How to Increase Employee Engagement with Gamification
For over a decade now, gamification has been used by businesses to improve employee training, participation and motivation. Gamification takes elements of video games and applies it into non-gaming contexts, like a specific process inside an organisation - truly taking the motto “work hard, play hard” to a new level!
The idea is to encourage employees to reach certain objectives by making mundane tasks fun. Merriam-webster defines gamification as, the process of adding games or game-like elements to something so as to encourage participation. Game design has been implemented into various parts of day-to-day operations, in functions like HR, sales, customer support and services to name a few.
Gamification = improved engagement
It all sounds like fun and games, but how does gamification really create engagement? It’s quite simple - by applying game mechanics and friendly competition into a work environment employee motivation is boosted, which in turn drives higher employee productivity.
Instant rewards such as points, badges, leaderboards, or progression are used to affirm success and motivate employees. These incentives foster employees’ behaviour to achieve set targets and business goals. Overall, urging employees to compete, improve and out-do their colleagues brings a wave of positive benefits such as:
Improved team performance - When individual employees are put to compete against each other in an enjoyable way, the entire team performance is simultaneously improved. Having the power to turn average repetitive tasks into interesting challenges encourages enthusiasm towards work and cultivates better team spirit.
Ability to provide real-time feedback - Gamifying work tasks allows employees to work towards real-time, measurable, and meaningful targets i.e. no more surprises in yearly performance reviews! This solves a vital issue - 57% of employees don’t feel recognised and 60% never receive instant feedback from their managers. More importantly, it also provides both employees and management with an accurate transparent way to track performance.
Better employee retention - Highly engaged employees are 87% less likely to leave their companies than their disengaged counterparts. Gamification provides another channel to captivate employees while bringing an element of fun into their daily work. Let’s face it, employees who enjoy their work, will also feel more committed to their organisation.
Examples of Gamification...
Amazon, has adopted gamification into various warehouses in a piloting program that allows employees to gamify their workload. The game works together with their facility technology to track employee work progress, which is then compared to other employees. Incentives such as virtual badges are used to reward employees. The trial must be working well as what initially began as a pilot in one warehouse has now expanded to five.
Giosg Derby app is a racing app that helps improve the performance of customer service teams using live chat by encouraging agents to compete against each other. It’s an additional feature in giosg Live Chat that gamifies the experience for live chat agents with various types of races, including number of chats, and average response wait time etc. Not only can it reduce response time by 35%, but it helps measure performance in real-time via a derby horse race type leadership board. How fun is that?
Check out the video below or chat with us to learn more about how to gamify your agent live chat experience with giosg Derby app.
