In recent years, there has been much discussion about the rapid growth of businesses and other organizations using “gamification” or the application of digital game design techniques to non-game contexts. Gamification helps to cut the boredom and induce a competitive spree among the employees and the users, enhancing processes’ output. These techniques are being used across a broad range of applications to achieve a variety of goals.
Human-Focused Design
Yu-Kai Chou, who has lectured at Stanford University and in Ted Talks, describes gamification as “Human-Focused Design,” a process to optimize for the human in the system by taking into account feelings, motivations, and engagement. In contrast, most systems are “Function-Focused Design,” designed for the system’s efficiency or to get the job done quickly. Not only that, gamification encourages the users to accomplish the tasks quickly with adherence to the required quality metrics as well. The gaming industry is centered on human-focused design because the purpose of the game is to entertain, which requires mastering motivation and engagement. The term gamification refers to the application of these techniques to productive situations beyond pure entertainment. This enhances speed, quality, participation and removes boredom by inculcating an element of intrinsic motivation in productive environments.
Increased Sales Productivity
Salespeople are often described as having a competitive nature. Sales managers employ game mechanics to motivate participation, engagement, and loyalty with sales teams, which is particularly effective when used with a sales acceleration platform’s data analytics, behavioral economics, and metrics. Contests, competitions, and leaderboards can be constructed around a number of different metrics inducing a competitive spirit among employees. Managers can use levels of achievement, goal setting, and rewards to drive the sales team’s motivation and engagement with the system and sustain the team’s engagement with customers and increase lead conversion.
Hewlett-Packard (“HP”) utilized gamification techniques to engage its resellers of several major product lines through an online platform called” Project Everest.” Each reseller had a profile with visual representations of avatars climbing the mountain, representing sales achievements, and integrated rewards schemes. Participating resellers could win prizes such as televisions and tablets. The grand prize for each of the target sales teams was the holiday of a lifetime. The project reportedly achieved a participation rate of 80 percent of resellers. The target goal was a 50 percent increase in revenue growth with the actual result being 56.4 percent.
Training and Education
Organizations have also used game mechanics as effective training and education tools. By way of example, Astra Zeneca, the large pharmaceutical multinational, used a game-based learning solution “Go To Jupiter,” to teach employees internally about new medicines. Agents earned points to reach a “stadium,” representing the official launch of medicine, where they would answer questions to gain other points and badges to improve their ranking. The goal was to educate agents on the release of new products, check real-time training results, and enhance team competition and cooperation. The results were that 97 percent of the agents used the solution, most outside of work hours, with 95 percent of users completing each training session.
Employee Recruitment
Price Waterhouse Cooper (“PWC”), the multinational accounting and financial services firm, used gamification techniques to improve employee recruitment in its Hungarian operations. Job candidates were spending very little time on the conventional PWC career website, and the firm wanted to improve the quality of the applicants. The company launched “Multipoly,” an online game in which job candidates could participate and work in teams to solve business problems of the type that would actually be encountered on the job at PWC. Candidates spent much more time engaged in the game than in visiting the conventional career website. The firm found that those participating in the game were much better prepared for the in-person interview with more knowledge about PWC, its culture and the services it offered, as well as about skills necessary for success. Upon being hired, they had an easier time acclimating to the company environment.
Game mechanics can be applied across a spectrum of real-life activities to achieve many different types of goals within a business environment. At its core, gamification centers on engaging and motivating people to certain behaviors; and has the capacity to enhance teamwork, build trust among people and encourage creativity.
Gamification removes the boredom and motivates employees, bringing a sense of achievement in what they are accomplishing. This extra sense of achievement induced by gamification helps in delivering better results and accomplish the tasks faster.
