On the surface, gamification and productivity appear to be conflicting concepts. It’s not uncommon that people think of it as an added distraction to productivity. But, on the contrary, there’s a natural synergy between them that you can exploit to build a highly motivated and engaged workforce.

In this article, we'll discuss what gamification is, its benefits, and how you can gamify work processes to boost engagement.

What Is Gamification in the Workplace?

Gamification is the use of game elements and digital incentives in non-game contexts. Although we have used game mechanics for entertainment for a long time, more individuals are now applying it to corporate culture with the increasing availability of tools to implement it into our workflows.

At its core, gamification is all about making processes and activities more interesting and engaging for your staff. It involves creating a game-like environment using goal-oriented components such as points, badges, or leaderboards.

What Are the Benefits of Gamification in the Workplace?

A man playing
  • Gamification can help your employees develop their skills.
  • It is an effective way to boost engagement and productivity by leveraging the natural competitive instinct in people.
  • Employees are more motivated when they have goals to work towards.
  • Gamified systems often provide feedback, which helps employees learn from mistakes and improve their performance.
  • The use of gamification makes it easier for organizations to measure progress and success (i.e., by tracking metrics such as sales or hours worked).
  • Gamification is a practical way to get people interested in activities that they might otherwise find boring.
  • It’s a great way to increase employee satisfaction and reduce turnover.
  • You can use gamification for training purposes, such as teaching new employees the ropes of their job.

Given the record numbers of employees quitting their jobs, this may be the perfect opportunity to give gamification a shot in your organization.

5 Different Workplace Processes You Can Gamify

1. Your Onboarding Process

Your company’s onboarding process is a perfect candidate to be gamified. Considering how vital it is to the growth of your organization and that it is often full of dull tasks, adding game-based elements can make the process more engaging and impactful. Besides, most new employees, especially millennials, already enjoy playing games on their mobile devices and other gadgets.

You can leverage game elements like leaderboards, badges, and incentives to encourage and motivate recruits to get the most out of your onboarding process.

For example, offering rewards to ensure that new employees thoroughly go through vital parts of your company’s internal wiki, like data security best practices. Or, transform task-lists recruits need to do in their training into challenges they must overcome to level up.

However, if you are looking for a tool to do the heavy lifting for you, OrgLynx is an excellent bet. This gamified tool provides various solutions that can help improve every step of your onboarding process by automating various mundane HR tasks, improving the employee experience, and team building in your workplace.

2. Training Existing Employees

Training in the workplace.

Having improved your onboarding process to acclimate new hires to their jobs, you can now focus on the existing members of your organization.

Do you currently train existing employees on new software and/or processes in a PowerPoint presentation? If so, they will surely benefit from the added engagement of gamification to accelerate learning. For example, you can teach them how to do their job via an interactive game that uses tutorials, hints, and quizzes.

If you’re looking to increase learner retention rates through gamification, you can use a gamified training tool like EdApp to add fun to your training and boost engagement. EdApp’s gamification features transform dull lessons into interactive games to stoke your employees’ competitive fire and conquer complex learning challenges.

3. Recognizing Achievement

Employee recognition is an essential element in any workplace. It helps promote motivation and engagement while strengthening employees’ feelings of belonging.

Gamifying your recognition process can help you improve the morale in your organization by making employees feel more appreciated. Why not, for example, show how much you value them through a leaderboard that features top performers? Or incentivize workers with badges that unlock privileges or extra benefits, like holidays or gift cards.

You can also leverage gamification platforms like Centrical, which uses points and leaderboards to recognize achievement among individuals or teams. This solution delivers an easy way for leaders to track employee performance in real-time and reward top achievers.

4. Improving Health and Wellness

Offering health promotion activities in your organization is an excellent way to improve employee health and wellness. Yet, despite their importance, these programs often fail in the workplace due to a lack of engagement.

This is where gamification comes into play! You can apply game-based elements to your health promotion events to motivate employees to work out or take care of their mental health.

For example, you could add competition elements to your wellness programs, such as using leaderboards that rank participants based on their performance.

Alternatively, you can automate this process using a Microsoft Teams integration called Health Hero for fun and wellness challenges with gamification.

5. Encouraging Teamwork

People putting their hands together

Collaboration is an integral part of the workplace. And, if you already have a collaborative environment in place, gamification can help improve it to build a more supportive workplace culture.

You can do so by encouraging more collaboration and incorporating fun elements, such as points and leaderboards, to motivate employees to engage each other and work on tasks together.

For example, you can use leaderboards to track which departments are doing the best job in engaging other teams during meetings. Or create a game-like learning challenge where employees must work together to solve problems. You can also use a social tool like Donut to help you create more opportunities to promote collaboration in your workplace.

Time to Gamify Your Workplace

Your employees are the backbone of your organization. It’s essential to keep them engaged and productive, so you can continue delivering on your business's promises in a sustainable way.

Gamification is a great way to do this because it turns tedious or dull tasks into games that can help people level up their productivity while enjoying themselves in the process.