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.
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