Gamification in Business

 

Discover how to motivate actions that add value to your business using Gamification and engage your employees like never before!

What is Enterprise Gamification?

Enterprise gamification is the process of integrating game elements and psycological principals into an existing system. This system can be a website, an existing enterprise software, an app or an online community.

The aim is to engage people and motivate them to change behaviours, develop skills or solve problems.

Gamification in companies is currently being applied to customer engagement, employee performance, training and education, contact centers, innovation management, personal development, sustainability, health and wellness, community engagement – and the list continues to grow.

How Does Gamification Work?

What are the Key Game Elements in Gamification?

• Challenges
• Levels
• Score/Points
• Feedback
• Badges
• Leaderboards
• Competition
• Collaboration

What are the Core Drives in Gamification?

• Epic Meaning & Calling
• Development & Accomplishment
• Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback
• Ownership & Possession
• Social Influence & Relatedness
• Scarcity & Impatience
• Unpredictability & Curiosity
• Loss & Avoidance

How is Gamification Used?

10 Business Problems Gamification Can Help Solve

1. Skills Gap – Find out where your employees underperfom and help them by giving them personalised training that meets their specific needs.
2. Poor Engagement – Only 26% of people feel valued in their jobs. Virtual rewards are the perfect way to regularly recognise and celebrate each employee’s efforts.
3. Poor Company Branding – Increase employee awareness of the company brand by increasing its visibility. Embed your mission and values within every aspect of your organisation. Customise gamification features to create Epic Meaning.
4. Employee Retention – Game mechanics provide a training experience with clear goals, motivating rewards and instant feedback. Offering a gamified  LMS increases engagement,  completion and scores.
5. Ghost Town Communities – Encourage user participation by giving challenges and achievable tasks. Create goals and rules of play, using a compelling narrative. Driving engagement with accelerated feedback cycles.
6. Lack of Evidence in ROI – Spot engagement patterns instantly  with gamification tools. As your employees complete training and interact with your systems they  earn virtual rewards, climb leaderboards and level up.
7. Intellectual Capital Loss – Retain knowledge when your employees retire. An online space can be used to train employees to fill future leadership roles. Stimulate conversations and content contributions using game mechanics.
8. Lack of IDP – Create an individual development plan (IDP) to improve the knowledge and skills of employees. Enable them to achieve short and long term goals of their career development.
9. Poor Collaboration – Using gamification in combination with an enterprise social network (ESN) can increase internal information sharing, as well as employee communication within and across departments. This can help drive cross-team collaboration.
10. Poor Customer Service – Help employees meet customer service quotas, close incidents faster, encourage teamwork, and increase positive feedback scores received from customers. When combined with CRM data, further incentives can be created.

Business Gamification Process

1. Get Goals – Capture existing strategic goals and priorities.
2. Set Objectives – Cascade goals to quarterly objectives and key results.*Objectives and key results (OKRs) help establish high-level, measurable goals for your business by establishing ambitious goals and outcomes that can be tracked over the quarter.
3. Select KPIs – Use existing key performance indicators – KPIs to measure performance.
4. Find Purpose – Let people know what they are accountable for. Help them to master the necessary skills to achieve  those objectives and the autonomy to get it done.
5. Announcee – Focus on intrinsic rewards and create a buzz around  this new employee engagement program.
6. Launch – It takes 2 or 3 games for organizations to learn the rules and how to operate the best. The only way to learn is to do it. Let the game begin!
7. Game On – Give people ongoing feedback. Continually track performance!
8. Reward – Reward people for a job well done with visibility. Have meaningful performance reviews. More frenquent and less formal. Celebrate success across the departments to see how everybody contributes!
9. Coach – Throughout the game, learn, adjust, repeat.

Sources

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59EAK2s7hEg
https://simplicable.com/new/individual-development-plan
https://www.cio.com/article/3302036/okr-objectives-and-key-results-defined.html
https://www.dummies.com/business/business-strategy/what-is-business-gamification/
https://yukaichou.com/gamification-examples/octalysis-complete-gamification-framework/
https://techcrunch.com/2012/11/17/everything-youll-ever-need-to-know-about-gamification/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/gartnergroup/2013/01/21/the-gamification-of-business/#4b5b756c4dc2
https://elearningindustry.com/gamification-in-the-workplace-reshaping-corporate-training-5-killer-examples

https://tinyurl.com/3thn6pc9

Gamification in Performance Management

 

Gamification in Performance Management

The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Your Employees

• Learning and Development
• Work environment
• Career Development
• Money and Benefits
• Autonomy
• Recognition
• Transparency
• Peer Motivation

Companies need to change the way they think about performance management. Today’s workplace is undergoing a massive revolution — with reorganisation and innovation. We have to consider exactly what employees need to support their physical, mental, and financial aspects. Using gamification in employee-centric initiatives helps companies to ensure an engaged, happier, healthier and more energetic workforce.

