Because the professional landscape has shifted over the years, many of today’s top CEOs and managers are working to find solutions to improve employee engagement. There are countless employee engagement programs and strategies, but finding those which truly work for your organization isn’t always easy. No longer do old, stuffy business practices resonate with modern employees, which is why it’s essential to consider new tools to help you get the results you seek.
When figuring out how to motivate employees, consider the utility of gamification on your intranet. At its heart, intranet gamification takes elements that are typically found in gameplay (sports, video games, etc.) and applies them to business practices, thus injecting a bit of playful competition into the workday. This strategy uses ideas and concepts that just about everyone can relate to … and quite simply, it works.
How to Motivate Employees with Intranet Gamification — 5 Huge Benefits
Once you see gamification in action, it becomes clear just how beneficial it can be in motivating employees and increasing employee engagement. It can take time to find intranet gamification strategies that work for you and your staff, but once you do, you can expect your company to benefit from the following:
1. Streamlined Problem-Solving
The ability to solve problems in an efficient manner can often mean the difference between a company that succeeds and one that does not. Whether it’s meeting customers’ needs, working out a bug, or developing a new product, today’s businesses are constantly finding themselves up against issues that can seem impossible to overcome. Intranet gamification gives employees the incentive they often need to find solutions to problems.
2. Intellectual Stimulation
There’s a reason why so many people relate to playing games, and it often comes down to gameplay being intellectually stimulating. You need to keep your mind sharp when doing work and completing tasks, and this is where gamification comes into play. If you can make any type of work feel more like a game, there’s a good chance you’ll see an uptick in employee engagement and performance.
3. Easier Onboarding
You may not realize the many ways you can apply intranet gamification to your business. Sure, it can be used to increase sales and for other similar reasons, but it can also be a useful tool for onboarding new employees. Intranet training can sometimes be mundane for everyone involved. Turning it into a game makes training not only more effective, but far more tolerable as well. If you’ve experienced difficulty with onboarding new employees in the past, you may want to give gamification a try.
4. Stronger Connection Between Employees
Collaboration is an essential aspect of modern day business, yet it won’t work when people don’t understand how crucial it is. Team-based gamification is one of the best tools available to foster stronger relationships between employees, as it tasks staff members with embracing the concept of collaboration even if they aren’t entirely comfortable with it. The result is a more productive, tight-knit workforce in almost every circumstance.
5. Higher Profits
As intranet gamification becomes more popular, it’s important to isolate areas where it’s being used the most … and sales tops the list. Gamification is an excellent tool for increasing the potential of a sales team, especially if you structure things to allow those who truly excel at sales to gain the recognition they deserve. A better sales team means higher profits for your organization, and no business owner should ever have a reason to turn down such an excellent opportunity for growth.
How to Motivate Employees with Communifire and its Intranet Gamification Features
Communifire is one of the leading examples of forward-thinking social intranet software, providing a number of tools that help businesses improve employee engagement levels, motivate employees, and streamline problem-solving for modern teams. A community platform can only be successful if it facilitates a great deal of daily activity among members, which is where gamification comes in.
Communifire features a points and badge system that’s designed to make intranet gamification easy and powerful when fully embraced.
There are a number of ways to use Communifire as a tool for intranet gamification, including the following.
- You can define and easily edit Communifire’s points and badge system, assigning specific rewards for such activities as creating blog posts, forum topics, photo comments, and more.
- Activities can be given priority, letting members know which need to be completed the soonest and carry the most weight in terms of points and badges.
- As users begin to accumulate points and badges, they’ll effectively “level-up” and gain new rankings, such as “seasoned member,” “senior member” and “pro.”
- Every detail can be tweaked to your liking, allowing you to customize Communifire’s intranet gamification system to meet the needs of your organization.
Key Tips for Incorporating Intranet Gamification into the Workday
As with any other tool to help improve employee engagement and motivation, hitting a stride with intranet gamification isn’t typically something that happens overnight. It’s always important to expect a bit of trial and error when introducing the concept of gamification to your staff, but if you put in the right amount of effort, you’ll quickly find a strategy that works for your organization.
When setting out to incorporate gamification into the workday, keep the following tips top-of-mind:
1. Identify an “Endgame”
Before you put any type of strategy to work, it’s important to identify exactly what it is you’re looking to gain from embracing intarnet gamification. Most managers look to gamification to solve the problems associated with productivity and employee motivation, but if you don’t set-out to achieve a tangible goal, you’ll never feel fulfilled. Try to quantify the results after a number of weeks or months have gone by, as this will show you how effective your strategies are in real-time.
2. Focus on Behavioral Changes
If there’s one thing that makes intranet gamification a truly powerful tool in business, it’s that it can change an employee’s behavior to better suit your collaborative organization. Some employees tend to isolate themselves and prefer to work alone, for example. Managers hoping to make these individuals more open to team collaboration can implement gamification strategies … and it often turns out to be an effective way to facilitate positive change.
3. Spot Areas that Lack Attention
One way to approach gamification is to to increase an employee’s interest in an area that may currently be lacking attention. There are a host of mundane tasks that, while necessary, many people simply don’t want to do. “Gamifying” these and other tasks can be a great way to ensure that they don’t get overlooked, not to mention add a bit of flair to responsibilities that tend to be boring in nature.
4. Give Context
It can be easy to implement intranet gamification without actually giving any context to your employees, which is one of the most important things to avoid before getting started. Explaining why staff members earn points for carrying-out specific actions and detailing the beneficial effects will help your employees make sense of gamification as a whole. After all, any time you simply jump into something without first giving a bit of background, issues can be expected to result.
5. Use Gamification for Onboarding New Employees
Whenever someone starts a new job, feelings of anxiety can be overwhelming. You can add a playful element to learning the ropes by using intranet gamification as part of the onboarding process. Each time a new employee reads a piece of documentation, he or she can check this off their list and gain points for completing the activity. There are countless other ways to use gamification during the onboarding process, so don’t hesitate to get creative.
6. Offer Thoughtful Rewards
In situations where you plan to give out actual rewards to employees, it’s important to be mindful of what they’re actually interested in. No one wants to receive a $20 coffee card as a prize if they don’t drink caffeine, and there’s truly no such thing as a one-size-fits-all reward. By taking into consideration the interests of each member of your social community, you can inject a bit of personality into the rewards you offer, which will improve employee engagement even further.
In Conclusion
The great thing about intranet gamification is that it offers so many opportunities to organizations that are looking to embrace it as an employee engagement strategy … or to boost productivity and countless other aspects of daily business. Let Communifire serve as the vehicle for “gamifying” your business’s social community, and watch as the benefits burst through the floodgates.
