Improve organisational performance with gamification

To get better business results, companies’ customers and employees need to learn to play. While combining work and play might sound counterintuitive, gamification has the potential to foster change, influence behaviours, and help people learn new things in new contexts.

It’s time to start associating the word “gamification” with corporate strategy and process improvement!

Let your employees go with the flow

The feeling that time is flying is due to a mental state of effortless concentration and focused motivation known as the Flow Experience.

Out of this zone is anxiety (when the skill is too low and the task too difficult) or boredom (if a task is too easy and skill too high). Gamification aims to reach the flow state (when skill and difficulty are roughly proportional) by building a series of rounds of increasing difficulty to reach the optimal corridor between the perceived challenge and the perceived level of skill needed.

In the corporate environment, this means loosening your grip without letting go completely: remove obstacles from meetings, reduce interruptions when reading emails, set boundaries and meaningful goals, and let work take its course.

Level up: turn the newbie into an enthusiast

Using the dynamics of psychology that make games so addicting, compelling and engaging, gamification can make employees, customers, and partners alike addicted to your business processes. Striking the right balance between game and play can get new and existing employees excited, competitive and creative.

When introducing newcomers to their new jobs, many companies include formal meetings, videos, or computer-based orientations in the onboarding programme. Instead, think of the onboarding process through the lens of gamification: to get a new employee into the “game” (newbie), start off easy and keep them interested along the journey. As things become more habitual (regular), gradually increase the difficulty and build habits. Eventually the regular will enter the mastery phase (enthusiast), where all the skills have been learnt and challenges need to be increased again.

To create shorter and more visible challenge-and-reward cycles and turn the newbie into an enthusiast, consider the following key elements of gamification:

	Level	Element	Questions to consider
1	Components, the basic building blocks and objects that users see and interact with	Badges, leaderboards, points, ranks, progression bar, gifts, loyalty cards	What component would be most effective and why?
2	Mechanics, the links that connect each building block with the next and describe the key actions that can be performed	Challenges, contests, feedback, interventions, ranking, rewarding, teaming	What actions would you ask your users to perform?
3	Dynamics, the top-level conceptual elements that bind everything together and cannot be managed directly	Collaboration, competition, progression, exploration, quest	What dynamics would positively affect your users’ engagement?