People Don’t Leave Jobs, They Leave Managers

Managers are more responsible for delivering positive employee engagement than anyone else in the business

70% of the variance in team-level engagement is based on the manager. This can be attributed to:

• The manager’s talents
• The manager’s level of engagement
• Employee perceptions of the manager

How’s the Performance of Your Managers?

Strengthening team performance starts with you strengthening your own manager performance

• 26% of employees strongly agree their performance reviews are accurate
• 2 in10 employees say their performance is
  managed in a way that motivates them to do outstanding work
• 21% of employees agree they have performance metrics within their control
• 30% of employees agree that their manager involves them in goal setting
• Employees whose managers involve them in goal setting are 3.6x more likely than other employees to be engaged
• 74% empployees who receive a performance review once a year or less often

Are Your Employees Motivated Enough?

Even the most skilled employee can underperform if they’re not sufficiently driven

• 30% of employees agree that their manager involves them in goal setting
• Only 22% agree their performance is managed in a way that motivates them
• 19%of employees talks to their manager about steps to reach their goals

You can have the best employee experience strategy in your industry, but those who have the best bosses have the best experiences.

Do You Know What Motivates Employees Nowadays?

In the Past:

• My Paycheck
• My Satisfaction
• My Job
• My Boss
• My Weaknesses
• My Annual Review

In the Future:

• My Purpose
• My Development
• My Coach
• My Life
• My Strengths
• My Ongoing Conversations

The truth is that today’s worker is motivated by much more than a paycheck and job security.

They are looking for meaningful work, genuine relationships and personal growth.

Transforming Management with Gamification

Drive manager engagement in order to drive employee engagement

• Job Clarity and priorities – 75% of employees with high role clarity are significantly more passionate about their job and report higher levels of job satisfaction than others
• Opportunities to learn and grow – Making work fun increases employee skill retention in 40%. It also improve the speed at which learners find effective solutions through practice
• Ongoing feedback and communication – Feedback tells users that their intended action was registered, and shows the
  outcomes of that action. Seeing points accumulate as actions are taken establishes a clear and instant reward system
• Accountability: Being explicit about exactly what results you expect, hold employees accountable for delivering results and boost employee engagement, morale, and retention

Sources

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/298342
https://neilpatel.com/blog/gamification-for-better-results/
https://squareup.com/gb/townsquare/how-to-motivate-your-employees
https://technologyadvice.com/blog/human-resources/gamification-elearning/
https://www.businessinsider.com/sc/the-way-we-work-is-changing?r=UK
https://elearningindustry.com/top-steps-motivating-employees-in-the-workplace
https://www.thebalancecareers.com/improve-performance-as-manager-2275900
https://www.gallup.com/workplace/215927/maximize-performance-management.aspx
https://www.gallup.com/workplace/215393/gallup-performance-management-process-redesign.aspx
https://www.gallup.com/workplace/238064/re-engineering-performance-management.aspx
https://www.effectory.com/knowledge/blog/hr-analytics-role-clarity-impacts-performance/
https://www.inc.com/partners-in-leadership/how-positive-accountability-can-make-employees-happier-at-work.html

https://tinyurl.com/bdevzvam

Is Gamification Just Hype Along With Transmedia And CDJ

 

By Gary Fox

Is gamification just hype or has it become a

Marketing Innovation Or Hype?

Marketing for many seems to be a dark art particularly when it comes down to understanding branding.

Like many other forms of business, marketing can suffer from the rise and fall of popular trends and the hype that often ensues; common sense seems to get left behind.

However, as understanding progresses we see theory move to practice, strategy move to implementation and measures used as feedback to learn and refine programs and campaigns.

There is a multitude of ideas shaping marketing, location-based services, mobile payments, crowdsourcing…, but I have chosen three that represent interesting ways to realise the benefits of digital and social marketing.

They help to shape a more intuitive set of interactions with customers that can provide relevance, entertainment and context.

Here are the three trends and some information and further resources:

Cross-Platform Storytelling (Transmedia)

A narrative approach using parts of a story across different platforms.

Narratives have been shown to lower the barriers to influence a customer through a process called transportation.

Basically, a customer is transported into a story, and as a result, their normal logical critical awareness lowers.

A second factor that comes from story-telling is the sense of empathy and involvement. In other words, you are demonstrating to customers you understand their lives and their journeys.

Gamification (Gaming Marketing Interactions)

Gamification is at a simple level employing gaming techniques to non-game environments to drive adoption, engagement, loyalty, sharing, even sales e.g. use game mechanics – badges, points, leader boards, levels, challenges, achievements…

Customer Decision Journey (CDJ)

Consumers are increasingly demanding and digital channels are ever more important.

