Gamified Exposure

Gamification is the process of taking something that already exists – a website, an enterprise application, an online community – and integrating game mechanics into it to motivate participation, engagement, and loyalty.

Gamification offers the opportunity to simulate the working environment and create a selection technique that chooses the best talent. For example, Marriott Hotels launched a mobile app that makes candidates virtually perform hotel industry tasks. This provides insight into how the candidate would approach real work and it helps eliminate those applicants lacking the patience or aptitude for the job.

Gamification offers new ways to align candidate behaviour with organizational goals. So instead of telling an employee that he “meets expectations,” it is better to say that he did not clear the second level of the game. Instead of creating performance ratings, HR representatives can create transparent leader boards with badges attached to each level, so that an employee knows how he or she is doing in his business unit, region, country or globally. If an organization has an internal social media portal, the conversations and chatter around the game can create employee engagement at this “virtual water cooler.”

The cases for using gamification are numerous and growing. SAP uses games to educate its employees on sustainability; Unilever applies them to training; Hays deploys them to hire recruiters and the Khan Academy uses it for online education. According to the Aberdeen survey, organizations with gamification in place improve engagement by 48%, as compared to 28% with those who do not, and improve turnover by 36% as compared to 25%.

Year 2015 will be the year of gamification inside the workplace migrates from a few isolated pilots to a new way to engage and recognize high performing employee.

         Gamification takes the essence of games — attributes such as fun, play, transparency, design, competition and yes, addiction— and applies these to a range of real-world processes inside a company from recruiting to learning & development.

Gallup’s latest research shows why companies are increasing their interest in gamification. The Gallup study finds 31% of employees are engage at work (51% are disengaged and 17.5% actively disengaged) but what is most interesting is how this data compares when you apply a generational segmentation.It turns out Millennials are the least engaged generation, according to Gallup, with only 28.9% engaged as compared to 32.9% for Gen X & Boomers. What is going on here? Gallup findings segmented by generation point to low engagement among Millennials who say they do not have the opportunity to show their best work or have a vehicle to contribute their ideas and suggestions. Using gamification to address this will influence not only engagement levels but also help a company become a magnet for best of breed talent. After all, Millennials will reportedly make up 75% of the global workforce by 2025!

How HR Can Use Gamification

HR teams can leverage gamification to achieve business goals by

• ·        Improve Talent Acquisition and Management

Company can easily turn the hiring process into a gamified experience by rewarding prospects with both acknowledgement and rewards for completing each step, from application to start date. Providing incentives can not only help attract qualified candidates from the start, but can also dramatically increase onboarding efficiency, as candidates are motivated to complete various steps to earn rewards.

At the same time, much like a sales function, HR teams can also use gamification internally to reward top recruiters and incentivize employees to refer top candidates. The opportunity for an employee to earn Referrer of the Year status can encourage employees to take a more active role in talent acquisition, and even help relieve some of the pressure from the HR department itself.

• ·        Cultivate Corporate Culture and Retain Valued Employees

Keeping employees engaged and feeling that they are part of the team is critical for retention and retention is paramount in maintaining valuable personnel assets, institutional knowledge and consistency, and avoiding costly turnover.

              Gamification can be used to promote a positive corporate culture by rewarding employees for cross-departmental collaboration, providing process or product improvement suggestions, or even participating in company-wide volunteer programs, for example.

           Company can use a gamified platform to track these activities and opportunities, as well as showcase employee participation to their co-workers to provide intrinsic motivation. As an added benefit, the platform maintains a record of all employee activities in the program, which is quite valuable information when it comes time to consider promotions, raises and other tangible rewards.

• ·        Motivate Employees to Learn and Participate in Training

Mandatory HR training, like harassment, diversity and other compliance programs, are often not high on most employees’ priority lists, especially when they do not see a relationship to their day-to-day job duties. Motivating them to take time out of their busy day to complete these programs in a specified period can be challenging.

Adding a gamification experience to the online learning program can spur action. Employee who earn rewards and recognition for having completed these tasks, or missions in the gamification lexicon, are far more likely to make it a priority and HR benefits from the ability to check those boxes for compliance in a timely fashion, without the pressure of having to hound employees to complete the programs.

• ·     Incentivize Paperwork and Other Administrative Requirements

No one likes to complete paperwork, especially when other tasks are more pressing — and exciting but paperwork is unavoidable in areas such as completion of benefits enrolment forms and expense reports, So why not make it fun?

Similar to training applications, rewarding employees with either peer or management recognition — or even tangible incentives — for completing required forms can create a friendly competition where employees try to out-do one another for the title of best expense reporter or quickest to complete benefits update forms.

•             Map the Path to Career Success

Employees see colleagues earning praise, achieving goals and climbing the proverbial ladder, and they want to know how they can achieve the same results. Using gamification, HR departments can create transparent, mission-based career paths that show the steps employees have taken to level up in the organization.

For example, perhaps the top salesperson completes refresher training annually, turns in expense reports within a week of travel, keeps his/her prospect pipeline up to date, logs five new leads every week and follows up on two.

By highlighting this behaviour in a gamified platform, other employees can see what it takes to become the top salesperson as this mentor provides a breadcrumb path to show peers the way to the top.

You can even design such programs to allow team members to recognize one another for contributions made toward a common goal and all of this data is tractable, creating a valuable historic record to capture employee and organizational knowledge.

By consulting the platform, it’s easy to identify employees who have achieved certification in specific skills, worked with clients in a specific industry or make other connections throughout the data. All of this combines to create a more efficient, collaborative, productive and upwardly motivated workforce.

To some, the idea of gamification sounds like a thinly veiled attempt to bait employees into doing what they should already be doing But the truth is organizations can use gamification as an effective way to combat the employee engagement crisis in the U.S.

According to a recent Gallup poll, 71% of American workers report feeling not engaged or actively disengaged in their work. This two-thirds majority translates into nearly $350 billion in lost revenue.

Using gamification, HR executives and their teams can create a more interactive, rewarding and attentive workforce. It can help ward off worker malaise by leveraging intrinsic motivators to drive desirable employee behaviour and improve efficiency and ROI, while reducing turnover and churn costs.