Playing Games at Work? Yes, Your Boss Wants You To!

“Where people aren’t having any fun, they seldom produce good work” – David Ogilvy.

Creating a fun environment for employees is the key to getting the best out of them. Successful organizations have adopted different fun concepts that drive productivity in employees and preserve its assets. The experiences, ideas, insights and tacit knowledge possessed by employees is an asset however, this asset creates more value when it is shared and applied. It helps in decision making, performance improvement, cost, and time savings in business activities. Promoting a culture of knowledge sharing among employees in an organization should be a critical strategic goal and a basis for sustainable competitive advantage. The biggest challenge to this process is keeping employees engaged and motivated to document and share their insights.

Gamification is a tactic that has been deployed in the enterprise in recruitment, learning and development with the purpose of driving productivity, engagement, and motivation of the workforce, which in turn influences the growth and success of the organization. This concept can also be applied to knowledge management systems to solve the same challenges.

So! What is Gamification?

Gamification is the process of using game mechanics, elements and principles and the application of them to non-game contexts to better engage users. It involves taking key elements that drive engagement in games, such as the points, achievements, leaderboards, and progress against challenges, and applying them to motivate the desired behaviors among users. In the workplace, gamification is the application of these principles to motivate employee behaviors with the aim of using “the carrot” instead of “the stick”.

Gamification of Knowledge sharing

Game elements that can be used to gamify Knowledge Management system include:

1.  Points: It is important to set up the point-awarding mechanism transparently, so the users know what activities are rewarded and how many points they gain from performing specific actions.

2.  Badges: Public display of badges allows for comparison, delivering satisfaction to those with many hard-to-earn badges, and motivating those who are below the average performance. Badges represent goals, goal setting enable people anchor their expectations higher, this in turn increases their performance and upon goal completion users’ satisfaction increases.

3.   Challenges and Contests: In contests, users compete for the best performance within a given timeframe. Users who decide to pursue the challenge allocate more resources to task-relevant activities and avoid distractions.

4.   Awards and Prizes: Any reward that the user wins for his/her action. Reward schedule applies reinforcements consistently to condition and strengthens the user’s behavior in anticipation of new rewards. Uncertainty in rewards (eg. Entry into a draw for a reward) has been shown to result in more sustained behavior change than a certain behavior = reward scheme.

5.   Rankings and Leaderboards: It orders the users according to some criteria (e.g., points, levels, badges), contextualizing the other game elements to enable user comparison.

Benefits of Gamification in Knowledge Management Systems

Organizations can make the most of gamification in knowledge management programs in order to keep employees engaged and motivated. Some other benefits include.

1.   Improved learning culture

By including gamification in the knowledge sharing, it becomes fun and effective, keeping employees engaged thus establishing a learning culture.

2.   Bridging knowledge gap

When employees enjoy the gamified user experience, it encourages them to share insights from experience which others can gain from. For instance, the knowledge shared by a well experienced employee can be beneficial to a new hire, helping him understand the demands of his role.

3.   Improved interaction and collaboration

Gamification enhances collaboration in addressing challenges and problem solving and improves interaction between employees. It provides an opportunity for the employees to connect with technology in a positive way, show their abilities and even encourage interaction between employee from a variety of backgrounds.

Introducing gamification concepts to knowledge management can boost employee involvement and commitment to organizational goals, which in turn will enhance productivity and reduce employee turnover. To achieve tangible business results from the gamified knowledge management system, it is best to have well defined goals, and activities tied to tasks that have meaning to the employee. Make the systems visible and the rewards fair and clear to encourage participation.

Interested in seeing how totaliQ uses gamification to increase tangible business results, request a demo here”

Credit: Study done by Morteza Amiri