All work and no play can lead to your employees feeling dull and uninspired. As it happens, using fun to liven up the workplace can help! Let’s explore how you can use gamification to your business’ benefit. Work and fun don’t have to be mutually exclusive concepts. First, it will help to establish exactly what gamification is.
Understanding Gamification
In its most basic terms, gamification is the process of taking one of your run-of-the-mill procedures and adding perks and other motivating factors to make it an engaging activity that your employees are motivated to do to the best of their ability.
This concept isn’t a new one. Consider the “employee of the month” tradition many offices will adopt. All it is, is a means of creating a bit of healthy competition between your employees to encourage them to compete with one another. Lately, the concept of adding game-like elements to the workplace has been expanding in more and more industries, and is now present even in the biggest enterprises. Gamification doesn’t have to take up any extra time and can be a huge benefit.
Why? Psychology, if you can believe it.
How Gamification Works
There are certain factors that human beings tend to find more motivating than others. A few big ones are being recognized, competing with others, and the promise of a reward in exchange for their efforts. It just so happens that turning tasks into games is effective. This has been proven so effective, the likes of Google and the United States Army use gamification pretty regularly. Google uses it to help minimize travel expenses by allowing them to keep any of the allocated funds for a business trip that have gone unused, and the Army as a recruitment tool.
How You Can Use Gamification in Your Business
There are multiple options that someone interested in gamifying their workplace has to consider. There are many programs and solutions available for different industries and applications that may be a worthwhile investment for you to make.
If you’d prefer to just dip your toe in and experiment with DIY gamification tactics, it isn’t difficult to do so. You could try distributing random cards to people as they accomplish goals and reach milestones, and see who can “draw” the best poker hand. You could do the same, but in a raffle format for some fun prizes every so often. You can also step it up and go bigger if you want to, understanding that investing in your employees will absolutely profit your business in the future. The key is to introduce those factors that can lead to a task being translated from a chore, to a game.
We hope this blog helps you combine work and fun. Have you ever experimented with gamification in the workplace? What did you find most effective about it? Share your thoughts and ideas in the comments! Aside from gamification, if you feel as though your company needs any help with IT support or IT services, reach out to Symmetric IT Group today.
