Spin the wheel for work: Prize ideas for employee engagement

Resources Spin the wheel for work: Prize ideas for employee engagement

How many times does a major sports team take their rainy day funds and put together a “big three” that go on to underperform? How many times do the best directors get paired with the most fabulous casts of actors and turn out an embarrassing flop?

The answer to both questions is: too often.

Talent plus talent plus talent doesn’t automatically equal success, and the same is true in business.

From a HR standpoint, you can put all the best pieces together, and you can have the vision, the funds, and the infrastructure which, on paper, make you too big to fail, but without all those pieces being engaged, feeling cared about, and buying in, your business will never be everything that it can be.

This article’s all about how digital spin the wheel games can be customised to support your employee experience (EX) campaigns, promote recognition, and how prizes can factor into motivating and rewarding your staff the right way.

Using gamification to support employee experience

The modern employee-employer relationship is a lot more complicated than it used to be. The narrative has shifted away from being entirely about remuneration and titles, and added things like work-life balance, recognition, corporate social responsibility (CSR), progression and engagement into proceedings.

What is employee engagement and why should I care?

In 1984, Charles A. Coonradt wrote a book called The Game of Work – applying sporting principles to the workplace. It looked to get people as engaged in their nine to five as they were in their weekend softball game by applying principles of gamesmanship and accountability to engage, inspire, and get the best out of people in their jobs.

This foreshadowed gamification as we know it today, and over time this idea has been developed, fine-tuned, and added to.

How does a spin the wheel game help with it?

A digital spin the wheel game is a visually engaging prize distribution mechanism that is universally understood.

A wheel, with prizes segmented around it, is spun, and whichever segment the wheel lands on (via a pointer) is the player’s result, be it a prize or a loss. The prize wheel has its origins in old roulette wheels, and later TV game shows, but the idea was quickly adopted by marketing and communications experts because it offers a clear and compelling user journey: try your luck with a spin of the wheel, and be better off than you were before.

The ubiquity of the concept, coupled with its attractive aesthetic makes it a really popular option for EX programmes.

If you need to distribute rewards in a fair and random way, while also communicating some sort of message, modern customised digital prize wheels offer up a randomised algorithm through which to take care of the prizes, and customisation options through intermediate content screens to communicate the desired messages.

Additionally, end screens typically come with the option to add call to action buttons (CTAs) to redirect employees to strategic pages, such as an important intranet page, or to sign up for an employee app.

So whether it’s to motivate a desired action, get eyeballs on specific information, or to simply reward teams and create internal excitement and good will towards the company, the custom-branded random prize wheel can be a very capable and adaptable digital tool.

Spin the wheel ideas: Employee experience use cases with practical advice

Powerful mobile technology and the rise of gamification platforms means that now all businesses can access a quality custom spin the wheel generator like Drimify’s and make their own branded spin the wheel games.

Whether it’s a prize wheel for marketing and customer experience, or for distributing employee rewards and gifts, it’s just a few clicks away and a morning’s work for any organisation in need of an engagement solution.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of use cases for spin the wheel games for EX with pro tips from our experience in gamification.

Spin the wheel for recruitment

Recruitment is about more than just advertising jobs, interviewing candidates, and hiring the best prospect. Before any of that happens, you now have to market your company, your culture, and your perks if you want to have a high quality pool of applicants to work through.

One way of doing this is through gamified experiences. Utilising experience builders like Drimify’s Dynamic Path™ or Combo™, you can deliver a series of varied game mechanics that engage prospective applicants in addictive gameplay like quizzes and mini games themed to your industry, but include instant win games like spin the wheel to intermittently distribute prizes.

The regular opportunities to win prizes keep people playing, while intermediate content screens and topical quizzes educate candidates on your culture and your brand’s mission.

This serves to not only inform, but create a positive and playful association with your brand.

Spin the wheel for facility discovery

Whenever you move to a new facility, particularly on a large scale, you’re turning a lot of people’s next day of work into their first day of school.

If your company has invested in a state of the art onsite gym for your employees, or have secured a commercial partner to provide that service, or you’ve created an industry-relevant learning library for your teams to upskill themselves and advance their careers, you need to do a bit of internal marketing to promote that.

The great thing about having a physical location is that it gives you a lot of physical real estate to play with – by which of course, we mean gamify.

You could place QR codes on key locations, which when scanned, open up instant win games like prize wheels, or, if you wanted to be more strategic, you could take the Dynamic Path™ experience builder, password protect the different levels, and place those passwords around the facility.

This way, to access the spin the wheels, quizzes, and mini games, they need to actually visit the different spots and interact with them to get the passwords.

Spin the wheel to raise awareness internally

Just because it’s sometimes called a prize wheel, doesn’t mean it necessarily has to distribute prizes.

With Drimify’s spin the wheel builder, the digital spin the wheel mechanics distribute a random result, which leads to a conditional end page (and can even include a conditional intermediate content screen) – meaning it’s dealing one of X user journeys every time it’s played.

