Gamification in the Workplace: Everything You Need to Know

Work doesn’t always have to feel like work. That might sound overly optimistic, but it’s a practice that recognizable companies like Cisco, Microsoft, and Siemens have followed.

By applying game elements to the workplace, you can boost your teams’ engagement, motivation, and performance across the board. And by introducing game mechanics to day-to-day tasks like making cold calls or onboarding new hires, you can give your employees clear objectives and goals. 

In this article, we'll identify potential use cases and explore creating course content with interactive videos to show how you can use gamification in your organization. 

Whether your goal is to increase productivity, improve collaboration, or develop new skills among your employees, you’ll learn everything you need to know about introducing gamification into your workplace. 

What is gamification?

Before we get into the specific ways you can incorporate gamification in the workplace, it's important to understand what it is. 

Gamification refers to the use of game design elements and experiences in non-game contexts– like workplaces, education, health and fitness apps, and more. At its heart, gamification aims to leverage people's natural desires for achievements, status, competition, and meaningful rewards to motivate and engage them.

Some key game design elements that gamification incorporates include:

• Points systems that award points for desired behaviors and accomplishments
• Badges and leaderboards that publicly recognize achievements and foster friendly competition
• Levels or ranks that allow users to see their progress and strive to advance
• Challenges and quests that encourage goal-setting and completing tasks

Ultimately, the goal is to channel your employees’ intrinsic motivation so work feels more like play, as well as increase their drive to perform well and continuously improve. In the following sections, we'll explore some tried-and-true approaches to gamification that you can start implementing right away.

Gamification in the workplace: Is it effective?

The high adoption of gamification across many industries raises the question of whether it actually works. Fortunately, this isn’t just a passing fad. 

Research shows that when companies properly implement gamification, its benefits extend to both companies and their employees.

For example, a study has found that skill retention increased by a whopping 40% and employee onboarding times decreased by 90% when companies introduced gamification principles.

Employee education aside, gamification also provides powerful social benefits. The previous study also showed that gamification significantly enhances feelings of belonging, connection, and community in the workplace. Up to 87% of employees reported that gamified initiatives made them feel more socially integrated and boosted their engagement.

Of course, not all gamification efforts are equal. If you really want to see results, your initiatives must be well-designed and based on an understanding of your employees’ motivations and needs. The rewards you choose must also be meaningful, and the overall experience should be fun and engaging instead of feeling like “work.” 

When done right, however, gamification offers compelling benefits that can have an incredibly positive impact on workplace culture, performance, and job satisfaction.

Also read: How Does Gamification Improve eLearning?

Employee use cases for gamification

Anything can be a game if you introduce a few game mechanics. Here are some common ways you can successfully gamify different tasks and workflows across your organization:

Onboarding and employee training

Adding levels, quests, and virtual badges to your onboarding training can incentivize employees to complete tutorials and certifications. Offering these rewards will ensure that your new hires feel supported as they get up to speed on how your business operates.

You can also apply these principles to your product onboarding. By adding a few game mechanics and rewards, you can increase the chances that your customers will onboard fully and can even shorten their time-to-value when using your product.

Sales and customer service

Performance-based rewards are great ways to encourage friendly competition across your customer service and sales teams. Not only will gamifying these aspects make it easier to surface top performers in your company, but this kind of public recognition can also incentivize employees who may be struggling to improve.

Product development

Setting up timed challenges and team quests can optimize your company’s workflows when producing or developing new products. Some companies take this a step further by creating company-wide challenges where the winning teams receive cash-based incentives if they are able to develop a new product or feature. 

Professional development

Yes, you can even gamify your employees’ professional development! To do this, you can start by implementing a point system to encourage continuous learning across your organization. 

For example, employees could earn points by completing training courses, on-the-job learning activities, and other development opportunities. As their points increase, employees can advance to higher experience tiers. Reaching new tiers can then unlock more advanced training courses, certification programs, and rewards for completing certain levels of training.

How to incorporate gamification in the workplace

Gamification doesn’t happen by accident. If you want to successfully implement gamification initiatives, then understanding your employees is paramount. Their unique motivations and interests should dictate which game mechanics you use.

Conducting surveys is a good way to gauge your employees’ interests and understand what truly drives engagement for people across different departments. Collecting this data will help you design learning experiences that your employees will find enjoyable and worthwhile. 

Now, keep in mind that gamification is not a “set it and forget it” activity. Instead, it’s something you should constantly monitor and iterate on. 

3 steps to create gamified learning experiences

Building engaging gamification experiences for employees may seem challenging at first. However, by establishing a solid framework and placing an emphasis on intrinsic motivation, any organization can quickly create and implement effective gamification experiences.

Here are a few steps you can take to get started with your gamification strategy:

1. Clarify your objectives

First, you’ll need to figure out exactly why you want to incorporate gamification in the workplace. What outcomes are you aiming for? Is it increased productivity, higher engagement in training programs, improved teamwork, or something else? Understanding your objectives will ultimately help you craft the appropriate incentives and rewards for your participants.

Similarly, you should outline the behaviors and actions that you want to encourage among your employees. These actions will form the foundation of your gamification program.

