Use Gamification to transform your employees’ mentality!

Melina Politi is a foreign guest writer from Greece. I am very happy to introduce her to you through an interesting post she wrote especially for gamifier.com.

Gamification by nature is the element used to enhance game stickiness and engagement. In a colossal community, gamers compete against their friends while seeking for acknowledgement and recognition.

Gamification represents how science can be cleverly disguised in order to provide incentives for cultivating creativity, encouraging peer cooperation in an entertaining and at the same time competitive environment.

When talking about Gamification in a business oriented manner, most people think about using this technique for increasing consumer interest and commitment. It is true that gamification cleverly aligned with marketing and sales is meant to make customers engaged; as this approach maintains their interest in the ‘game’ alive by setting the right rewards, people feel satisfied and not misled. The optimal approach though is to combine gamification elements for enhancing both customer loyalty and employee efficiency.

In the enterprise environment, gamification elements should be used for making employees learn how to develop a dependable working attitude. The ultimate goal is productivity, advancement and achievement and not rivalry and winning. Through this process, the personnel can develop remarkably innovative concepts through crowdsourcing.

When setting up a new enterprise where processes have not yet been established it is much easier to develop a gamification friendly corporate culture. Once business goals are set, team leaders, CXOs or other managers should define a series of milestones to be achieved and rewards for the employees that demonstrate the highest productivity or best results or collaboration spirit!

For a newly founded company, it’s crucial that coworkers develop a long-standing vision. In essence the corporation’s personnel are expected to devote a great amount of time while keeping their motivation alive in order to accomplish business objectives. If people from different teams get together they have the chance to cooperate, share ideas, realize common purposes and with a small touch of game elements, the journey can be far more fascinating and appealing.

This wonderful experience is a result of how Game mechanics are used. Successful game mechanics should be able to entice humans through inherent motivations such as status, sense of satisfaction or even tangible rewards such as bonuses.

In the direction of implementing successful gamification techniques in the enterprise, the management should primarily focus on classifying the different employees within the company into segments. This would facilitate the identification of inducements to be offered to each segment so as to make them take the challenge and prove they are more efficient and capable than the rest of their community.

Corporate goals aimed to be achieved through teamwork should be well accepted by every member. In order for this to happen each employee should acknowledge his position and duties and most definitely should learn how to identify and respect the needs of other group members. They should see their colleagues as companions and not as competitors, otherwise the there will hardly ever be a healthy cooperation with a very productive outcome.

In terms of gamifying internal processes and making people work together and not against each other for the corporation’s best interest, it is crucial to make them feel like a group.

How can you do that?

Give them space to express themselves. Apart from professionals, employees are also individuals with interests, likes, peculiarities. Provide them a corporate social network, blog or some room in general to get to know each other and learn to like and value each other. Perhaps they could even find more common ground apart from work related issues. Most importantly, through conversation in a relaxed atmosphere, there is great possibility for business matters to be discussed with open mind and clear head.

Make division and overall corporate vision and goals visible to everyone. How to apply gamification when the majority of the staff isn’t aware of what it is supposed to achieve? Different teams or even different members within the same team receive partial and diverse information about the scope of projects or corporate strategy. It is absolute need to cultivate it to the personnel’s morale prior to even thinking about game mechanics or gamification of business.

Share corporate culture and make individuals feel they belong to a community.

Use social networks to highlight important moments that teamwork thrives! Everyone needs a good old times reminder once in a while and social networks are the place to praise your employees. Everyone can see it; including customers and they would feel rewarded as a group.

When such a mentality is existent among employees, gamification techniques can be utilized with immense success.

In gamifying the business management should be very careful in setting timeframes and goals, because they wouldn’t want all these elaborate new processes to backfire. Employees should have clear objectives to fulfill and they should be rewarded instantly after they productively finish each task. Otherwise, there is a high risk of turning once motivated groups of employees into indifferent individuals.

The major evident issues in gamification plans in an enterprise level are whether it will be able to resonate with corporate culture and to grasp employee mentality.

The inspiration of altering business practices so that the people associated with them, find them more fundamentally gratifying, could really transform the enterprise.

How can you make the difference and inspire your people?

Melina Politi, Business Development at LazyLand, is active in the process of creating long-term value for an organization. Exhibiting a degree of competence in many different areas such as, marketing, customer care, operations and management with the aim to identify and capitalize on growth opportunities.

LinkedIn: httpss://www.linkedin.com/in/melinapoliti