A recent Gallup Study found that disengaged employees cost companies as much $300 billion in lost productivity every year. Disengaged employees are simply less motivated to work hard, push the envelope, innovate and deliver excellence.
If employee engagement is the key to delivering workforce motivation, how can a business leverage available tools to create that environment? Quizzes and competitions are traditionally a great method to engage both employees and customers. While many organizations run social competitions, this necessitates separate monitoring of the results. Instead, use your LMS to create, deliver, track, review and improve workforce gamification.
What is Workforce Gamification?
Moving beyond gamifying aspects of training, learning and development, workforce gamification extends the principles of game-based learning to day-to-day aspects of work operations. Instead of traditional incentive structures, Mobile Destination used workforce gamification to inspire their sales personnel to reach and surpass their goals, and saw a 20% improvement in sales.
Businesses still need to define targets and rewards, of course. However, the way these are tracked and achieved makes all the difference!
Consider an interesting month-long game of Bingo. Each person can be assigned a “Bingo card” with a 5×5 grid. Each square on the grid represents an achievement to be unlocked. This could be hitting daily sales targets for a full week, achieving five positive customer reviews, etc. Normal Bingo rules then apply.
Since each salesperson is randomly assigned a card, there is an element of strategy involved. Should they first pursue the customer reviews, or keep that for the end of the month? Since Monday was a good day, should they push to surpass daily sales targets on Tuesday and Wednesday too?
The team also interacts more to discuss each other’s progress with the game, resulting in improved employee engagement, team-building, motivation – and, ultimately, increased sales for the organization.
This is just one example of how to transform employee motivation through workforce gamification. By making every aspect of work a light-hearted competition, workforce gamification delivers better results at every level.
Without such a complete gamification transformation, can I still improve employee motivation?
You can also use micro-assessments to increase employee engagement. Consider simple quizzes delivered through your LMS: A professional quiz with a technical question, or even trivia based on general knowledge, knowledge of organization or colleagues, etc. Quizzes with daily and monthly prizes are a great way to keep employees tuned in and constantly involved.
Rypple found that, to feel more motivated, 23% of employees need development opportunities and training; 14% need regular, specific feedback about job performance; 10% need a better relationship with coworkers. Each of these is easily addressed by using technology in simple ways.
For instance, to provide greater development opportunities, offer employees game-based e-learning opportunities that don’t just make the training more interesting; it can also improve the employee’s career prospects and the quality of delivery by the organization. Create a public forum for positive feedback from customers, managers and mentors, and a private channel for constructive criticism. With public leaderboards and games that engage the entire team, team cohesion and friendly competition will improve intra-team relations. In addition to engagement, you can also look at delivering microtraining and kudos via your LMS.
While you could work towards operationalizing any part of this, remember that the greater the push towards a game-oriented culture, and the greater the commitment by management, the better the results! Through the right use of gamification and strong employee engagement, it’s possible to improve employee motivation and, thus, productivity. Work with our team of experts to learn more and get started.
