For years, employee engagement has played a critical role in business success. From elevating the customer experience to reducing costly employee churn, it’s helped many businesses grow their revenue and improve company culture.
Thankfully, with the rise of gamification, obtaining team engagement is easier. Gamification is an industry tactic that introduces elements of game playing such as competition and point scoring to motivate employees in the workplace. Through it, management regardless of vertical can create a fun and productive work environment without sacrificing a hefty chunk of their budget.
In order to help you better understand gamification, we’re breaking down its benefits and how you can implement it to drive optimal results.
The Benefits of Gamification
Improve Workplace Efficiency And Maximize Revenue
For a business, there is nothing more costly than a team that is unengaged or unproductive. A lack of efficiency can drain valuable time, hurt product or service quality, and irritate the customer – all elements that impact your bottom line and reputation.
With the incorporation of gamification, you create a sense of urgency through scoring and encourage teams to challenge each other in specific aspects of their work. This friendly form of competition improves the quality of tasks, pushes teams to have greater time management and allows them to be more self-aware of how they perform. By being more self-aware and knowing where they need improvements, they can deliver more quality service or products that lead to growing revenue.
What’s more, if you have a gamification platform in place, teams can have real-time visibility to immediately improve the experience. Say you own a restaurant for example and a team member is consistently behind on the time it takes them to prepare a specific food item. If they get a solid 7 ranking every time they work and recognize that their fellow team members are consistently getting a 9, they’ll feel more inclined to improve their efficiency. If they don’t, having numerical evidence of their shortcomings is great for management to leverage during one on one sessions or team meetings to encourage improvement.
Become More Objective Oriented
With gamification, achieving a set goal becomes fun and rewarding. When leveraged correctly, gamification provides a line of visibility to both teams and management so they are always objective driven. If, for example, your business goal is to reach “Very Satisfied” across all customer experience aspects, then your team will strive for that unified goal. This can make the whole process much more achievable as employees that begin to work with a goal get things done quicker and with a purpose.
When you implement your gamification program, set clear and concise goals at the beginning of each workday or work week. Explain to your team why you’ve set those specific goals and how they can go about achieving them. Teams will find their work more rewarding when they reach their objective and when they do, they’ll work harder each time to make sure they continuously reach that goal.
Reduce Team Member Churn
In a recent CAP study, it was revealed that the cost of replacing an employee is clustered between 10 percent and 30 percent of a worker’s earnings – which is quite substantial when you multiply this over several team members. As per CAP’s example, losing an employee with a $75,000 income means a loss of $7,500 to $22,500. This is a hefty chunk of revenue that could be used in other aspects of your establishment.
To eliminate churn, it’s important to ensure the workplace gets your team excited and acknowledges the value of their work. Ultimately, employees want to be in a culture-focused environment that shows their work is appreciated. With gamification, you can do just that by highlighting top performing team members with insights gathered from your program. With an ideal Customer Experience Management platform supporting your program, teams can even see real-time scoring so they can correct behavior immediately. Having this visibility into performance is great for management to reward or recognize top performing teams and encourage underperforming teams to do better.
If you’re looking to go the extra mile with gamification, you can even incorporate incentives like gift cards or vouchers so teams can work towards a more tangible reward. Having team members feel rewarded for their work while also having fun is an ideal way to reduce your employee churn rate.
Now that you know how gamification can benefit your business, it is time to take a look at how you can effectively incorporate it into your business model for greater success.
How You Can Effectively Implement Gamification
Design A Roadmap
Deciding to incorporate gamification is the first step, but simply having a solution and hoping teams use it won’t drive success nor improve team engagement.
Gamification, like any business tactic, is one that requires a clear goal and an effective strategy – in other words, a roadmap. To build a successful roadmap, consider your team members current performance. Derive qualitative data by having conversations with them and obtain quantitative data by looking at their sales and feedback. Once you have an understanding of how they are performing, define what you want to achieve. This goal should be specific, measurable, and achievable – something your team can understand and find reasonable, not daunting.
Once you’ve defined your goal, it’s time to design your strategy or roadmap to success. In this step it’s critical to be as precise as possible, considering points like; technology, a feasible timeline, training considerations, budgets for incentives (if you plan on using any), and so on. All of these components will ultimately determine the success of your program – so make sure you cover all your bases.
Find a Solution/Platform To Enhance Your Roadmap
Finding the right solution can make or break your attempt to gamify the workplace. You can spend thousands of dollars on a platform and train your team thoroughly, but if the platform doesn’t deliver insight or impactful capabilities, your program won’t be successful.
When considering a solution to enhance your roadmap, here are some qualities it should offer:
- Real-time insight
- Multi-location features
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) integrations
- In-app integrations
- Omni-channel measurement
- Flexibility with the design of questions
A standard and successful gamification platform should be able to do multiple if not, all of these things.
Educate Team Members
With a roadmap in place and a solution to help you achieve your end goal, it’s time to educate your team.
Using your roadmap as a point of reference, discuss performance metrics and the progress you’d like to see. If your regular customer service “happiness” rating is “60%” set a goal of “80%” and watch team members go out of their way to obtain that number. Make sure you’re effectively communicating your objectives and allow them to ask questions should they have any – disseminating your goal is critical to ensure that everyone from front-line staff to management is working towards one unified goal.
Utilizing training sessions is also a great opportunity to break down your new solution and get team members excited about it. Take the time to walk them through it, show them highlights, and how they can obtain insight to provide the best experience possible.
Utilize Incentives
If you’re looking to maximize your efforts, incentives are a great way to do so, because let’s face it – free tangible items are always well received by team members for a job well done.
When team members are overperforming, perks or recognition are great to motivate them and celebrate their accomplishments. Combined with competition, team members will work that much harder to reach your new set goals.
Measure and Improve.
Implementing a gamification program is only the first step. Once implemented, it’s critical to monitor and consistently improve the customer experience. Customer preferences always fluctuate and adapt to different economic climates, so your business should as well.
Set dates for reviewing feedback and performance ratings with your technology solution. If your overall rating isn’t as high as you’d like it or you’re not reaching your goals with the program, this gives you an opportunity to make adjustments where they are needed. This ensures you always wow your customers and team members stay engaged.
Through the use of gamification, businesses have the opportunity to improve their team engagement and transform their company culture as a whole. Not to mention maximizing revenue and improving reputation. With that said, in order to see optimal results, it’s critical to have a roadmap that drives long-term goals as well as a scalable technology to streamline the process and improve the customer experience. When leveraged correctly, gamification can help you consistently improve your business for long-term success.
