Gamification is gaining more and more space in the corporate world. One of the main reasons for this is that this is a resource with high potential to increase employee engagement and intrinsic motivation.
However, as there are many possibilities for using gamification, there are still doubts regarding how it can be applied in the day-to-day work of a team.
Through the Gamification methodology, many managers are resuming support from employees and seeing the company recover its growth rate.
Gamification contributes to making the work environment more pleasant, improving employee involvement and motivation in pursuit of a common goal.
In this article, you will learn how a gamification is a great tool for making teamwork improve in companies.
People as the main part of a gamification
The main focus of gamification is people’s behavior. The games are used in the corporate context to reinforce attitudes that generate positive results both for the employee, who has the opportunity to strengthen their professional profile and for the company.
Another important point related to gamification is that this is a strategy capable of promoting people’s intrinsic motivation.
Therefore, the first step in establishing an efficient gamification strategy is to know the people who make up the team: their interests, aspirations, and their perceptions of the work performed in the company.
Processes for engaging teamwork
Gamification at work involves making everyday work more like a game. For this, it is necessary to make the work processes be perceived differently.
The idea is to make the team look beyond the tasks, reports, and graphs and make a more personal and emotional relationship with their main responsibilities in the company. When this happens, the engagement and commitment to the company are much greater.
Tools to engage teamwork
Gamification can make use of technology to its advantage, and work tools are a great way to gather information on what gives feedback to people on how they are performing the necessary effort.
Such tools comprise everything that the team uses to carry out its work, it can be a CRM, a project management system, an E-mail tool. A gamification strategy includes some automation at work to ease the process while giving more meaning.
Why should you use gamification to engage your team?
To understand the impact Gamification will have on employee engagement and motivation, you need to understand how and why it works.
The new worker profile is extremely engaged with the digital world and loves to play games. On the other hand, most companies have discouraging tasks and processes, making the job tedious.
However, to reduce the lack of motivation, turnover, and, the drop in production, companies are changing their work styles with the help of Gamification and improving the level of employee engagement.
This happens because the result of the work starts to have friendly feedback about the employee’s action, making him better understand the consequences of his performance and get more involved, just like in a game.
Gamification has proven to be very successful in engaging people and motivating them to change behaviors, develop skills and solve chronic business problems.
6 Steps to teamwork motivation through gamification
1. Identify what motivates the team
Every person is motivated by something. Each one has their personal and professional goals, their tastes, and their way of being and relating to others.
2. Identify the team’s interests
Along the same lines of conversation with the team, it is essential to listen to the team and involve them in the creation of the game.
The game needs to be something that arouses the interest of players, and that engages them to play more and carry out their activities.
With a theme and a story of the game that is of interest and that excites the players, the chance for the game to bring results is much greater, as players will want to continue playing and evolving in the game.
3. Identify the company’s goals with the game
The company’s goals must be clear at all times. All participants must be aware that they are helping to achieve the company’s strategic objectives through execution and respect for the rules of the game.
Provide ongoing feedback and, if possible, show gamification results against strategic goals.
4. Engage corporate training in the game
It is common for companies that have a corporate training program to have a high rate of absences in the training provided.
Gamification can be a tool to leverage this participation in training, scoring, and rewarding those who participate in training.
5. Provide ongoing feedback
It is critical to the success of gamification strategies that moderators continually provide feedback to players.
Feedback consists of providing information on how the user and other players are in the game. In addition, how much remains to reach certain goals, scores obtained, and completed challenges.
This is necessary as it creates greater engagement, motivates the player to keep playing, and shows that what he is doing is bringing results!
6. Create a sense of progression
Within gamified environments, a sense of progression must be created in the game.
If there is no progress mechanic in the game, it probably won’t be able to engage players for very long, and strategic goals won’t be met.
How to use gamification as teamwork engagement in companies?
To use gamification to engage teams takes a lot of planning. Below there is a step-by-step guide to implementing this strategy:
Identify the problem
The first step is to understand what aspect the team needs for engagement. Gamification has the power to deal with all kinds of problems, but trying to solve them all at once is not the best way. Each one needs a customized solution to ensure accuracy and effectiveness in the final result.
One of the best ways to discover areas for improvement is to question those involved in the process. Therefore, observing each person’s behavior is also an excellent measure to identify engagement issues in the organization.
Set goals
Once the team identifies the problem, you will see goal setting is natural. If the IT development team is not meeting deadlines, the goal is to make processes more agile. If an employee does not do well with teamwork, the goal is to develop training that corrects the employee’s failure.
Understanding what is expected of the gamified action is essential to assess what kind of solution will be applied. Generally speaking, games test the user’s skills to achieve a specific goal. Therefore, this fictitious goal must be directly related to the real goal.
Understand collaborators
It is necessary to seek as much information about the audience as possible before starting a strategy. Identify the preferences of the participants of the action to create a personalized and attractive solution for the persona in question.
Each gender, age, and employee profile have more identification with a different format. Knowing this in advance is extremely valuable to the success of your plan.
Measure the results
There are two ways to measure engagement results after a gamification strategy. The first is to look at the data obtained from the automatic feedbacks. The levels reached and scores obtained say a lot about the employee’s evolution and involvement in the proposed activity.
The second is to accompany employees after the action, through tests, satisfaction surveys, and one-on-one conversations. Thus, it will be possible to assess whether the content is for employees. Also, it will outline a plan to improve the dynamics in the next few times.
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