How Leaders Can Utilize Gamification To Level Up Engagement
Nov 6, 2019
Ready for an alarming statistic? A new Gallup poll found that almost nearly 90% of employees feel disengaged. The same poll discovered that when employees are highly engaged with their company culture, those same employees outperform their peers by a whopping 150%.
So how do you take this data and make meaningful transformations within your company? The answer is not as difficult as you think. The answer is simple: have fun. This is where the leadership concept of gamification comes in. What is this gamification buzzword anyway? To put it simply, it aims to make anything (meetings, incentives, practices, etc.) more like a game. Does this work? Just look around you. The universal love of games unites most people. Just look at the sheer growth in the gaming industry from professional sports to online games. Gamification crosses geographical, political, and societal boundaries. What leader wouldn't want to tap into that wellspring to inspire their workforce? Engagement is a direct result of making anything more like a game. The motivation comes from an inherent instinct to, well, play. So how do you introduce gamification to your office? Here are some gamification techniques you can start incorporating into your team building. Feel free to find a way to make this your own. The whole goal is to make working as team fun again. Use leaderboards and contests to drive motivation and create a team bond. It's amazing what a little bit of competition will do to engage your employees. Find a common goal and work towards it. Make the contests fun, and reward tiers of performance. Also, don't forget to make public recognition of these contests part of your game. Rewards don't have to be fancy or expensive. Instead make them sincere and acknowledge the winner's work and make them feel more included and seen. This will, in turn, make them more motivated and engaged. Encourage the winner of your contest to determine next week's game. This will keep the fun going week after week and encourage all to participate. When employees earn rewards that are scalable, gamification works. Once a particular game works with your team, spread that game throughout your entire organization and make any modifications necessary. While the rewards are mostly symbolic, gamification doesn't have to cost your company a thing.
Read the source article at forbes.com
The stakes are high. Worldwide, Gallup found that 87% of employees are disengaged. The same study noted that highly-engaged workforces outperform their peers by 147% in earnings per share. But how do you motivate and reengage your employee? It's a challenge many leaders face on a daily basis. The answer may require you to think outside the box and, believe it or not, actually have fun.
Gamification is a buzzword with a simple meaning: the act of making something more like a game. From the persistent glow of the world’s mobile phones, game consoles and sports channels on TV screens, it’s clear that a love of games unites us across geographic and demographic lines. Games enthrall us, engage us, entertain us and bring us closer together. When we make something more game-like, we make it more engaging, more motivating, and more fun. As a professional who works with gamification every single day, I can say that this is why gamification is so powerful when applied to tasks or jobs, where motivation and engagement are difficult to secure.