For instance, if the goal is to enhance training participation, consider setting targets related to completing onboarding modules or ongoing learning activities. Once you and your teams align on these goals, you can break down larger goals into manageable tasks or milestones that employees can strive toward.

2. Explore various gamification approaches and methods

Once you’ve identified your program’s goals, it’s time to begin exploring various approaches. For example, you can incorporate elements like points systems, badges, or leaderboards to monitor employee performance and create some friendly competition. You may even consider offering both work-related achievements and social achievements to foster morale across your teams.

3. Leverage AI to build courses and training at scale

After you’ve figured out your goals and methods, all that’s left to do is create the content to support your gamified program. Fortunately, today’s AI tools make it easy to create gamified content at scale. 

For example, Colossyan is an AI video tool that offers SCORM export, allowing you to create engaging content with AI avatars and export it to your LMS, improving your LMS gamification. The platform also offers: 

• Multiple choice knowledge checks: Test your learners’ skill development and understanding by incorporating quizzes into your AI avatar videos. 
• Branching scenarios: Increase employee engagement while simultaneously personalizing content with “choose your own adventure” learning experiences. 

Tips for successful gamification

Once you’ve built out your gamified experiences, you’ll have everything you need to reap the rewards of gamification in the workplace. But that doesn’t mean your program will succeed by default.

While gamification seems like an easy way to improve employee engagement, effectively implementing it requires careful planning and execution. 

Here are a few helpful tips to ensure your gamification efforts successfully increase employee motivation:

Prioritize the user experience

Participating in your gamified experiences should be seamless for your employees. Any unnecessary friction can disincentivize your team members from fully engaging in these activities, which defeats the point entirely. Your game mechanics should be clear to ensure a smooth user experience. 

Focus on intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivators

Your gamified program’s goal shouldn’t be to hand out badges or gift cards. Instead, your gamification strategies should focus on fostering a sense of competency, autonomy, and purpose for learners through gameplay. With these goals in mind, make sure your rewards align with your desired behaviors rather than solely driving employee participation.

Leverage video content

Every effective game experience leverages multiple mediums to engage its participants. Video content is one of the most accessible and effective ways to deliver information, which makes it a great employee gamification strategy. Plus, your learners are more likely to retain information from a video rather than text-only material. 

Real-world examples of gamification for employees 

So what does gamification look like in the real world? Several notable companies have seen plenty of success from implementing gamified experiences across their organizations, including Cisco, Microsoft, and Siemens, to name a few.

Cisco is a perfect example of how gamifying social media training can strengthen skills in an enjoyable way. Its gamified program resembles popular titles like The Sims and League of Legends and allows sales and HR professionals to advance levels and earn team-based badges. As a result, the technology company saw increased participation and competency in reaching out to prospects on Twitter and communicating with potential candidates via LinkedIn.

In another example, Microsoft gamified its contact center training by introducing points, badges, and personalized goals to boost its agents’ morale. Due to these efforts, the company was able to drive a 12% reduction in absenteeism and a 10% increase in calls per shift, which illustrates how well-designed gamification can make difficult jobs more engaging.

Siemens took its approach even further by viewing gamification as central to engaging digital natives who are entering the workforce. As CEO Barbara Humpton noted, “We can’t expect a generation of digital natives who never experienced an analog workplace to want to go back in time. They will join us if the workspaces and tools we provide them clearly represent the future.” 

The big takeaway from Siemens's findings is that if work feels like a video game, the new generation of workers may feel more motivated and invested in their roles.

When do gamification techniques fail in the workplace? 

Increasing employee engagement is no easy task. Despite your best efforts to add gamification elements to the workplace, there may come a time when the inputs just don’t match the outputs. 

However, by understanding the common pitfalls of gamified training, you’ll be able to avoid failure and successfully implement new programs.

Let’s explore a few reasons why your game elements could fail:

1. High levels of competition: Competition should motivate employees, not frustrate them. Give everyone across your organization a chance to succeed. Otherwise, you’ll only be hurting your employee morale.
2. Stagnant experiences: Keep your gamification system fresh with new goals or challenges so it stays exciting over time.
3. A focus on extrinsic rewards: Focus on intrinsic rewards like building new skills, not just extrinsic rewards like gifts.

But keep in mind that even recognizable brands don’t always get gamification right on the first try. As seen with Disney’s gamification experience, creating mandates around completing gamified experiences without understanding your users’ needs will almost always backfire. 

Ultimately, if you want your program to drive a real impact across your organization, then you need to come up with thoughtful, empathetic gamification elements that align with both your business goals and your users’ needs.

Start creating gamified experiences with Colossyan

Building gamified experiences in the workplace isn’t cheap. When you start to factor in the development costs, you’ll begin to see just how much time, effort, and financial resources it takes to get these programs off the ground.

Fortunately, with AI video creation tools like Colossyan, this isn’t an issue.

Colossyan’s interactive video features make it easy for companies to create gamified video experiences for their teams at scale. Whether you want to create content for new sales training or employee onboarding, you can do it all with Colossyan.

Try Colossyan for free today or book a demo with our team to get started.