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How Gamification Engages Employees in Transformation

Gamification relies on positive reinforcement by putting the spotlight on success, rather than focusing on those who aren’t succeeding. This makes gamification an effective tool for lowering resistance and motivating employees to invest in a transformation project.

Many companies are doing this to help employees change behaviors through an entertaining process. But how and why do games work as an engagement lever? And what results will companies get?

How Gamification Mechanisms Can Drive Your Company Transformation Project

Mobilizing your employees is the key for successful change, but this will only happen if they’re motivated. Games provide healthy competition among employees and teams and gets them more involved in the process.

While the social aspect is an important lever in gamification, so is the need for recognition. It’s the classic carrot or stick scenario: each person has a natural tendency to compare themselves to others and to seek recognition from their peers.

Just like with any game, there are several player profiles, each with different expectations: finish the game, explore it, enjoy a fun experience with other players, or play better than others and keep beating one’s personal best. You’ll have to identify what motivates employees at your company, and juxtapose that with a company culture that may be unsuitable, in order to set up effective and engaging solutions, that can be summarized as follows:

  • points = gratification
  • levels, progress bars = status
  • challenges = completion
  • badges = recognition
  • rankings = competition

Rewards play an important role and will be a key factor in the success of your project. Ask yourself: What really motivates employees? What do they expect to get out of the game? No matter what the reward (recognition from company, digital or tangible reward, etc.), the important thing is to find a win/win solution with employees that encourages them to fulfill the company’s strategic objectives.

While gamification has existed for several years, the rise of digital tools combined with advances in artificial intelligence have changed the way it can be used, particularly in a business setting.

How to Use Gamification for Your Company

Gamification can be used in many ways as part of a transformation project:

  • Encourage employees to adopt a new tool and drive usage of advanced features: User training activities provide initial adoption of new tools for a CRM, digital workplace, service management, ERP, etc. But soon after that, users become complacent and figure out the minimum amount of functionality they need in order to complete their day-to-day tasks. Now users only use this minimal set of features and fail to adopt the rest of the solution. Personalized engagement of the user community with gamification had been proven to move the needle. ​
  • Improve process compliance: Create emulation within the community with challenges targeted at improving KPIs​ related to key aspects such as Data Quality, Territory Management or Opportunity Qualification.
  • Improve employee productivity: Thanks to a time-boxed gamification, your company can motivate sales employees to be more efficient and highlight their progress.
  • Accelerate employee upskilling: Learning in a fun way allows employees to better assimilate information and do so in a more enjoyable way, based on reward systems.
  • Encourage knowledge sharing, develop team spirit and create healthy competition in order to promote a positive approach to transformation within the company.

Your ROI with Business Gamification

Companies are looking to capture business value from their transformation projects and employees want appropriate support for the change. Gamification offered by the InsideBoard Digital Success Platform is based on KPIs which enables you to motivate employees.

In practice, the company’s strategy is distilled into metrics. These provide individual and collective objectives which serve long-term engagement and motivation.

The platform enables the company to define, measure and share the project’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) which will drive actionable best practices. This will create motivation and sustain it over time.

A Few Real-Life Examples

While some customers have doubts at first (not enough time, doesn’t fit company’s culture…), this approach has been proven to work time and time again.

“Our sales teams are, by nature, very competitive. The competitive spirit is part of their DNA. By leveraging this desire to rank higher, this continuous need to improve, we increase user engagement significantly.”- Eleftherios Diamantidis, Marketing & Sales Trainer at Michelin

At Michelin, a multi-regional challenge on all the key performance indicators is organised every year in order to motivate sales people to quickly adopt the new processes on Salesforce. A global challenge was launched in the 21 countries, for the Mediterranean, Central European and Baltic regions (Poland, Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, etc.), resulting in a 95% CRM adoption rate in just six months.

We hear the same positive feedback from Orange, a global telecom provider, who went even further by setting up flash challenges every 2 months around Key Performance Indicators. This challenge reflects the business priorities of the time.

“We can definitely see the differences in outcomes between our active users and those who are not active in the challenge. So for us, it’s a proven engagement lever” – Margot Bauchère, Project & Change Manager at Orange.

As a proven engagement lever, gamification helps companies share a fun, positive approach to transformation and generate employee engagement in the transformation program. This ultimately leads to success and capturing the expected business value.