Make Work a Game with Gamification

Finding ways to maximize productivity is typically high on a business owner’s to-do list. The problem is that often managers can’t find a way to effectively motivate their people into doing more. One proven way to get more out of your staff is to gamify their tasks. Let’s take a look at the practice. 

Gamification of Business Tasks

Gamification is widely used in parenting to convince children to cooperate on things that may nor be in their best interests. As a business owner or decision maker, your employees come to work with their own expectations. To enhance those expectations, gamifying tasks may be just the thing your business needs to take operations to the next level. 

The psychology of gamification is that of making even trivial tasks seem important by presenting them as a competition. If this doesn’t sound realistic, consider the concept of “employee of the month.”

Why Gamification is Effective

Human psychology is a big part of why gamification has an impact. As a species, human beings tend to be strongly motivated by certain desires, namely:

• Recognition - I want my efforts to be paid attention to.
• Competition - I want to win.
• Distinction - I want to be rewarded for my efforts.

Inherently, most tasks at work don’t carry anything but negative feedback. By gamifying even the most menial task, it injects the capability of fulfillment. Employees will be more driven if they a) think they are competing against their work “rivals” and b) if they think they can get the recognition of being superior. As long as the incentives continue, you can expect that these workers will be more driven to accomplish better work than without those incentives. 

Adopting Gamification

If you are considering gamifying your more rote tasks, you have a lot of options in which to do so. Sure, different tasks, different workflows, and different industries will have different things they can do to jazz up workplace competition, but choosing how to accomplish this (i.e. what the game is), and what incentives there will be as rewards is all up to you.

Do you think that gamification will work for you? Leave your thoughts and suggestions in the comments section below.