One of the activities to give more effective results to your team is to motivate them to deliver all tasks. And how can you engage your team to produce more, on and on?

Gamification has been part of the management world since managers realized that how important it was to change the subject and focus to turn the problems into defying but pleasant challenges.

In this post, you will see how you can gamify to engage your Large at Scale Scrum (LeSS) teams.

What is Gamification?

Gamification is the practice of applying game mechanics in various areas such as business, health, and social life. The main objective is to increase engagement and arouse users’ curiosity and, in addition to the challenges proposed in the games, Gamification rewards are also crucial items for success.

Although it is not necessary to create a game itself, the practice has gained a lot of space in management and has even been inserted in applications and books. It’s the use of game elements and game design techniques in an out-of-game context.

Benefits of gamification in the workplace

Gamification is a technique, which consists of continuously introducing into work activities:

• Fun
• Competition
• Personal recognition
• Sending feedback

It can be used in a variety of environments, but in organizations, gamification is focused on setting business goals and motivating employees, as well as evaluating their performance and improving their commitment to day-to-day tasks.

Now that we’ve described gamification, I’m going to list the benefits it can bring and show you some approaches that can help achieve that benefit.

Motivation

A good way to keep your employees motivated to perform activities through gamification is to create an incentive system. It can range from a points program and recognition for a skill or job well done (offering badges, badges in Portuguese) to a financial bonus for achieving goals.

This will help motivate and engage the team. However, for it to be really effective it is necessary to create a mechanism within the game that creates meaning to the work that will be performed within the production process.

Furthermore, it is extremely important for the employee who understands the culture and business issues so that he can engage with more ease and autonomy.

Objectivity in work activities

A part of the gamification implementation is precisely the constant automatic data collection. In other words, creating indicators for your business tasks that measure performance.

This data can be very useful for checking the success rate of activities. In this way, subjective and imprecise evaluations make room for objective and direct indicators that greatly facilitate the work of any manager.

Feedback and recognition

Gamification is a great tool for giving feedback to contributors. Through tables with their productivity indexes and their history, the employee will have a better idea of ​​their performance.

This makes them understand their knowledge gaps and improve their behavior in certain activities. In addition, it is imperative to recognize employees when they do a good job.

Gamification has a facilitating role in this case. The tool helps the manager through the data provided and, many times, this recognition can come automatically within the created game. With this continuous feedback, it is also easier to assess the organizational climate.

Skills development

Many people like games as they can improve some of their players’ skills. The feeling of developing a particular skill is one of the most important aspects of fulfillment and well-being in the workplace.

With gamification, the employee will be able to:

• Stay motivated and engaged
• Receive feedback constantly
• Search for new knowledge to overcome future obstacles

How important is engagement?

In organizations, training has always been a good way for managers to make their employees expand their knowledge, techniques, and specific skills. However, if employees are constantly benefiting from development programs, why do they become discouraged over time?

This is usually because they are not fully engaged. Without the necessary interest on the part of employees, resources used in training and development are wasted, causing program goals to be missed.

In situations like this, one of the most efficient ways to get around this issue is to have the support of gamification. With this method, employees better assimilate the organization’s culture and learn to do their jobs in a much more efficient way.

Why use gamification to engage?

Currently, gamification is seen as the most efficient methodology for training and development programs, providing employees with awareness and alignment with business objectives.

By using the techniques used in games and fostering the internal audience through collaboration, constant feedback, rewards, and status achievement, gamification has the power to motivate them and make them achieve the company’s goals.

How to implement gamification in a company?

The challenge of engaging employees is an arduous one. However, if you implement a strategy that embraces the entire team in a gamification funnel, the process will be much simpler and more efficient for everyone involved.

The funnel is a symbolic scheme of how employees learn more about the company, become stronger about their goals, and transform the way they do their jobs.

A mistake that many managers make is to treat the symptom of lack of engagement with motivational training that does not produce meaning for people in the organization.

There are a few points you need to understand to make gamification effective in your business. It is essential to consider the following recommendations to get started:

Get to know the company’s weaknesses

First, you need to identify the company’s main issues: Are your employees suffering from a lack of motivation? Was there a drop in productivity? Do you see that team engagement is no longer the same? The answers will be relevant to know how to get started with the gamification rollout.

Align the project with the company’s goals

Remember that the gamification strategy must align with the business objectives. This makes the engagement of employees even greater, making them realize that they are closer to the processes they are part of.

Set the goals you want to achieve with gamification

Once you identify the company’s weaknesses, defining gamification goals becomes a simpler task. However, you need to think of a plan of what should be able to correct these issues: do you need to train more employees? Do you want to encourage group work? Do you want to generate more competitiveness?

Create a plan and evaluate

You can make a plan for how you could pass this experience on to the company’s employees. The important thing here is to try to understand how engaging and efficient the process is going to be. Therefore, it is necessary to do some tests with smaller teams to be able to evaluate the results.

Always work with feedback

One of the most relevant points of gamification is the continuous use of feedbacks. By receiving feedback on their performance, employees will know whether the choices they made were considered good or bad and how they can improve. In addition, they will be more open to learning new techniques and thus achieve better results.

Where to use

We like people to self-organize, so they update their tasks on the board. We also have an overview board to monitor all projects’ progress (GitScrum Gantt Charts). GitScrum Task Effort and Effort Templates to make estimates on how long a project is gonna take.

Use GitScrum User Stories to add value to the projects’ features. GitScrum Time Tracking helps us measure billable hours and elaborate budgets.

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