Why Gamification Is The Leading Technology In The Business World

Gamification has been penetrating the corporate world with much momentum in recent years. Its application is widely effective and vastly broad. And its benefits are exuberantly helping its case as one of the leading technology that’s cutting-edge and the preferred ally in supporting companies achieve their strategies and goals.

When done right and effectively, gamification can offer companies a highly engaged, efficient and productive workplace thanks to qualities such as:

• Encouraging collaboration and teamwork
• Building community spirit
• Inspiring healthy competition
• Rewarding points and badges
• Enhancing skills and leveling up
• Eradicating bias and fostering fairness
• Enhancing productivity through the achievement of goals and targets
• Delivering prompt and fast feedback
• Urging transparency and communication
• Facilitating onboarding and familiarity

These are just some of the qualities that companies can extract from a gamified workplace. On top of all this, gamification has helped create an environment that’s more lively, fun and less mundane and dull. It’s helped employees enjoy what they do, making them much more focused, reinvigorated and successful in their careers. Companies have used gamification to attract highly skilled talent, rid themselves of mediocracy and truly engage their employees. After all, a highly engaged workplace will undoubtedly guarantee your business success.

Related Article: How Playing Games Can Lead To An Engaged Workforce

Where has gamification been used and made its mark? Here are some of the areas where companies have extracted the most from it.

Corporate Culture

Gamification has helped company communicate values and align teams to a common purpose and goal. Think of it as a unifying tool that’s aligned people to achieve goals that are collectively fulfilling a higher purpose. Each project or program that employees complete in the gamified world helps them understand the value of their contributions, the philosophies of the company in the techniques they use to achieve goals and keeps them involved in shaping the company culture.

Customer Service

In a time when customer experience is pivotal for company’s success, gamification has rewarded employee behavior that has produced exceptional customer service. Naturally employees are much more motivated to do well ‘in the game’ and hence provide customers extraordinary support. And since every behavior is within the gamified platform, users can share ideas and concepts to learn from each other.

Human Resource Management

From enhancing employee engagement, to finding the right talent through gamified assessments, onboarding and even boosting employee loyalty, gamification works miracles for HR management. Not to mention you can even incorporate policies and other readable into it which most employees often find boring.

Inventory Management

Gamification has even been applied to inventory management where it rewards employees for efficient practices and management of inventory and processing orders and shipments.

Learning and Development

Probably the first area to benefit from gamification is learning and development. Enhancing its employees’ abilities has been vital for companies to retain talent with relevant skills. Gamification has been used globally to impart knowledge and teach new skills in an environment that’s fun, interactive and engaging. Of course, the biggest benefit that companies have gained from gamified learning platforms is the ability to improve results and retention of what’s learned.

Marketing

Aside from the gamified incentives that companies have been using to attract customers and promote their products and services, internally, gamification is being used to motivate employees to market the company as well. Employees earn points, badges and rewards for actively sharing information and product knowledge on social media and for bringing in referrals.

Ownership

Gamification has been a vital element in a company’s strive to find new and innovative ideas and practices. Through its rewards employees are encouraged to speak up, share ideas and strategies and of course feel much more part of the company, than just being its employees. Employees feel a deeper sense of ownership and pride in their contributions thanks to gamification.

Project Management

One of the key features of gamification is its ability to track progress. In terms of project management this is simply brilliant. Managing and monitoring a project’s completion, the collaboration that goes into it and the timelines to follow and meet all become seamless via gamification. And of course, there are incentives to get the project moving along promptly.

Sales

Through healthy competition, improved collaborations, incentives and rewards that appeal to everyone in your sales team, gamification can significantly boost sales. And it’s not just about getting rewarded for the closure of sales, instead sales reps are rewarded for each step of the sales cycle.

Teamwork

Gamification promotes transparency, not just in the company values and goals, however, it also makes visible team member’s progress. The benefit to that is how teams can work closer, get an understanding of where each member struggles and excels and then working together to achieve the team’s goals. Information and knowledge is freely shared between members making gamified platforms the perfect solution for team harmony and cohesiveness.

At present, gamification has made its mark as the leading technology partner to help companies achieve their business strategies. Have you seen or heard of some other application of gamification in the corporate world? Do share your experience in the comments below.

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Paul Keijzer is the CEO and Founder of Engage Consulting and the co-Founder of The Talent Games, which aims to transform HR by digitising talent processes and creating more engaging and productive workplaces through gamification and mobile technology. As a global HR and Leadership Management expert, Paul knows how to combine business insights with people insights to transform organisations and put them on the path to growth.