5 Benefits of Gamification in the Workplace

If you’re like most HR leaders, you’re probably looking for unique and effective ways to motivate, inspire, and engage your employees while they’re at work.

You might have heard of gamification – an approach that uses gaming elements like levels, rewards, and points systems to increase user engagement – and wondered how well this would play out in the workplace. 

The short answer is that gamification can be a truly powerful strategy to improve employee engagement. To understand how and why, however, we’ll need to dive a little deeper. 

In this article, we’ll explore five of the most compelling benefits of gamification in the workplace and discover how it leads to enhanced learning outcomes and a greater desire for ongoing learning. We’ll also cover some of the most commonly used gamification tactics and provide a brief guide to incorporating gamification into your own employee engagement strategy.

How do companies use gamification in the workplace? 

Let’s first take a step back and examine some major use cases for gamification at work:

New employee onboarding

Employee onboarding is a classic use case for gamification.

As new hires progress through various learning modules, watch AI video presentations, and sign critical paperwork, they can track their advancement against a progress bar or with a points system.

Interactive features like quizzes and checkpoints can provide additional enhancements by requiring learners to demonstrate that they've digested the knowledge.

Here’s an example of an AI video presentation for employee onboarding created using Colossyan: 

Learning and development

After the initial onboarding phase is ongoing employee training and development.

You can just as easily apply game-like elements here to enhance the learning process. For example, as they progress through additional training modules, employees could earn points to cash in through a corporate rewards system. 

Task management

At a smaller level, you can apply your gamification strategy to employees’ day-to-day work by gamifying task management.

Consider your sales team. Each team member is responsible for a set number of activities each day, from calls and emails to social media messages and more. You can easily gamify these with progress bars.

You could also add a scoring system to each activity. For instance, a sales development representative (SDR) might get one point for logging a phone call or 20 for booking a meeting. This system can create a little friendly competition in the work environment as SDRs strive to come out on top.

Career progress tracking

Finally, the broader process of monitoring career progress can also benefit from a little gamification.

Say one of those SDRs wants to move up into an account executive role. Their manager could map out the various training programs they need to pass, behaviors they need to exhibit, and new skills they need to adopt before they’re ready to step up. Tracking these milestones can be like monitoring progress in a video game. 

5 benefits of gamification in the workplace 

Gamified learning can have powerful real-world effects on employee performance, company culture, and overall productivity.

Here are five of the most important gamification benefits to consider:

1. Enhanced learning outcomes

Gamification initiatives can improve learning material retention and may even motivate further learning.

Two meta-analysis studies that combined research from different fields demonstrated that “applying gamification in education can improve cognitive, motivational, and behavioral learning outcomes.”

By incorporating gamification in the workplace, you can not only make your team’s work more enjoyable, but also enhance learning outcomes in the process. 

2. Higher employee engagement

Similarly, gamification has the powerful ability to increase engagement among workers. Employees at companies that use gamified programs regularly report an increase in engagement.

In fact, in a study from Talent LMS, 89% of respondents stated that gamified tasks motivate them more than non-gamified tasks.

3. Increased employee advocacy

As employees engage more with their work and feel more fulfilled, their overall satisfaction in the workplace increases.

This satisfaction often enhances employee advocacy, which is when company employees take action to promote their employer through social media posts, personal recommendations, or other mediums. It also has an important effect on retention and hiring, which allows you to improve your talent pool.

4. Better team building

Not all gamification initiatives need to focus on the individual. In fact, you can use gamification to inspire teamwork by adding in a bit of friendly competition.

For instance, departments can compete against one another for points, monitor rankings in real time, and band together to win the current prize.

5. Improved desire for ongoing learning

When applied to the learning domain, gamification not only improves engagement with existing learning materials but also motivates employees to want to learn more.

Gamification provides employees with a little burst of motivation each time they pass a module and fuels their desire to absorb more information and continue upskilling.

What features make gamification fun for employees? 

