It’s party time – what is a party without games?
But nowadays games aren’t confined to parties. Games appear in the workplace too.
Employee engagement and customer engagement can be low, learning from books can be difficult. Engagement is also easy to lose and difficult to inspire. Gallup’s 2016 The Worldwide Employee Engagement Crisis report found that only 32 percent of US workers are engaged with their jobs daily; less than half that number, 13 percent, are engaged worldwide. Disengaged employees are less productive and have lower morale because they tend to think negatively about their jobs. Disengaged employees tend to bring their colleagues and teammates down with them,
It is proven that playing motivates people and enhances learning. Recruitment training and being in the office can actually be fun and social Gamification is a technique for applying game mechanics to non-game context, to make it fun and thus increase engagement.
To successfully gamify you need four steps
- interactive challenges
- constant/instant feedbacks
- competition and social
- rewards and redemptions.
Gamification taps on everyone’s intrinsic motivations to have fun in enterprises. Banks and telephone companies use gamification as a rewards and motivation platform to use employees using game psychology. Community engagement to motivate target behaviours for various purposes such as in employee’s training/performance management or consumer marketing/sales advocacy.
Why is gamification relevant to me?
You will almost certainly been subject to gamification whether you know it or not. Those who no longer have the concentration to read a book and resort to little quizzes in FaceBook have been ‘gamified’. But it’s not only you, its everyone you communicate with. It is relatively easy to build the software (we can recommend an organisation) but what can you use if for is more the challenge? The more you develop your soft and mindfulness skills the more likely you are to recognise ways of harnessing the stickiness of gamification to bring the waifs and strays back into the fold for good. Simple badges, levels and points which appear in normal software games can be used to develop continuing engagement.
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What kind of games are YOU likely to want to play?
- Do you like games which are strictly logical or prefer those which appeal to your emotions?
- Do you like to get into the real nitty-gritty, into great detail – or just want to skim the surface?
Your behavioural profiling preferences will tell you whether you are engaged with this – the detail you may or may not need the appeal to the emotions or lack thereof.
Any manager will need to know what social behaviours she may be trying to enhance, which target behaviours will help hit the goals, what extrinsic rewards to offer to get intrinsic motivation, and which tribes and communities she need to engage.
And engagement doesn’t just affect employees. Holding consumers’ attention through the continuous noise of competing marketing messages represents another avenue where engagement is critical to success. Modern consumers are fickle. Unless something truly intrigues them, they move on.
David Rigby – davidr@smartcoachingtraining.com