Engaging employees is beneficial for companies: motivated, they are more efficient and more effective. However, it is not always easy to know what to put in place to permanently involve your teams. One of the solutions to this problem is found in gamification. Motivating through play has many benefits for the company, including that of engaging employees. Here's everything you need to know about gamification, its benefits, and its various applications within organizations.
What is gamification?
Definition
Gamification, or gamification, consists in transposing the mechanisms of the game to a non-fun universe. Concretely, it is therefore a question of using what naturally motivates human beings — the fact of surpassing themselves, of improving themselves, of competing, of being rewarded.
Application types
In business, gamification can be used in various ways:
- Engaging customers, by arousing their interest through the game, before offering them the opportunity to discover a service or a product in more detail.
- Motivate employees to perform, by showing them their progress in an atypical way, by creating emulation, by establishing a team spirit.
- Set up an original onboarding, by involving new and existing employees, to promote integration.
- Continuously training, to develop new skills while having fun.
The advantages for the company
Gamification can therefore be used in different ways within organizations. The benefits for businesses are quite numerous; we have identified the most important ones.
First of all, gamification is a powerful lever for engagement. It allows Motivate employees to perform certain tasks, as these are no longer perceived only as a constraint. Receiving a variety of rewards can be an incentive to perform at your best and to progress.
It is also an interesting tool to promote team cohesion. By organizing group challenges, original teambuildings, or any other activity for which cooperation is essential for success. This sustainably develops relational skills within your teams: kindness, listening, empathy, etc.
Training programs also work very well thanks to gamification processes. This makes it possible to develop certain professional skills in an interactive format. Combining learning and entertainment is very effective.
Finally, if you want to develop and communicate a corporate culture to your employees, gamification can help you: it is a very good tool for transmitting messages, creating a common vision, or even appropriating values.
Attention: setting up fun systems does not prevent measuring the effectiveness of your teams. If possible, create regular reports to verify that your new device meets your expectations.
Tips for setting up
To set up fun systems in your organization, here are some tips.
First, you need to set goals, which are not necessarily based solely on performance. It can be a question of strengthening the cohesion of your teams, of accelerating innovation, of developing new skills or of generating a different form of motivation.
You must then be creative in order to create content adapted to your goals, which is fun, interactive and interesting. You can work together on the project, and even call on a specialized company if necessary.
Finally, think about a rewards system. It is important that a majority of people are valued: so don't limit yourself to the winners. Moreover, it is not mandatory that the reward be material: it can simply be recognition, the title of “best team”, or “the most original performance”. This encourages intrinsic motivation, which encourages you to surpass yourself in order to obtain personal satisfaction and not an external reward.
Be careful that the game does not lead to deviant behaviors: too much competition or a lack of fair play, for example. The atmosphere must remain benevolent in all circumstances.
Example of gamification projects
Teamstarter companies have fully understood the value of using gamification to engage their employees on various projects. Here are a few examples:
- Evaluate the company's carbon footprint in a fun and responsible way. The objective is to collectively identify areas for improvement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
- Organize a workshop to learn how to pitch. Friendly, it allows everyone to improve their speaking skills with fun activities.
- Setting up the Klaxoon tool for remote meetings. Thanks to quizzes, polls, and collective challenges, this improves the effectiveness of teams during meetings. It is even more interesting when some participants are teleworking.
- Organize games in English. To improve the linguistic level of the teams, there is nothing better than organizing games. Escape games are particularly interesting because they develop team cohesion at the same time. Listening and helping each other are necessary for success.
This list represents only a few examples of what can be implemented in businesses around gamification. The possibilities are endless to engage your employees: don't hesitate to let your creativity speak for itself!
Gamification is therefore an excellent way to engage your employees. To facilitate the realization of this type of project, you can use a participatory budgeting platform such as Teamstarter. The operation is very simple: your employees can propose projects and they carry them out as soon as they have raised the necessary amount. For their part, the other employees assign each month a budget defined by the company to the project of their choice. Fun and easy to implement, our platform allows you to realize the ideas of your employees thanks to a simple tool and effective support. You will see that your employees have more ideas than you think!
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