How to Increase Your Employee Engagement through Gamification

If you don’t create an engaging environment for your employees, you may struggle to keep your team invested in their work and motivated to help your business succeed.

Gamification allows you to implement innovative ways to boost employee engagement. From reward systems to fun training sessions, this article will give you all the strategies you need to give your workplace a rewarding atmosphere. 

What Is Gamification? 

Gamification is a way of making typical elements of a job fun by adding game mechanics to boost interest and engagement. This method takes earning points, badges, or climbing leaderboards and implements them into non-gaming environments like your business intranet to keep your employees interested in their work. 

With a staggering 85% of employees stating they are not engaged in the workplace, gamification can help provide a strong motivational boost. Gamification, in fact, allows you to not only reward talent and hard work but also encourage your employees to embrace the company culture and work towards key incentives. 

How Can Gamification Improve Employee Engagement? 

All employees want to feel like their achievements are recognised and that they can grow within their roles. Picture this: instead of your employees drudging through their daily tasks, gamification makes some aspects of their jobs feel almost like playing a game.

People tend to work harder when they’re having a good time and have an end goal (and a reward) in sight. With gamification, you can add an element of fun to your employee’s daily grind, boosting their engagement with their work. 

6 Ways to Increase Employee Engagement with Gamification Strategies

Are you ready to take your employees from bored to inspired? Here are our top six gamification strategies to make your workplace feel more rewarding for all your employees. 

1. Points and rewards systems

Who doesn’t love a reward system? Give your team the chance to earn valuable points from completing everyday tasks they typically carry out in their roles. You can even offer special rewards for achievements or finishing large-scale projects. Once your team has earned a certain number of points, let them redeem rewards. You can offer plenty of options, including:

• Bonuses in cash 

• Gift cards of their choice 

• Paid time off 

• Travel vouchers for flights and hotels

• Event tickets

Let’s take a look at a points and rewards system in action. 

A salesman working in a car dealership closes a deal on a car worth $75,000. This is their first high-value sale. You award the salesman 20 points and offer them different rewards in exchange, including a paid day off or a cash bonus. The salesman takes a paid day off and feels motivated to continue pushing for more high-value car sales. 

But what if you’re a business with a team of remote-working employees? Motivating them from afar can be tricky. Remote software solutions such as those provided by RealVNC let you set up virtual meetings to issue points and offer rewards to employees who work from home.

2. Friendly challenges

We’re all competitive to some degree. Setting up “Friendly Challenges” as part of your gamification strategy lets you create competitions and challenges between employees that are motivational and fun rather than stressful. With these challenges, you can encourage your employees to stand out and achieve targets, fostering a sense of camaraderie. 

The friendly challenges you set up will depend on your business and employee roles. If you manage a team of software developers, for example, you could launch hackathons to test their coding skills. Whereas, if you’re an e-commerce business, you may want to encourage your employees with a sales sprint competition, setting a monthly sales target. 

This not only helps your team surpass their current sales but also makes your ecommerce customers feel valuable as they receive better and more tailored services from your salespeople.

3. Digital badges of honour

Imagine being able to give your employees a digital badge visible to all members of your company when they do something great, like completing their online training or finalising a complex project. You can, with a digital badge of honour system. 

Digital badges allow your employees to feel proud, knowing they are being recognized and rewarded. Implement different badges depending on your employee's achievements and allow your team members to collect them to work towards rewards like a paid day off or a cash bonus. 

Let’s take a look at an example of a digital badge of honour system. 

You own a VoIP for call centre business with a large team of agents. You decide to reward the “Call Whisper Wizard” badge for the call centre agents who can give customers successful, real-time advice during 80% of their monitored calls. 

All employees who receive this award get a digital badge visible on their profile, are recognised in team meetings, and gain small yet valuable rewards like gift cards. 

4. Leaderboards

With leaderboards, you can set up friendly competitions within teams, almost like an office Olympics, to celebrate individual wins and recognise people’s hard work. Set up scoreboards and employee rankings depending on performance and participation. 

To establish who’s on top of your leaderboard, it’s vital that you use reliable data gathered through regular internal audit controls (read this if you’re wondering “What are internal audit controls?”). This will ensure that your decisions are as unbiased and accurate as possible.

Let’s look at an example of leaderboards in action.

If you are a real estate business, you can create property management leaderboards that acknowledge the managers who maintain above-average occupancy rates and satisfy tenants. You could even quantify satisfaction by how fast property managers respond to tenant queries and maintenance requests. 

Whoever stays at the top of the leaderboard every month should receive motivating rewards like bonuses or paid time off. 

5. Learning quests

Learning quests are a dynamic way to improve employee development programmes and encourage constant learning.

Rather than setting up traditional (and often boring) training sessions, you can take your team members on a hands-on learning adventure. You can give them a mission, a challenge to overcome, and tasks that guide employees through the learning process. Set up different levels and rewards for completing certain modules to gamify your learning quest even more. 

You can either host your own learning quest on a safe and trusted domain (such as those offered by OnlyDomains), or hire an external company to create your learning quests on your behalf. 

Let’s look at an example of learning quests in a software development team. 

Professional software developers need to constantly undergo training to stay ahead in their role. As a tech company, you could create a “Coding Quest” that rewards users as they go through programming courses and receive certifications. As your programmers advance through the levels, you can reward them with badges to recognise their efforts.

Once they complete the course, you could reward your software developers with gift vouchers for useful programming technologies or hardware. 

6. Team missions

Rather than keeping your employees separate and working on their own tasks, consider creating team missions to bring all your departments together in a collaborative atmosphere. Whether you’re working on short-term projects or ongoing goals, team missions combine the skills, expertise, and efforts of everyone in your company to attain your goals faster. 

To gamify team missions, consider enacting a points system and creating leaderboards to rank your employees and their performance in a friendly yet competitive way.

Let’s look at how team missions could be used in a call centre like Vonage.

All call centre representatives need to have a strong foundation of knowledge of the products and services they’re assisting customers with. To encourage this in a team setting, you could set up a “Knowledge Sharing Mission.” Create separate teams with a mix of members with varying experience levels, and promote knowledge sharing on a weekly basis. 

You can award points to individual reps who show a commitment to conducting knowledge-sharing team sessions and who take on the role of mentoring colleagues. After the Knowledge Sharing Mission is over, you can provide virtual badges and certificates to customer service reps who successfully mentor the most people. 

Gamify Your Business With These Six Strategies Today

If your employee's motivation feels stagnant and you’re not getting the results you crave, gamification can go a long way in boosting morale and performance. By implementing our six gamification strategies, you can start to put life back into your business and give employees all the tools they need to achieve—and get rewarded for it.

Keep your staff engaged and ready to learn by offering a rewards structure with exciting benefits like gift vouchers, cash bonuses, and paid time off. Whatever your business type, you can empower your workforce with gamification and see tangible and actionable results.