In effect, consumers are taking control of what McKinsey terms the “consumer decision journey” – the moments from awareness to purchase to service; but the emphasis is on the influence and experience from social networks to sales channels to paid media.

In reviewing these trends we need to evade the hype surrounding them and focus on their value; determine the potential benefits and apply them to determine their effectiveness .

Of course, the size of your budget affects the level to which you can scale them and harness their full potential; the reasearch and insights, the creativity and technology underpinning any campaign strategy.

However, even smaller businesses can apply these principles in a more simplistic form as a framework for creative new ways to market themselves.

These trends are providing new and exciting ways to engage your customers and create some relevant interactions:

Story Telling Across Platforms

Why is storytelling so powerful?

Storytelling is at the heart of human behaviour and has run through our cultural heritage as a means to provide entertainment, learning, values…it is the glue that cements us from smaller day to day to the life-changing dramas that change lives.

Bernadette Jiwa provides some great points as to how businesses can use storytelling in her book.

We now access information across a multitude of platforms.

By providing access to stories across these customer touchpoints parts of the story can be revealed to build the narrative. However, it is not simply pushing out the same content to different channels.

For instance, a transmedia story may have some of the stories revealed in a video, some through social media e.g. Facebook, and other parts taking place in real life via a live event.

In his book Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins defines transmedia as storytelling that:

“immerses an audience in a story’s universe through a number of dispersed entry points, providing a comprehensive and coordinated experience of a complex story.”

The point of transmedia storytelling is that multiple entry points provide a rich (and complimentary) opportunity to narrate.

Transmedia requires a mind shift, a change in the creative process to understand the context of each platform.

Though consideration must be given to how the sum of the parts becomes greater than the whole – amplifying the story. In combination with social platforms, this provides an opportunity for higher levels of relevance and interest.

Gamification

Gamification is a buzzword that is surrounded by a lot of media hype and subsequently is often simply labelled as a method to throwing in some badges and incentives to incentivise customers to engage with a brand (a Pavlovian approach to rewarding customers).

Firstly let’s remove some of the hype around gamification here are two excellent articles that drill into the opportunities and issues facing the development and implementation of applied gaming:

 Gabe Zichermann co-author of a book called Gamification by Design. The other is Sebastian Deterding, a designer and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Hamburg studying game design and behavior, posted a long and detailed rebuttal outlining what he believes is wrong with Zichermann’s book.

Yet despite these arguments brands are experimenting with new ways to explore this and indeed it is also expanding into areas such as education. But like Deterding I favour the ideas that we have an opportunity to harness this to explore solving puzzles, meeting challenges (not just large but breaking these down into more bite sized levels of achievement) and recognizing success for self-improvement (for self and among peers). The superficial idea of simply offering badges and currencies without some deeper level of reward and participation could fail miserably.

Customer Decision Journey

David Edelman does a great job of expressing the customer decision journey in the Harvard Business Review article in 2010 entitled Your Spending Your Money In All the Wrong Places.

The old linear approach as a process for how we decide upon purchase has always seemed convenient but counter-intuitive to the multiple influences that are involved.

David makes a convincing argument that marketing needs to extend the customer decision journey into the various touchpoints that the customer experiences with the brand and the organisation – from the service dept to the website to the brand’s presence on social media, and resellers sites.

The focus is on building the brand around the customer rather than delivering to the customer based on the organisation.

This fundamental shift in thinking is about realigning older departmental structures and changing the emphasis to organisational adapt to the customer flow. Likewise, a marketer needs to focus on which platforms that influence the customer e.g. advocacy led products require more emphasis on social channels.

Within this mix of touchpoints, social media plays an important part in creating word of mouth. 

Google came out with some research called Zero Moment of Truth that very clearly and convincingly lays out the business case for social media and how it impacts the consumer’s buying journey.there’s been a fundamental shift in how consumers gather data and how they’re using that data to make buying decisions for products.

Some Final Thoughts

If you look at brands like Nike and Coke they are providing entertainment, facilitating platforms and participation around their brands be it an app for running, a music concert or facilitating conversations around an event. As part of this fusion of offline and online, we are stories unveil from heroic moments to real life emotional insights. Curiosity has led us to explore and can be harnessed to develop the interest and depth of a story across a platform. The danger though lies in the people seeing these as another selling method, an influence rather than an act of delivering value. I suspect many will not get the balance right. But these new opportunities can be used to unveil the stories of the brand community not just the constructed narrative of the brand itself and perhaps this is where the value lies.

https://bit.ly/3Ssq4Th