” to promote collaboration.

A hard system, as you might know, is where a process is written down, and involves clearly defined steps. You could write down what needs to be done like a recipe for baking bread. Follow each part to the letter and the dough rises, skip a few, or cut corners, and you can end up with a soggy facsimile of what you were shooting for.

By customising Surveys to regularly check in with employees, you can identify where refreshers in the relevant soft skills need to be deployed, and get a general sense of your company’s health from a collaborative working standpoint. Is everyone marching to the beat of the same drum, or have the chaos goblins run amok? This year-round approach not only allows you to monitor how effectively your teams are collaborating at any given moment, but gives you valuable data and feedback to feed into your strategy over time. Maybe different features of gamification would more effectively serve the aims of your strategy, or maybe you got on the right track from the beginning and just need to fine-tune the content for better results. The more data you have, the better informed your ongoing internal campaigns will be, and the better they will perform.

Different aims for your corporate gamification strategy

When you work for a good company, you should never be short of company. A good business is built on teamwork because nobody can do it all on their own. Collaboration is ultimately the key to success, but there’s obviously a lot of nuance in the word collaboration. It’s not just all sharing ideas and letting the best ones take off.

Below, we’ll run through some of the more nuanced ways your gamification strategy can be used to target more effective inter-workplace relationships for your teams.

Gamified team building

Team building is using activities to create team cohesion, and games are a great way of doing this as they can serve as an ice-breaker. A competitive, interactive experience, like an escape room, or even a Quiz can encourage people to let their guards down and get caught up in a sociable competition. This practice aims to create a more friendly and warm atmosphere, and allows everyone to express themselves in a caring environment. It can also serve to build and strengthen bonds between team members.

Gamification of training

The practice of gamification in corporate training can incorporate developing soft skills, as discussed earlier, but also to reinforce job and industry specific knowledge by simulating experience. Such a gamified experience will still be built along similar game constructs, posing virtual scenarios and asking users to apply their acquired knowledge to it, but the subject matter will be far less general.

Onboarding

When new people join a company, it can be quite complicated to set up an onboarding process that is both effective, and creates cohesion with the rest of the group. Through gamification, it is possible to make onboarding more intuitive and more autonomous for the user. By playing through an experience to learn about a company’s values and its culture, instead of feeling like a spare part waiting on existing employees with their own responsibilities, or being thrown straight into a team or department, it eases new employees into their new home.

Performance incentives

This is based on competition, and is typically based on offering rewards and highlighting the most efficient and effective elements of a company. The best known example is that of car dealerships. Through a table showing their sales results, salespeople are motivated to sell more and give their best. This example of gamification has now spread to many industries because of its results and effectiveness.

However, this is definitely one to be careful with and use with caution. By incentivising individual results, you’re incentivising short term, and incentivising competition which could serve to demotivate some staff members, and even create a toxic, dog-eat-dog workplace.

While businesses have classically rewarded results over effort, and the expression “working smart, not hard” has been thrown around a lot for a long time, the fact is, successful businesses and sustainable progress are built on the blood sweat and tears people are willing to shed to lay the foundations that can deliver results. It’s a bit like waiting staff tips boosting their salary to exceed that of the chef who cooked the meal. In some cases, rewarding results in individuals is rewarding the dumb luck of which sales person drew the right lead.

In sports, the expression “process not outcome” carries a lot of water, as while races and contests may be outside an athlete’s control, being subject to other competitors, dubious officiating, and injuries, they can control the work they put in and their preparation. By the same token, some entrepreneurial disruptors and thinkers are adopting similar mindsets in their approach to business.

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