6 Problems Companies Can Reduce with Gamification

Games form a foundational part of childhood, and the abilities we learn—to compete, express emotions, collaborate, persevere, and accomplish goals—stay with us even in adulthood and our corporate lives. Organizations can leverage these inherent human abilities to extract innovative ideas and solutions.

Industries have quickly grasped the blueprint provided by video games. They have successfully integrated "gamification" into many processes, leveraging people's competitive nature to encourage ongoing engagement with their products or services.

However, the question remains: Is gamification worth the investment? This article will uncover six organizational problems that can find a solution in gamification. 

The Mechanisms Behind Gamification

Since medieval times, competition has been a core part of human behavior, seen in knights' tournaments before cheering crowds. Today, this same competitive spirit is evident in online multiplayer games, where players battle for dominance in virtual playgrounds. Gamification harnesses this human need to compete and connects it to work through game-like elements into non-game contexts to motivate and engage people.

Gamification leverages elements like points, leaderboards, and rewards to motivate both employees and customers to engage with a system or participate in specific activities. By incorporating these game-like features, companies can significantly boost engagement, foster a culture of continuous learning, enhance feedback mechanisms, and address various organizational challenges.

The next section will highlight some areas where gamification can instantly be a game changer and solve longstanding issues.

6 Problems Organizations Can Overcome with Gamification

    1. Training

The era of learning through endless 50-slide PowerPoint presentations, punctuated by repetitive question sheets, is behind us. We used to aim for just enough correct answers to pass, eager to return to our 'real work.'  

Companies today are gamifying their training programs to make learning more engaging and effective while helping employees retain information better. Think of salespeople competing in knowledge battles and winners moving up the leaderboard, making learning more fun and engaging. 

One of the big four firms has integrated gamification into its training and development program. The firm launched an internal app to increase employees' awareness and understanding of its products and services and help them better identify business opportunities. 

    2. Engagement

Key highlights from the State of the Global Workplace report show that 62% of the working population are not engaged, while 15% are highly disengaged. Clearly, traditional approaches need to be revisited. 

Gamification has serious potential when implemented thoughtfully. By adding elements of gaming to the standard employee/manager dynamic, companies have found that employees are more likely to stick around, especially in a remote environment. It can also allow employees to celebrate milestones, earn badges, and receive rewards while improving their skills and helping them beat their own statistics or challenge each other.

 3. Performance

The feedback loop that gamification creates transforms daily work performance from a chore into an engaging and rewarding process. Performance reviews show the exact impact of gamification. 

The inclusion of game-like elements makes the review process less intimidating and more engaging. In addition, a clear scoring system helps employees understand how their performance is being evaluated, reducing confusion and building trust.

    4. Brand Loyalty

When a leading global fast-food chain added prawns to its menu, it launched a gamified campaign to create excitement. The gamified solution allowed users to play, earn points, and receive discount vouchers. This marketing campaign struck several cultural chords and created a lot of buzz on social media sites. The staggering level of active participation led to a significant increase in in-store sales compared to the previous year. 

Performance and social features are positively associated with emotional, cognitive, and social brand engagement. The result is meaningful interactions that go beyond transactions and create lasting connections between brands and their audiences.

    5. Recruitment

Although improving employee engagement or brand awareness is one of the most common and earliest use cases for gamification, the value gamification brings to any business goes beyond these two aspects. 

A French postal service worked on a similar notion. The company was struggling with retaining employees, with almost 25% of new hires leaving the company after a few months of joining. This made the company rethink its hiring strategy. The company used gamification to increase retention by creating a virtual academy that allowed potential candidates to experience the life of a new postman in a fictional replica of various scenarios, such as waking up early in the morning, learning, and even understanding ethics in the workplace. 

Through this gamified experience, the candidates could gain a clear understanding of job expectations. On the other hand, the hiring team could evaluate how different recruits respond to various situations by simulating issues and various conditions. 

    6. Team Building

Organizations have long used exercises and activities to promote collaboration, improve communication, and increase productivity within their teams. However, traditional team-building approaches still struggle to fully engage participants. 

By injecting elements of competition and play, gamification fosters communication, engagement, feedback, and skill development within teams, making team-building exercises stimulating and impactful. 

Level Up Your Business Game

Companies today are fighting tooth and nail to keep their employees engaged and their customers happy, and gamification serves them well. The concept of gamification for business ideas can lead the way by inspiring passion, creativity, and a higher level of expertise than even they can imagine. However, the excitement surrounding gamification can often fall flat or even backfire if applied in the wrong way. 

It's important to create a healthy sense of competition, but not so much that it demotivates your employees. Remember that people learn at different paces, and competition can be discouraging for those who don't progress as quickly. True business gamification should focus on intrinsic rewards and benefits that help employees on their journey to greater success in the long term.