Reaching New Levels with Gamification

3 minute read

Upland Admin

Gamification helps organizations achieve their goals and reach new levels of success. It isn’t a new concept. For years now, app developers have been turning to gamification to incentivize their users to stay active and teachers have been giving gold stars to their students for good behavior. Especially in the past few years, employers have been using gamification in the workplace as well.

If you haven’t yet come across gamification, it isn’t playing games in the office or changing work systems to exist in fantasy worlds. Instead, it’s bringing elements of games – like earning points or having a scoreboard – to a task or process where you wouldn’t necessarily expect it. The primary goal is to incentivize participation, whether that’s in a training module, to reach for a goal, or to adopt a process.

There are multitudes of statistics out there that show gamification has a positive effect in the workplace. For example, Mordor Intelligence found gamification has the ability to raise engagement and loyalty by an average of 30%. And TalentLMS concluded that 87% of employees agree gamification makes them more productive, and 82% agree it makes them happier.

Why does gamification work?

To put it simply, it’s addictive. Gamification creates a goal, with incentives to achieve it along the way. It also adds an element of fun that can make a task more interesting and less routine.

How can you use gamification to your advantage?

Don’t forget that gamification is meant to be an aid. Though you might have a super cool idea for something that would be tons of fun, it will only be effective if it helps with the task at hand. These are some avenues where gamifying systems works well in the office:

Onboarding

New hires get bombarded with an onslaught of information that they need to take in and learn. If there are online training modules for them to complete, earning points and achieving digital badges helps them retain that information and stay motivated, instead of being overwhelmed by the volume of information.

Introducing gamification right from the get-go also has the advantage of bringing employees into a company mindset of being engaged and celebrating small achievements in their work life.

Ongoing accomplishment

Gamification is highly effective at driving ongoing performance achievements. Firma Foreign Exchange, an InGenius customer, has a great case study to prove this. Their organization is using gamification in Salesforce to motivate their sales teams. Management knew that gamification could be used to persuade employees to adopt new processes and, in turn, guide them towards a more efficient way of working. Since the Firma sales teams spend a lot of time on the phone, call data is crucial to creating realistic goals. Using InGenius workflow integrations, call activity is tracked and brought into a Salesforce points dashboard, which rewards employees for calls and gives extra points for using the preferred processes.

Since the implementation of their gamification system, Firma has seen significantly improved employee motivation and process adoption, with the added bonus of a 25% increase in outbound calls.

Skill Development

Management should want their teams to always be learning. Though it isn’t always feasible to frequently send employees out for training classes, online training can be an easier – although sometimes less engaging – way to encourage growth. Luckily gamifying learning with badges or trophies can add a more interesting layer to ensure employees keep trying to level up.

When companies invest in the right software and take the time to implement wisely, gamification can galvanize strong performance and boost business growth.

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