The fact that 63% of the global workforce is not engaged isn’t all that
surprising. That’s mainly because companies have kept their focus on the bottom
line and profitability. Thus, driving their workforce to work on achieving
targets that are based on a cause which they don’t really associate with.
Unfortunately, such companies haven’t realized that to really impact their
profitability they need a highly engaged workforce. The 63% of the global
workforce that aren’t engaged alone are contributing to $500 billion
productivity loss and higher attrition. When you think about it, why would your
company’s success matter to your workforce? Especially, if they can’t
understand the benefit they’ll achieve from it. That’s the challenge of
employee engagement. That’s why there’s a global engagement crisis. And this is
precisely where gamification can be just the solution that companies all over
the world need, now.
With gamification you can achieve several key advantages. With more and
more multinational organizations realizing these benefits they’ve managed to:
Companies that have successfully deployed gamification programs are
seeing ROIs of over 260% with paybacks of less than 1 month!
Mundane, repetitive and often monotonous work can really bring down
your workforces' morale and enthusiasm. Getting caught up with daily routine
that’s static and unexciting can seriously hamper employees’ sense of purpose
and direction. To add to it all, performance metrics don’t really help much as
they often feel procedural, less intuitive and quite dull and boring. This is
where companies can massively benefit from gamification.
Through gamification you can help your employees feel successful,
accomplished, valued and recognized for their achievements and contributions.
The gamification process reinvents goal-setting and team achievements making it
fun and exciting and encouraging healthy competition. Not only this, you can
also make career progression and advancements highly engaging and exciting.
Gamification in the workplace is much like games itself. In games,
players earn rewards in the form of skill enhancements, resources, points and
upgrades. The same game mechanics apply to the workplace when you implement
gamification. Based on their performance and contributions you can reward
employees with points or scores, upgrades to their scope of work, equip them
with or make accessible to them resources and even enhance their skills. All
this is done so that they can progress their careers within the company.
Obviously, when you’re being rewarded in a fun, exciting and challenging way
you’ll be more engaged and aligned to the company’s goals.
The beauty of gamification is its ability to be accessible to anyone in
your organization and everywhere within your company. By harnessing the power
of mobile technology you can apply gamification with ease, feasibly and to a
wide group of your workforce. However, some companies are challenged by how
they can get their employees into the program. To approach this you can have
digital dashboards placed around your office. These can be in highly visible
locations such as lunch rooms, the place where employees sign in, main halls,
etc.
Using these visible-to-all dashboards makes goal achieving a
companywide agenda. It showcases team and individual leaderboards that can help
reinforce the gamification program. Teams will be able to see how other
cross-functional teams are performing against them and how their own team
members are faring against the competition. Fluctuating daily scores would keep
them on their teams and gunning to achieve more goals and targets. Just the
kind of high performing and highly engaged workforce that leaders dream of!
You know how you have annual or semi-annual performance reviews that
help you guide your employees to exploit their full potential and achieve more
success? Usually the outcome of such meetings is a recharged workforce that
understands the game plan and is hungry for challenges. They’re ready to go out
and be successful. However, why wait till the end of the year or for the middle
of the year to pump your employees up?
The beauty of gamification is its real-time feedback. Your employees’
daily contributions are tallied against their peer group to suggest how well
they performed each day. With the help of the gamification process you can
provide feedback that’s faster, accurate and much more relevant to your
employees. Plus, it’s purely objective, eliminating bias and making the
feedback much more valuable and credible.
What gamification does, in essence, is provide continuous, frequent and
relevant feedback to your employees so that they can take corrective measures
promptly. This allows them to make the necessary tweaks within and through the
year, ensuring they’re always on track to achieving their goals. You’ll never
have another missed target at the end of the month!
It’s no secret that a highly engaged workforce will be more productive
and aligned to the company’s success. In a time when there’s an employee
engagement crisis, gamification is precisely the solution that can help your
company address this challenge.
Learn how you can take your leadership teams through a growth
model which will help them mature on a personal and professional level by
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