This could be utilised in the following way for a corporate social responsibility (CSR) campaign targeting employees:

This adds an element of randomisation, but also encourages discussion and debate among employees.

Instead of extant sustainability initiatives, they could be pitches, and afterwards, employees could discuss and then debate and advocate for which one should be carried forward and actioned.

Spin the wheel for marketing calendar events

Yes, your external marketing might well go crazy during Christmas, Easter, and Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but these marketing calendar events can often apply to employees too.

What workplace doesn’t do something for teams over Christmas? What workplace doesn’t have a Christmas party? Or doesn’t do a little something during the summer holidays for their teams?

The spin the wheel game mechanic is ideal for randomly distributing prizes to employees around key marketing calendar events, either as an individual game, or as an instant win component that’s part of a larger experience like a digital advent calendar.

Look beyond the obvious: Marketing calendars are unique to every business. Yes, you’ve got the biggies, but are you also an official supermarket for the Vuelta a España? Are you the logistics partner for a major festival?

Whatever the case, you can use instant win games like prize wheels to reward and engage your audience before the planning stages of these key events. It creates positivity towards the task and excitement around the opportunity as you can use intermediate content screens to educate them on their impact.

Spin the wheel for interactivity and re-engagement within employee apps

In the same way spin the wheel games are a great way to generate interactivity on loyalty apps for external audiences, they can do the same thing on internal employee apps.

Employee apps typically have a lot of learning resources and news specific to the company and employees’ roles, so finding ways to re-engage employees with chances to win is a great way to periodically get people back on the app.

Prize ideas for spin the wheel games: Rewards that work

Some of you might be thinking, “Sure, these spin the wheels sound great, but I haven’t got the budget for all these prizes! How do I know what works?”

A cursory search of the internet will tell you that your rewards budget should be between one and two per cent of your overall payroll, and we’re here to neither contradict nor enforce that.

What we would say as gamification experts is that this isn’t about throwing prizes at employees at random (whilst acknowledging that on a more literal level, at times, that’s exactly what it is). You should always carefully consider your rewards budget, your EX budget, and how each project contributes to business goals.

Every spin the wheel or EX project has to tie into retaining talent, attracting talent, boosting the workplace culture, and generating buy-in to big events. If it contributes to any of these in a meaningful way, it’s worth the expense.

With that being said, here are some other things to consider when choosing your prizes for your employee-targeted spin the wheel games and EX programmes.

Understanding what motivates your employees

The great thing about Drimify’s spin the wheel builder – and really any enterprise grade gamification platform – is that you’re going to get a lot of data to work with from project to project.

If you think of a big or premium prize in a spin the wheel game as bait, you will be able to see in the sheer numbers of participation and engagement percentages what prizes are most valued by your employees.

Over time, you will learn what they respond well to as a prize, and what is less worthy of spending your resources on.

Balancing the frequency and value of rewards

If you go and give away a Ferrari, that’s probably it. For maybe a decade or two.

It’s great to know what people want, but you need to balance this against how frequently you can run reward based games like spin the wheel.

Gamification works best when used frequently, so bear in mind that blowing the rewards budget on one amazing contest might do big numbers, but it’ll hurt you in the long run.

Also, consider that the bigger the premium prize, the less employees you’ll be rewarding overall.

SWAG, or stuff we all get, can go a long way, especially when it’s useful, smart stuff, like your company branded water bottles but made by a premium partner brand, or button-operated umbrellas for the winter – particularly if you live in a rainy city.

Creating a fair and inclusive rewards system

You also need to make your rewards system fair. For example, if there’s a £250 voucher as one of the bigger prizes in a larger, multi-step EX campaign, it shouldn’t just go randomly on a spin the wheel that’s open to everyone.

It might be better to have the really big prizes be distributed in an exclusive prize wheel that’s only distributed to employees who got into the top 10 of the overall leaderboard. Then you can have more of the SWAG-type prizes available through instant win games that are dotted through the experience that keep everyone playing, even if they have no chance of cracking the top 10 based on poor early performances.

Bigger and more generous prizes don’t always equal better campaigns: If you have the budget and everything’s going amazingly, it can be easy to get carried away with big prizes, but there always needs to be a balance between chance and merit.

If you were giving away days of paid time off, and premium experiences like helicopter lessons, and some of the worst performing employees won, but your best and brightest just won a new mug, you’d create more problems than you’d solved.

Some prizes are better being distributed logically and on merit rather than at random. Exactly where the line is between chance and merit, is down to you to decide.

Your own custom spin the wheel is just a few clicks away

The guidance around prizes in this article serve as a starting point for defining one of the biggest aspects in creating your own EX campaign.

Remember, it’s not just about giving things away – every spin the wheel should serve a valid EX purpose that serves your business, and fits into your budget, so really think through how each project serves your overall strategy.

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