Workplace gamification to help businesses

The world of work regularly evolves. Workplace environments, management styles, and employee preferences – these are all mercurial aspects of business. They change generationally, and with developments in technology introducing new benefits and new possibilities to companies. With working remotely becoming more and more common due to its efficiency potentials, as well as it being the preferred working style for gen Z workers entering the job market, there has been a noticeable increase in the use of workplace gamification.

To improve the performance and management of a business, more and more entrepreneurs, business leaders, and people managers are turning to corporate gamification to create interactive opportunities among colleagues. Gamified content can be as effective in remote working situations as it can in the office or onsite, and brings a lot of benefits to both work environments. It can be adapted to digital team building, corporate training and upskilling, and as a digital tool to increase productivity.

What is gamification at work?

The use of gaming mechanics to learn new skills, motivate people to do specific tasks, and generally increase productivity as part of a human resources strategy (HR) is not a new idea. From childhood, we learn how to be adults by playing games. Playing cops and robbers, playing shop, and copying our parents and role models. Parents and teachers regularly use simple game mechanics to motivate us as children. Think back to Mary Poppins, the eponymous nanny famously said: “If there’s a job that must be done, there is an element of fun. You find the fun and – SNAP – the job’s a game.” Even wild animals learn to hunt by playing with their brothers and sisters. Play is nature’s default learning mechanism.

However, as we grow up and conform to the societal expectation of being taken seriously, there comes an adult expectation to just crack on and be disciplined. The workplace and business generally has developed a reputation for seriousness and conservativeness, so learning at work can suffer, and subsequently, so can productivity.

Fortunately, the concept of serious games was coined in 1970. Serious games are defined as games with a serious purpose as opposed to being for pure entertainment. The purpose is typically to practise skills, or to aid in learning new job-specific knowledge. They ultimately aim to be an effective learning experience to make employees more effective in their roles, and increase productivity within a company.

Where did serious games come from?

Originally devised for military training, serious games quickly found their way into the corporate world, as they offer so many advantages and benefits when it comes to effectively upskilling and developing employees through learning. Instead of teaching your teams some theory, or having them sit through a few seminars, and then letting them loose on real customers and projects, you can have them practise and better their understanding of the subject matter by playing through scenarios in a game. Instead of the real world, where wrong moves and missteps could contravene numerous laws and codes of conduct, and result in real consequences, both financial, legal, and reputational, the simulation you can create in a serious game allows them to make mistakes and learn through repeatability.

This is almost a rebranding of “play” so that businesses and corporations around the world can benefit from the superior audience engagement rates well designed gamification projects can yield. The use of serious games, and the gamification of the workplace, offers so many benefits and advantages to companies across different sectors.

Gamify for better engagement, increased productivity, and employee autonomy

Gamification in the workplace is mostly a training and learning tool, but it has impacts and repercussions across business functions. Consider if, instead of more traditional corporate training materials, you were to create a long form, multi-step, playable learning pathway. By using the Dynamic Path™ format, you get access to every game engine on the Drimify games creation platform to create multiple modules. Through a series of customised Quizzes, steps of pure video content, some copy, and some mini-games with the details customised to reinforce targeted learnings, you could create massive open online courses (MOOC) bespoke to different areas of your business. You could have a course specific to management, and courses specific to more specialised or technical areas. This would allow employees to manage their own learning and develop at their own pace, alongside their daily tasks.

The benefits of this approach over traditional corporate training are extensive. You empower employees to take accountability for their own development, while being able to easily monitor their progress through your Drimify dashboard. This is in case they need more support in some areas, or you identify any strengths which could be used elsewhere in the business. Through the gamified content you can create, you have a powerful digital training tool that works on any modern device, so they can be used onsite on tablets, in the office on computers, or at home, on smartphones or laptops. You also eliminate the need for 20 different employees’ diaries to correspond for a training session, don’t lose hours in a day of having certain business functions understaffed, and the training itself becomes a lot less labour intensive.

Additionally, by harnessing the same game mechanics and game design elements as video games, the engagement rate will be superior to a team leader or instructor delivering a lecture or reading off a presentation. Your employees, and certainly the employees entering the workforce today, and over the coming years, are digital natives, and very comfortable and familiar with video games and their mechanics.

You could also create gamification experiences for your teams to promote their own wellbeing. For example, courses focused on good habits, such as health-boosting hacks and adopting a growth mindset. Jane McGonigal, an American game designer known for her work in the world of video games, explains more in her guide: SuperBetter: The Power of Living Gamefully, on how it is possible to achieve remarkable personal development in the least amount of time using only games.

A business ally to rally and motivate its teams

Modern workers, more than their predecessors, value stimulating working environments that they are motivated to be a part of. In order to successfully engage and stimulate modern employees in your business, and aid your recruitment campaign, you need to create a dynamic environment. A great way to aid this effort is by applying game design elements, and more broadly, a gamification strategy, across your business.

The whole game of business is a constant fight for attention. When you’re marketing products, you’re fighting to engage your customer’s attention, internally, you’re trying to engage the attention of your employees. Modern gamification tools and their various applications work on short feedback cycles, pull on psychological levers like the desire for competition, discovery, and social interaction, and as such are the ideal vehicle through which to engage the modern workforce.

The key is to establish a “play framework” which is adapted to your business and your employees. This means you’re not compromising on the serious work your business does, which can also produce the same “captivating effect” as a game.

Gamification at work’s main advantages

From a manager’s perspective, gamification is an ideal process for coaching teams, improving their experience within the business, and sharing with them the business’s culture and values through effective internal communication.

From the perspective of employees, they are better equipped to stay motivated as less exciting tasks become more fun in their gamified form, and they benefit from superior training experiences. These training experiences, depending on your business’s gamification strategy, can be focused on job-specific skills, but can also be used for more broad personal development, which can help your employer brand as you become known for empowering your people, rather than just utilising them as a resource. These little touches are what can lead to better employee retention, attracting better talent, and spending less time training and plugging shortfalls in labour.

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