Watch this short two minute video to hear Snowfly’s founder talk about the surprising, fun, and crazy history of gamification in the workplace. Seriously, this is a trippy story and worth your time!
That is a fun story, isn’t it? How clever the management came up with that fun and highly effective way to incentivize their team to impact a meaningful metric.
Without doing any research on gamification in the workplace I can guarantee that this was not born in 1974, though. The principles of gamification have been around probably for as long as work has been around. The idea is that gamification makes certain things fun with a chance of earning some kind of reward to incentivize people to do something. That’s the basics of gamification.
Software Made Gamification in the Workplace Different
Brooks talked about, studied, trained on, and implemented gamification in the workplace for years before the Internet was widely available. It’s fun to hear him talk about it. Using face cards is fun at the small team level but the Internet allowed the principles and elements of gamification to easily reach thousands of employees at once.
Employee recognition which looks like social networking has made an impact on many cultures. Instead of hearing your name at a company meeting, or in a print newsletter, you could now see an entire section of your private website dedicated to lavishing praise on team members for doing good things. This can be gamified, of course, when you allow employees to award points to one another when giving recognition.
Managing employee rewards has also become simplified, at scale, with technology. This is something that in the past might have been managed in a ledger, or a spreadsheet, but once the Internet caught steam it could be done in an automated way.
Gamification in the Workplace Should Be FUN
One of the reasons we hear employee engagement and gamification programs fail is because, after the honeymoon period, they get stale. They get old, boring, and predictable. It’s critical you choose a gamification vendor that is designed to change as often as your admin wants it to change.
What do you make fun? Onboarding. Gag… right? Onboarding is lots of paperwork, legal compliance stuff, etc. What if you gamified it and made it more fun? Really, you can gamify just about anything, from training to wellness programs.
We’d love to talk to you about setting up a program that is fun for more than four weeks. We have customers who have been with us for over a decade and their employees are still having fun with our system! This is partly because we have a flexible program and partly because their leadership is onboard with keeping things fresh and exciting.
Look, gamification in the workplace doesn’t have to fail. Too often we hear about failed implementations from executives who think the idea is good but they are worried about another failed program. Let us work with you to get something in place that really makes a difference.
We believe gamification in the workplace should give measurable results at every level. Want to increase employee satisfaction or productivity? Want to improve employee retention and your employer brand? We can help.
Gamification in the workplace is all about creating a better culture. We’d like to do that with you. We’ve done it in restaurants and in hotel chains. We’ve done it in call centers and factories. We’ve done it with teams small and large, on-site and remote. We’ve done it in English and in other languages. Tap into our breadth and depth of experience to really make a difference at your organization!
Ready to talk?
