Gamification in business doesn’t mean that employees will be playing games like Minecraft at work – don’t let the word ‘game’ confuse you. This is a very common misconception as many relate gamification with gaming and games-based learning.
Gamification means mixing core elements of games (that make them fun) with scientific methods of driving user engagement. For instance, having employees win points, badges and rewards when they reach goals, and compete with one another to gain those rewards.
We’ve asked professionals from various industries and organisations to share their thoughts on gamification in their businesses. See what they had to say below:
Information Technology (IT)
One creative (non-techie) team member came up with the idea of J Coins, which is a virtual currency we can distribute to fellow team members, rewarding them for executing on any one or all six of our company’s core values. Plus, team members are incentivized to give more than receive, with a person’s total J Coin count being adjusted up whenever giving a J Coin, and remaining flat or averaging lower when receiving a coin.
Whomever receives the most J Coins is treated to something nice at the end of the month. It reinforces presence of mind and taking time to show gratitude for another person’s efforts.
Public Relations
I’ve used a gamification LMS system with my team to rev up the energy when confronted with a particularly large project or one that has a quick turnaround.
Team members get points for a variety of win conditions: Each team member has 10 points to award (one at a time) for assists from another team member. These are posted out on our company intranet chat, so they’re a very public kudos.
Each person earns points: 3 points for milestone turnovers 1 or more days ahead of schedule, 1 point for an on-time turnover (our project has several different deliverables from each person and the point-earning opportunities are evened out that each person can earn 21 individual merit points).
There’s a set of prizes for achieving individual accomplishment levels and a team award (combining everyone’s earned points). This fosters a healthy ambition where everyone has the potential to win and there’s an overall benefit for everyone succeeding.
Earlier attempts had more of a competitive vibe to them that we found counterproductive to both meeting our overall deadlines and team morale.
E-Commerce
We were looking for a way to make our business different and more successful than our competition. One area that we realized we could excel at, that would bring the best ROI, was customer service.
With this in mind, we added customer-email management software to our business. This tool has a great feature which adds points when you answer a customer email in a timely manner and the customers can score how well you did. This completely changed the dynamic in our office.
We then added giveaways to the highest employee scores each month. I can honestly say our customer service time and quality has improved incredibly since this integration!
Webanywhere have helped several companies with gamification, transforming training for million of employees and making it easier and fun. Mozilla’s Open Badges feature, available in Totara, is a great way to recognize achievements in the workplace. If you’d like to learn more about Gamification and Open Budges, get in touch with our elearning experts.