Gamification has helped businesses achieve desired outcomes in numerous aspects. Gamified loyalty programs bring repeat business, gamified marketing campaigns boost customer engagement, gamification in the sales process motivates the salesforce to target higher revenues, and the list goes on. Similarly, the HR department can reap enormous benefits by leveraging gamification in its people management strategies.
If you are unfamiliar with the concept of gamification in HR, you’ve come to the right place! In this blog, we’ll start with the basics and guide you through everything you need to know to get started.
What is Gamification?
Gamification is the use of psychological theories to positively impact human behavior by leveraging different human desires like learning, achieving, competing, socializing, etc. In common terms, gamification is the application of game design elements and mechanics to non-game elements. By incorporating elements such as points, levels, rewards, and challenges into tasks or activities, gamification enhances participation, learning, and engagement.
The most common example of gamification is the fitness app on your phone. Most of the smartphones track your physical activities and challenge you to achieve milestones. For example, the Apple fitness app has three rings: Move, Exercise, and Stand. Each ring fills a bit as you spend more time walking, exercising, or standing. It assigns you the goal to complete the ring every day. Completing the ring gives you a sense of accomplishment. It goes a step further by helping you compete with your friends. When you see that your friends are walking more than you, it ignites a feeling of competition within you and motivates you to win the competition by being more active. In this way, gamified triggers (rings and leaderboards) make you achieve favorable outcomes (more active lifestyle) engagingly.
Source: Apple
How effective is Gamification?
There are numerous examples where companies used gamification in various aspects of their businesses. Let’s have a look at some of the instances where gamification has produced measurable and positive results. Please note that we’ve deliberately included very diverse examples to demonstrate its versatility
- Website Visitor Engagement: Verizon Wireless gamified its community website – “Verizon Insider” with an aim to boost engagement. The site simplified its user registration process and started rewarding users with badges for engaging with the site. This encouraged the users to comment on and share the articles, resulting in higher referral traffic to the site. As a result, the users spent 30% more time on the site and pageviews increased by 15%.
- Speed Limit Implementation: Volkswagen and the Swedish National Society for Road Safety, experimented with a Speed Camera Lottery to encourage safe driving. The speed camera installed on the road punished over-speeders with a ticket, whereas people following the speed limit were enlisted in a lottery. The lottery winners would win some amount collected from the speed limit violators. Over three days, 25000 cars passed through the camera. The average speed before the experiment was 32 km/h, but this experiment brought it down to 25 km/h — a 22% deduction.
- Acquiring Borrowers as a Bank: Australia’s Commonwealth Bank developed a simulation game that helped the players understand the nuances of investing in real estate. The game offered a virtual suburban housing market, where prospective investors could try investing strategies without risking real money. It provided an opportunity to ‘try before you buy’ in a sector where trials are impossible. As a result, the bank was able to generate about 600 loans within one year behind an investment of around $400,000.
The above examples prove that gamification can be applied in countless situations. Now, let’s move to gamification in HR.
Gamification in HR
What is gamification in HR? Just as we saw how gamification is used in many fields, you can use it in the HR field too. It can be used to improve the efficiency of the HR function, and it can also be used to bring positive change to the entire human capital of an organization.
Three elements can be used to implement gamification in HR:
- Performance: Provide real-time performance goals along with a continual process of feedback on progress.
- Achievement: You should provide a visual manifestation of your employees’ achievements.
- Social Behaviour and Interaction: Peers should be aware of each other’s achievements and they should be able to interact across groups.
Completion of clear goals, for example, performance against SLAs, should be rewarded with visual manifestations of achievements like badges, points, etc. Doing so gamifies the work. Now, you need a channel where employees can showcase their achievements in front of their peers. Once you have all these three elements aligned, you have successfully gamified your workplace for a healthy and competitive environment
Ideas on Implementing Gamification in HR
In this section, we’ll explore some ideas on how you can incorporate gamification for different HR objectives in your organization.
Improving Productivity:
HR can boost employee productivity by gamifying employee targets. For instance, employees can earn small instant rewards or collectibles/points for achieving individual goals, which, when accumulated, unlock larger prizes. Immediate incentives like gadgets—headphones, smartwatches, or speakers—along with grand rewards such as family vacation trips, add excitement. By incorporating intrinsic motivators like rewards, unpredictability, and social recognition, you can stir excitement and bring more productivity into the day-to-day work of your employees.
Learning and Development:
Instead of traditional methods like pre-recorded video lectures or classroom training, HRs can make learning and development more interactive with L&D platforms. By incorporating challenges, quizzes, and rewards like badges or points, HRs can motivate employees to participate actively in the training programs. Gamified learning offers real-time feedback, personalized progress tracking, and opportunities to advance through levels, making the process more dynamic.
Employee Engagement:
Gamification can also help HRs with employee engagement. One of the popular ways to do so is through Enterprise Social Networks. The ESNs can leverage humans’ natural need to socialize and create a more interactive and motivating work environment. They encourage employees to appreciate one another, share accomplishments, and earn rewards for actively engaging at work. This social interaction fosters camaraderie and drives healthy competition, motivating more employees to engage and contribute, and ultimately strengthening workplace involvement and productivity.
What’s Next
Gamification can be the best way to level up your HR Management. You should look closely at your HR processes and find ideas for incorporating game-like elements into them. Additionally, you can search for technology platforms that leverage gamification to deliver an engaging employee experience.
Your next read: 11 Tips for Effective Gamification of Employee Goals