Gamification

It's the end of a working day. Workers switch from corporate to leisure devices. Laptops make place for TVs, tablets, and gaming consoles. It's digital reality. Screen time has grown drastically since the 50s, when TVs replaced radios as the dominant medium for home entertainment. People feel the need to interact more with the digital world. Gaming is increasingly popular for people to spend leisure time. It's engaging and that's why organizations consider bringing gaming elements into the workplace.

Gamification has everything to do with video games. Gaming is popular. Society has long moved on from the perception that video games are reserved for kids. Research by the Entertainment Software Association (2022), shows that nearly two-thirds of Americans game and that 65% of American gamers are 18 years or older. Gaming is an acceptable undertaking for adults and workers likely spend some of their leisure time interacting with a gaming console. Through the process of introducing gaming elements into workplaces, popular features such as challenges, points, badges, and leaderboards, are brought into the day-to-day work of employees. Gamification is a strategic approach to enhance systems, processes, and activities by mimicking gaming experiences. These enhancements are aimed at improving engagement from employees with their work, colleagues, and the organization.

Global employee engagement is low. Data by Gallup (2023) shows that employee engagement is at 23% around the world and 33% in the United States. Since the pandemic, employee engagement has been tumbling down a slippery slope. A study by the Achievers Workforce Institute (2021) found that just 21% of employees are very engaged at work. Furthermore, 42% said company culture diminished during the pandemic and 46% feel less connected to their organization. Organizations that have mastered practices keep workers engaged, however, see employee engagement at 70%. That's triple the global rate and more than double the rate in the United States. No wonder leaders are looking for effective initiatives that help their organizations reach similar levels of employee engagement. Gamification can play a big role in engaging workers. People like games, also at work. In a survey by TalentLMS (2019), 89% of employees said that they would be more productive if their work was more gamified. Introducing gaming elements into the workplace increases worker motivation and performance, and can be particularly effective for lower-performing workers. Although many business areas can benefit from gamification, the biggest potential is in implementing gaming elements for training and development purposes.

Organizations have been experimenting with gamification for quite some time and there are great success stories. KPMG, in 2018, launched a gamified learning app to better familiarise employees with the organization's service offerings. Users interacted more than a million times with the app and KPMG observed a 24% improvement in awareness about its service offerings among employees. The gamified learning app was effective at closing knowledge gaps and gave employees a more positive impression of KPMG as an innovative place to work. Deloitte, IBM, and BMW have also been experimenting with gamification. Deloitte started using leaderboards in skill development programs and noticed a 47% increase in the number of return users each week (Business Chief, 2023). IBM, in 2019, rolled out a gaming element as part of a pilot program: a digital badge. The organization saw the number of employees passing the end-of-course exams skyrocket by 694% (Business Chief, 2023). Research by TalentLMS (2019) captured the broader sentiment of employees toward gamification. 88% of workers said they'd feel happier at work because of gamification and 83% felt motivated after receiving gamified training. In addition, 78% of workers said they'd be more attracted to an organization if it used gamification in its recruitment process, giving leaders yet another reason to invest in gamification.

The best approach to getting started with gamification is utilizing employee onboarding programs as testing grounds. That's where engagement peaks and when employees are most eager to share their feedback. Leaders can use these programs to shape unique experiences for new workers and see whether gaming elements catch on. This serves as a great basis for understanding what motivates employees and identifying metrics that help monitor the effectiveness of different gaming elements. Bit by bit, leaders build a gamification strategy and start defining objectives that can be applied to systems, processes, and activities across the organization. With that in place, they can start to roll out gamification to internal training programs, repetitive day-to-day activities, and the recruitment process. From there on, it's about continuously collecting feedback from employees and user data from systems to iterate on and improve the gamification strategy.

Gamification is about bringing engaging gaming elements into the workplace. It plays an important role in engaging the workforce by introducing, among others, contests, rewards, and leaderboards. Leading organizations have seen how investing in gamification positively affects the performance and satisfaction of their employees, improving employee engagement. Many leaders are eager to follow suit and can get started by leveraging their existing onboarding programs to experiment with gaming elements and define a company-wide strategy. Effectively enhancing operations with gaming elements will help them reach higher levels of engagement and it might satisfy the hunger of employees turning on their gaming devices after a day's work.