Gamification for business uses game elements to motivate employees to perform their best. Furthermore, It prompts them to compete with their goals, and/or team members, as well as past accomplishments. It shows how they’re doing and what’s needed to reach their goals.

Gamification in the workplace for business, to be truly effective, must be a kind of Fitbit for work. And, It impacts an organization’s culture to get people thinking, talking, and driving employee performance differently, more effectively.

5 things you didn't know about gamification in the workplace

Real-time performance management

The problem is most performance management methods involve assessing things retroactively, looking well in the past, often on an annualized basis. Employees find communications about performance in this context confrontational and discouraging.

Gamification focuses on the right now. Imagine a basketball coach who jogs up and down the court, following his team as they use their skills to drive to victory. And, gamification brings this real-time dynamic to your employees’ performance. Feedback is given on-the-spot, by showing performance KPIs, personalized benchmarks, and goals within the gamification application.

Transparent measurement

Many large and successful companies use Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to communicate goals and objectives to employees. Moreover, OKRs work well for knowledge workers. Employees who have direct dealings with customers are different. They’re on the frontline. They don’t have goals like “launch a new product.”

As a result, their OKRs are narrower in scope, more oriented toward a specific task or set of tasks.

Objectivity and fairness

Employee management is moving away from largely subjective forms of evaluations toward objective measurements and proactive employee development.

Both see what goals are being met and where performance gaps exist. When employees see their evaluation is fair and consistent, discussions about performance become more collaborative, more positive.

Fosters desired behaviors

Competition, especially friendly, well-designed forms, is viewed as a positive motivation method. And, they believe in this fallacy and, as a result, manage performance with leaderboards; a kind of management by humiliation.

With gamification, better sales can be generated by driving the desired behaviors sought from all members of the team, collectively and individually. And, those behaviors can be measured: more calls, qualifying leads, meeting potential and existing clients, and more.

More than a game

Gamification creates ways for employees to monitor their progress and act from a place of intrinsic motivation. Furthermore, it isn’t a game, but it can be a game-changer for employee performance and company culture.

The Conclusion

Suppose one wants to implement a gamified approach to work for the sole reason of increasing productivity. In that case, the programs are also needed to be designed in the same way.

Defining gamification is not that easy, and neither is implementing it at the workplace. Employers looking forward to incorporating gamification need to be very careful with their objectives that they want to achieve through it.