Gamifying the employee experience

In decades past, companies paid little attention to how their employees experienced the interaction with their workplace; work was seen as a simple transaction in which employees traded their time in return for a paycheck, and how they personally felt about the way they spent the hours between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. was of little importance.

But as the 9-to-5 job increasingly becomes an artifact from a bygone age, workers are beginning to measure their jobs not only by the size of their paycheck, but also by how valued they feel within the organization, whether their workplace supports their personal values, and how the time they spend at work is nurturing their personal and professional development.

Ignoring the employee experience is a recipe for high turnover. For theMillennial generation, there will always be another job. Networking sites like LinkedIn make it easy for your competitors to poach talented employees. Informal income, from freelancing to driving for Uber, give workers a fallback option. These days, telling an employee “if you don’t like it, leave” is as good as asking for their resignation.

Gamification, as part of an engagement and performance solution, can give you the tools you need to create a positive employee experience by encouraging team-based engagement, building a culture of empowerment, and fostering productivity. It’s more than a perk - it’s a new approach to work.

Better than Free Lunch

Many attempts to improve the workplace experience focus on providing tangible perks that boost morale, like employee appreciation luncheons or tweaking the workplace environment with something like an open floor plan. But too often, these initiatives feel like empty gestures - employees want actual appreciation, not free pizza. Your employees need to feel like you’re truly aware and appreciative of their contributions to the team, not simply that they are working within your line of sight.

Gamification can help build the four pillars of a positive employee experience:

• Teamwork: A team-based culture forms the foundation for an outstanding employee experience. Gamification can encourage teamwork by tracking and rewarding collaboration. Traditional employee performance metrics like annual peer reviews do a poor job of quantifying the true time and effort employees put into helping each other succeed. Our Bunchball Nitro platform uses big data analytics to identify your team’s best players, helping you group workers with complementary skills and design an incentive structure that encourages interaction and collaboration that fits your workplace.
• Validation: Bunchball can improve employee experience by giving you the tools to recognize and reward workers’ achievements. Traditional winner-take-all contests risk alienating novice workers who might become discouraged when competing with seasoned veterans. By tracking and rewarding incremental improvements in performance, Bunchball inspires productivity, progress and mastery.
• Empowerment: Empowered employees are more likely to have a positive workplace experience, and a well-designed gamification program will provide workers with channeled flexibility, allowing them to tackle the tasks they’re most motivated to take on. The Nitro gamification platform gives your employees autonomy with accountability, keeping them productive and in control.
• Purpose: Finally, maintaining a sense of purpose is crucial for improving your employees’ experience. Workers are most satisfied when they are sharpening their skills and working towards shared goals. Gamification can help you cultivate your workers’ sense of purpose by quantifying their progress as they develop new proficiencies and take on greater responsibility in the workplace. They will also be able to see how their individual efforts are supporting your organization’s broader success.