Unless you’re living under a rock, you’ve probably heard the term gamification. In meetings, articles, and even casual conversations, people are abuzz about the way gamification increases engagement, builds community, and drives business.
But what is gamification?
Gamification is the use of game attributes to drive game-like player behavior in a non-game context. This definition has three components:
- “The use of game attributes,” which includes game mechanics/dynamics, game design principles, gaming psychology, player journey, game play scripts and storytelling, and/or any other aspects of games.
- “To drive game-like player behavior,” such as engagement, interaction, addiction, competition, collaboration, awareness, learning, and/or any other observed player behavior during game play.
- “In a non-game context,” which can be anything other than a game (e.g. education, work, health and fitness, community participation, civic engagement, volunteerism, etc.).
“Gamification offers engagement and motivation techniques to rally opposing forces to work toward collaborative goals,” writes Gartner analyst Elise Olding.
Gamification represents how science can be cleverly disguised in order to provide incentives for cultivating creativity, encouraging peer cooperation in an entertaining and at the same time competitive environment.
In the enterprise environment, gamification elements should be used for making employees learn how to develop a dependable working attitude. The ultimate goal is productivity, advancement and achievement, not rivalry and winning. Through this process, the personnel can develop remarkably innovative concepts through crowdsourcing.
In terms of gamifying internal processes and making people work together not against each other for the corporation’s best interest, it is crucial to make them feel like a whole. How can you do that?
Give them space to express themselves
Apart from professionals, employees are also individuals with interests, likes, peculiarities. Provide them a corporate social network, blog or some room in general to get to know each other and learn to like and value each other. Perhaps they could even find more common ground apart from work related issues. Most importantly, through conversation in a relaxed atmosphere, there is great possibility for business matters to be discussed with open mind and clear head.
Make overall corporate vision and goals visible to everyone
How to apply gamification when the majority of the staff isn’t aware of what it is supposed to achieve? Different teams or even different members within the same team receive partial and diverse information about the scope of projects or corporate strategy. It is absolute need to cultivate it to the personnel’s morale prior to even thinking about game mechanics or gamification of business.
Share corporate culture and make individuals feel they belong to a community.
Use social networks to highlight important moments that teamwork thrives
Everyone needs a good old times reminder once in a while and social networks are the place to praise your employees. Everyone can see it, including customers and they would feel rewarded as a group.
When such a mentality is existent among employees, gamification techniques can be utilized with immense success.
In gamifying the business management should be very careful in setting timeframes and goals, because they wouldn’t want all these elaborate new processes to backfire. Employees should have clear objectives to fulfill and they should be rewarded instantly after they productively finish each task. Otherwise, there is a high risk of turning once motivated groups of employees into indifferent individuals.
Gamification is here to stay, that’s for sure. In the future it will become such a part of our lives that we will be gaming without even knowing it. Perhaps that’s why Gartner predicts that by 2016, 70% of Fortune 2000 companies will have at least one gamified application. Furthermore, 50% of organisations that manage innovation processes will gamify these processes. In 2010 business spent $ 100 million on gamification. In 2016 that figure is estimated to reach $ 2.8 billion. Interesting numbers!
