The fact that 63% of the global workforce is not engaged isn’t all that surprising. That’s mainly because companies have kept their focus on the bottom line and profitability. Thus, driving their workforce to work on achieving targets that are based on a cause which they don’t really associate with. Unfortunately, such companies haven’t realized that to really impact their profitability they need a highly engaged workforce. The 63% of the global workforce that aren’t engaged alone are contributing to $500 billion productivity loss and higher attrition. When you think about it, why would your company’s success matter to your workforce. Especially, if they can’t understand the benefit they’ll achieve from it. That’s the challenge of employee engagement. That’s why there’s a global engagement crisis. And this is precisely where gamification can be just the solution that companies all over the world need, now.

With gamification you can achieve several key advantages. With more and more multinational organizations realizing these benefits they’ve managed to:

• attract talent that fit well with their culture and environment,
• motivate their employees,
• enhance workforce productivity, and
• align their employees to the company’s goals.

Companies that have successfully deployed gamification programs are seeing ROIs of over 260% with paybacks of less than 1 month!

Making Work Fun Again

Mundane, repetitive and often monotonous work can really bring down your workforces’ morale and enthusiasm. Getting caught up with daily routine that’s static and unexciting can seriously hamper employees’ sense of purpose and direction. To add to it all, performance metrics don’t really help much as they often feel procedural, less intuitive and quite dull and boring. This is where companies can massively benefit from gamification.

Through gamification you can help your employees feel successful, accomplished, valued and recognized for their achievements and contributions. The gamification process reinvents goal-setting and team achievements making it fun and exciting and encouraging healthy competition. Not only this, you can also make career progression and advancements highly engaging and exciting.

Gamification in the workplace is much like games itself. In games, players earn rewards in the form of skill enhancements, resources, points and upgrades. The same game mechanics apply to the workplace when you implement gamification. Based on their performance and contributions you can reward employees with points or scores, upgrades to their scope of work, equip them with or make accessible to them resources and even enhance their skills. All this is done so that they can progress their careers within the company. Obviously, when you’re being rewarded in a fun, exciting and challenging way you’ll be more engaged and aligned to the company’s goals.

Gamify Your Workplace

The beauty of gamification is its ability to be accessible to anyone in your organization and everywhere within your company. By harnessing the power of mobile technology you can apply gamification with ease, feasibly and to a wide group of your workforce. However, some companies are challenged by how they can get their employees into the program. To approach this you can have digital dashboards placed around your office. These can be in highly visible locations such as lunch rooms, the place where employees sign in, main halls, etc.

Using these visible-to-all dashboards makes goal achieving a companywide agenda. It showcases team and individual leaderboards that can help reinforce the gamification program. Teams will be able to see how other cross-functional teams are performing against them and how their own team members are faring against the competition. Fluctuating daily scores would keep them on their teams and gunning to achieve more goals and targets. Just the kind of high performing and highly engaged workforce that leaders dream of!

Feedback That Really Helps

You know how you have annual or semi-annual performance reviews that help you guide your employees to exploit their full potential and achieve more success? Usually the outcome of such meetings is a recharged workforce that understands the game plan and is hungry for challenges. They’re ready to go out and be successful. However, why wait till the end of the year or for the middle of the year to pump your employees up?

The beauty of gamification is its real-time feedback. Your employees’ daily contributions are tallied against their peer group to suggest how well they performed each day. With the help of the gamification process you can provide feedback that’s faster, accurate and much more relevant to your employees. Plus, it’s purely objective, eliminating bias and making the feedback much more valuable and credible.

What gamification does, in essence, is provide continuous, frequent and relevant feedback to your employees so that they can take corrective measures promptly. This allows them to make the necessary tweaks within and through the year, ensuring they’re always on track to achieving their goals. You’ll never have another missed target at the end of the month!

It’s no secret that a highly engaged workforce will be more productive and aligned to the company’s success. In a time when there’s an employee engagement crisis, gamification is precisely the solution that can help your company address this challenge.

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Paul Keijzer is the CEO and Founder of Engage Consulting and the co-Founder of The Talent Games, which aims to transform HR by digitising talent processes and creating more engaging and productive workplaces through gamification and mobile technology. As a global HR and Leadership Management expert, Paul knows how to combine business insights with people insights to transform organisations and put them on the path to growth.