It’s no secret that happier and engaged employees are more productive. They’ll enjoy the work they perform, work harder, work better and stay with your company longer. And when your employee’s productivity is driving them to perform at high levels your company’s chances of achieving success becomes all the more realistic.

Using gamification you can make work and achieving goals much more enjoyable, fun and rewarding. You’ll be able to attract talent, engage them and keep them motivated by the instant rewards, gratification and prompt feedback that they receive through a gamification platform. Moreover, you’ll improve your employee’s productivity, reduce employee turnover and significantly enhance engagement.

At first, you’ll probably be apprehensive to introduce “games” in the workplace. However, when you consider just how many people are playing games in one form or the other, you’ll think otherwise. And that’s because, everyone, and I mean everyone, plays some form of games. Be it the games your fitness tracker has or the ones you download onto your mobile devices. Everyone’s playing some game. So why not your employees? Why aren’t they playing games that you design, with your corporate goals and strategies embedded into them and with the overarching objective of enhancing your employee’s productivity?

How to make Gamification Work for You

Unlike traditional games, the way gamification works is that it transforms your ideologies, culture, strategies and objectives and adds fun to it. Through the application of game mechanics you’re making the dull, mundane and often hard to digest corporate philosophies, into somethings that much more appealing and easier to work with.

When technology giant SAP wanted to motivate their sales professionals and prepare them to tackle complex sales meetings with clients, they turned to the gamification app called Roadwarrior. What the gamified platform did was take real examples and data that the sales professionals could relate to and simulated client meetings. Playing the game meant answering questions to ‘clients’ accurately and hence, they earned badges and competed against each other. What’s more is that the platform also gathers data on customer needs, thus providing sales professionals a better understanding of what to expect and ensure they succeed in their meetings.

To make gamification really work for you, you’ll need to focus on its customization. That’s one of the most fundamental aspects of ensuring gamification is effective for you. Most gamification platforms, like C-Factor, can be customized to your company’s specific needs, strategies and objectives. That way your workforce will be much more familiar with the environment, the requirements of the game and aware of their expectations. With a customized gamification platform that’s tailor-made to have real working experiences that your employees are familiar with you’ll make the experience much more impactful. Thus, enhancing your employee’s productivity.

Why Gamification Could Fail For Your Company

There’s no doubting that you want your employees to be happy and engaged. Your company’s success depends on it. Happier employees not only work harder and are more productive, they treat your customers better and stay with you longer. However, by simply gamifying your strategies without a clear plan you won’t achieve this goals. In fact, your entire gamification strategy could fail miserably just because of poor design. That means if your gamification platform lacks creativity, customizations and meaning, your efforts would go to waste.

Without an engaged workforce, working for you is just work that gets them paid and nothing more. Disengagement kills your employee’s productivity. Workplace games isn’t a miracle cure for low morale and reduced productivity. You could very easily be missing the true issue at hand. It could be cultural, lack of competitive drive, lack of transparency and even misalignment from the company’s purpose and vision. Sometimes it’s even poorly performing managers that bring your employees down. Often you’ll find employees aren’t the right fit for your culture and work environment. Which is why gamified recruitment platforms such as C-Factor can help you mitigate this risk.

To really enhance your employee’s productivity you need a well designed and implemented gamification platform that applies your company’s philosophy and ideology in way that can positively impact everyday workplace challenges.

Another reason why gamification fails is when the company’s desire to gamify work is overused and played out too much. By implementing an off-the-shelf solution you’re basically setting yourself up for failure. Simple incentives, leaderboards and rewards won’t have the impact you’re looking for if it isn’t based off of your corporate strategies and culture.

Gamification has the power to significantly enhance your employee’s productivity, if its implementation and design is well planned and backed by your company’s strategies and culture. Without this, you’re basically gamifying for no reason at all.

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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.