Powering Up Gamification in a Team with Kanban Methods

From the advancement of technology and the implementation of new strategies to grow in the market, many businesses needed to reinvent the way they deal with their audience and their own teams, especially with gamification.

The objective arises to potentially increase the engagement of these two groups with the brand, to raise revenue, and ensure a more solid base. Gamification in companies is a good example of this.

The Kanban method also reminds us that leadership is not exclusive to senior positions. Some of the best leadership comes from the daily actions of people on the front lines of their teams.

Therefore, with employees thinking about the company and its processes as leaders, small changes and improvements are made inside and outside organizations.

In this post, you will see how gamification has been used with Kanban methods and also has been a favorite tool to major companies.

Increase results with Kanban

According to Ann Coppens, a specialist, and a manager at Gamification Nation, Gamification is a “growing trend, as we see everywhere. If you’re running an app or software of any kind, you need gamification in it. It’s nearly becoming expected”.

Coppens also realizes that Gamification “offers an opportunity to grant emotional positive encouragement to team members, whether their ‘steps forward’ come with a celebration, compliments, claps, points, a token icon, or a message from the managers to congratulate them for little achievements”.

Finally, the specialist foresees that what will add value to your gamification program “will be thinking through from starting a project, on what would be motivational for your people, what would be motivational for the stakeholders; rewarding and assessing rewards and levels according to that”.

Each column in the chart represents a step in your workflow, such as “in progress”, “delayed” or completed”. These columns can be defined by you or your team. Each Kanban card represents a work item.

From then on, all the progress of the tasks will be registered on this board! When you start working on an item, you move it from the “Demand” column, for example, and when it’s completed, you move it to “Done”. In this way, you can easily track progress and visualize bottlenecks.

What results can you achieve with gamification?

Depending on your goal with gamified actions, various results you can achieve. We highlight some examples below:

Increased productivity and team motivation;
Improvement of the organizational climate and social relations;
More willingness and organization to work as a team;
Improvement of work routines;
Constant feedback to employees through game results or action;
Expansion of brand awareness;
Increased sales of a particular product;
Assistance in capturing customers and leads;

And, it is from there that Gamification for internal activities ends up entering the scene. But how to implement it?

Daily activities

This is a technique that mainly contributes to productivity and engagement.

Assuming that the team clearly has in mind its weekly responsibilities, the game can organize itself in the fulfillment of each task and, with that, get feedback from the manager.

This feedback can show the reasons why the game of the day/week was won or lost and what can be done to improve the result.

Team goals

All teams within a team must have goals. In this sense, using game elements for team goals contributes even more to engagement.

A practical example would be to generate rewards for achieved goals: mini rewards, personalized objects, promotions, days off, bonuses, etc.

General engagement

One of the most important criteria for attracting and retaining talent is how a company’s culture is managed and what is done to make employees feel part of the institution.

Given this dynamic, it is important to have a welcoming internal environment, but in addition, it is essential to encourage participation with rewards.

See the reasons why you can benefit the employee, either with gifts or points to redeem rewards at the end.

Benefits of Kanban Methodology

As we can see, Kanban institutes a series of changes over time, focusing on the company’s evolution. Therefore, it brings a series of benefits to teams and employees, making their work much more assertive. Here are some benefits of the Kanban method:

Easy application

We explain here that you can start implementing Kanban with your company’s existing system and workflows. There is no need to create any kind of new project or make any rearrangements. As it does not require sudden changes, Kanban is easy to apply and can start structuring at any time.

Identification and elimination of errors and bottlenecks

By viewing the workflow and managing it, it’s easy to see where errors occur in the workflow. It is possible to identify where demands you lost, creating delays and a bottleneck. From this identification, it is time to act with small changes to eliminate these errors.

Time optimization

More than reducing time spent on tasks and improving deliveries, Kanban allows you to do this intelligently. With practice, it is possible to track the progress of tasks and ensure that there is an optimal number of active projects. This avoids overload and ensures that tasks are done with the necessary resources and time.

How to use gamification in the company?

You can use gamification in several ways. Both as a way to improve the productivity and engagement of employees and to encourage the use of a new tool by its customers.

Furthermore, it is wrong to think that gamification connects the use of online technologies and applications. It is possible to create and run games in the offline world as well.

As just like any strategy, it is important to understand the purpose of gamification to start building and executing it. Keeping this in mind, another very essential point is to know the profile of the players, their needs, and their tastes.

This will help you to look for game references and themes to build something that really generates engagement and increases the number of game participants.

Gamification is fun but is very professional, but you can link to the company’s growth and is part of the professional environment. It’s a light way to get employees to engage with a purpose and improve their productivity.

As we said, it is crucial to be following the organization’s profile and culture. If you’ve used this strategy in your company, please share your experience with us in the comments.

How do you use GitScrum for Gamification?

We use Kanban boards to create gamification programs and manage them. Kanban is definitely the tool we use to work.

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

Boost your productivity and creativity with GitScrum!

GitScrum has many Scrum features that will support all your project necessities. Increase your productivity and get instant and efficient results with our Scrums! Follow the cycle using our Scrum features!