When it comes to implementing gamification in your own company, you’ll need to figure out what gaming elements will improve your employees’ engagement and productivity. Here are some examples to choose from:

Points and scoring

Employees can earn points for certain activities, such as ticking off daily to-do tasks, engaging in additional training, or completing projects. They can view these points in real time and redeem them for prizes like paid time off.

Leaderboards

To inspire positive competition, you can display current scores on a leaderboard, either for individuals or teams. This can also be an effective way to spot underperformers so you can provide additional support.

Levels and progression

Levels are a way to create progression without a number of different role names, reporting lines, or seniority grades.

For instance, new software developers might start out at level one and progress up to level five based on their ability to demonstrate core competencies, complete certain training modules, or take on additional responsibilities.

Badges and achievements

You can grant your employees badges alongside points and levels to highlight specific achievements, such as completing first aid training or engaging in an employee buddy system.

Rewards and incentives

You can use rewards and incentives to gamify work in a variety of ways:

• Employees can collect points and redeem them for desirable rewards like flexible working hours.
• You can incentivize particular behaviors (like achieving 120% of a sales quota for the month) with spot rewards. 
• Group-based rewards, such as a paid team outing, can also be an effective way to inspire collaboration.

Social interaction and collaboration 

A key aspect of many modern games is the ability to interact with others and collaborate socially. Group-based rewards and incentives, leaderboards, and inter-employee competitions can all contribute to greater social cohesion and workplace collaboration.

How to start incorporating gamification into your training 

Interested in leveraging gamification to increase employee engagement with training materials? Follow these five steps to get started:

1. Clarify your training objectives

First, make sure you’re clear on what you want employees to get out of your training plan.

For example, are you:

• Looking to give workers a broad overview of how other departments contribute to organizational success?
• Aiming to upskill employees in particular roles?
• Providing company-wide health and safety training?

Gaining clarity on your objectives, along with who you expect to engage in the training program, sets you up for success in the next steps.

2. Build out a training content plan

Next, design a plan for creating training content that aligns with the objectives you’ve identified.

For instance, if your goal for your training content is to provide administration team members with a greater understanding of financial compliance, you might plan out several learning modules that cover accounting practices, tax requirements, and data security legislation.

3. Design your game mechanics 

Here, you’ll determine what game elements you’re going to include in your workplace training plan.

Will learners accumulate points for each educational video they watch? Will you set up a leaderboard to encourage friendly competition? How and for what will employees redeem their points?

Establishing these elements will help you when it comes time to create your content.

Also read: The 10 Best Training Video Production Companies To Check Out

4. Accelerate gamified content creation using AI 

This step is where many companies get stuck. They know that they want to leverage video for its superior engagement and retention, but they don’t have the time or budget to produce all the videos they need in a timely manner.

That’s where AI video generation tools like Colossyan come into play. With Colossyan, you can use custom AI avatars to access authentic storytelling, create effective employee onboarding sequences, and generate informative learning material in a matter of minutes.

Colossyan also has some built-in gamification functionality and many more interactivity features – such as multiple choice quizzes and branching scenarios. 

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5. Test, gather feedback, and iterate

Now that all of your learning content is ready and you’ve worked out your gamification tactics, it’s time to bring it all together and start engaging your workforce.

Consider rolling out gamified learning in phases to learn from any hiccups as you go. For example, you may want to start by introducing gamification to just one department at a time. 

Be sure to ask for feedback from team members as well to find out what tactics are the most engaging and motivating. You can then implement that feedback as you iterate on your gamification strategy.

Take advantage of the benefits of gamification in the workplace 

Workplace gamification confers a number of important benefits, from increased employee engagement to improved knowledge retention. When it comes to employee training, gamified video content can be a powerful way to improve learning outcomes while increasing motivation.

Colossyan Creator, our enterprise-grade AI video generation tool, helps you create video learning content at scale. It can even help you gamify the learning experience with interactive features like knowledge checks.

Try it out for yourself today.