The secret formula for employee engagement

How do you build workplace culture, promote healthy behaviour and engage in human interaction when many of your staff might be working at home? 

Gamification is not about recreating an experience for employees but instead a mechanism to help achieve employee engagement to reach organisational objectives. HR gamification is one of the most prominent modern trends in organisational management as it encourages people to do more of what you want them to do and also get better at it. The fun, motivational element gamification has can add value to organisations while increasing employee job satisfaction and engagement. 

Gamified systems introduce elements such as storytelling, sharing of experience, friendly competition, active knowledge sharing and recognition of other’s achievements. It is also an easy way to increase job satisfaction and engagement within isolated teams. While it is a relatively new concept in HR, the newfound buzzword uses intelligent measures to keep the workforce engaged and occupied, boosting morale and maintaining high levels of confidence among employees.

Employees want to be seen as valuable parts of the organisation information system, so companies should strive to use HR management systems to allow their employees to add value to themselves through peer recognition. With COVID-19 bringing to light the detrimental health effects isolation has on employees, gamification is a powerful approach to tackling social- and health-related behavioural issues, by changing the way people are living.

From a company perspective, Gamification has been proven to give businesses the advantage by attracting and engaging clients, as well as motivating and retaining talent. For the individual this can have many different benefits, ranging from developing and enhancing creativity, building team relationships and engaging & maintaining attention.

Currently Deloitte is using Gamification as a tool for Leadership training and have found that they have made this process ‘addictive’. After building a Leadership training curriculum for senior executives they found that they were having trouble engaging the executives in the program. They turned to a gamification company to measurable milestones to the course by adding badges, leaderboards and status symbols to the course. This not only measured the number of executives participating in the course but also reduced the time it took to complete the course by 50% as well as increasing the number of users to return to the site by 46.6%. Deloitte is a perfect example of how Gamification can increase engagement in the workplace but they are only one of many other companies already using it. Google uses it for submitting employee travel expenses, Microsoft used it to make sure language localisation needs were met and Cisco Systems used it to engage employees in boosting their social media skill sets. 

While gamification seems to be at the early stages of being incorporated into learning and training development, it has already had a big impact on the multinational corporations that have already incorporated it into their HR programs. Incorporating gamification into your company’s Strategic Human Resource Management offers opportunities that will bring an advantage to your HR professionals.