What is gamification, and how could it help employee engagement?

Humans love games. Through forms of gamification, we learn how to walk, eat and interact with others. But what is gamification, and how can it help organisations improve employee engagement and attract talent?

The key to gamification success is to be strategic in how it’s implemented. With a solid plan of action, business leaders could leverage gamification techniques to build brand loyalty, improve participation and collaboration, training initiatives, and drive company performance.

But before we dig into the weeds of how to get a strategy underway, let’s cover what gamification actually means. After that, we’ll look at organisational benefits and provide a few real-world examples.

What gamification is and isn’t

First, let’s put the record straight on what gamification isn’t. It’s not about playing Mario Kart and calling it work. There are people who already do that, and well done to them! For the rest of us, gamification is a way of using game elements or game mechanics to make non-game scenarios more engaging and enticing.

The principles and theories that drive how we play games can be applied effectively to real-world business contexts. Gaming, when distilled to its core DNA, is about solving problems. This is why gamification in a real-world context can be applied to many familiar concerns, such as employee retention, engagement, recruitment, or productivity.

What gamification could be used for

There are many use cases for a gamification strategy, and here are a few to start thinking about.

Gamification for employer branding

We have written about the importance of having strong employer branding. It represents a crucial component in the story of an organisation, and what that company looks like through the eyes of jobseekers. Instead of appearing stuffy and corporate, gamification techniques could be used to interactively demonstrate company values and identity.

For instance, encourage prospective candidates – particularly the often digital savvy Gen Z – to apply for job vacancies with their social media profiles. Deliver a mobile recruitment process, and set up a referral programme that candidates could use to get to know more about the company and the people who work there.

Be creative and open to all sorts of fun ideas that may typically be thought of as unconventional. Be active on many communication channels, develop recruitment campaigns that include games and prizes, and build engagement.

Employer branding is an all-encompassing term for HR management and recruitment practices. Organisations could demonstrate their employer brand with gamification tactics that create better experiences for new hires. Business leaders may find that using gamification to show candidates what sets them apart may help entice the best talent.

Gamification for building loyalty

Employee loyalty has taken a hit lately. As the pandemic turned our careers and our employers’ fortunes upside down, the after-effects have manifested as the Great Resignation, among other things. 85% of UK organisations were affected by 2021’s wave of resignations, when loyalty took a back seat to personal wellbeing.

Gamification might offer a solution to employee disenchantment. Loyalty could be improved with a rewards strategy that includes bonuses for meeting specific goals. According to a 2019 Employee Benefits survey, 38% of respondents felt that working towards rewards and bonuses would make work more fun. 32% said it would encourage them to work harder, while 37% said it would make them happier at work.

And as we discovered from putting the Indeed 2021 World Happiness Report together, ‘happiness at work is a must, not a perk’.

Gamification for onboarding and training

Employee training and development programmes don’t have to be boring. Learning can be engaging and easy to remember, so gamification could help in motivating employees to retain more information and have fun doing so.

The CIPD says: ‘Gamification in both physical and online learning can encourage greater engagement and retention of knowledge.’

Imagine a training programme that, instead of comprising bullet point presentations and static PDFs, is delivered in graphic novel form instead, or via an in-house private podcast. The idea is to change it up a little and think differently about more engaging formats for capturing people’s attention.

Quizzes could be useful in helping employees get to grips with boring or complex instructions. For instance, imagine using scenario-based training to illustrate security hygiene. Video-like presentations could show scenarios where employees pretend to be on a call with a stranger while suspicious activity occurs. Employees have to determine what to do moment by moment, and rationalise why they make each decision. It’s a great way to learn and recall best practice security hygiene. A follow-up quiz would check employees’ understanding of what they learned from the gamified training.

Examples of gamification

Our two favourite examples of gamification can be used to demonstrate that it can be digital and analog in nature. If you wear an Apple Watch, you will know what ‘close your rings’ means. It’s a system that helps to motivate wearers into moving their bodies, exercising and standing up more. A digital colour rings display changes through the day, and by the end of the day it’s difficult to not feel motivated to close each ring. People are further motivated with awards for things like ‘perfect week’ or ‘distance walked’.

Starbucks and other retail coffee shops offer loyalty cards that reward us with free drinks. This form of gamification is reward-based, which incentivises the purchase process. For each star or stamp we ‘earn’ through buying a drink, we get closer to the goal of a freebie at the end of it. Further game mechanics motivate us to reach silver or gold membership status, to reward our loyalty, but only as long as we buy more coffee.

There are many examples of gamification in the UK. For instance, Topps Tiles uses a learning management system that has subsequently increased employee engagement in the company’s training and development resources. Mobile network EE created a gamified learning portal called The Digital Academy, which resulted in knowledge assessment scores of 99%. Furthermore, 92% of EE’s workforce say the Academy has increased their digital skills.

There are no limits for creative businesses

There are many upsides to implementing a gamification strategy, with thousands of successful case studies to discover online. We’ve outlined just a handful of examples of how organisations can adopt a gamification mindset to improve engagement, employer branding, training and loyalty. By using gamification as a tool for behavioural change, innovative, creative businesses of all shapes and sizes could see significant gains in many other areas, too.