The Pros and Cons of Gamifying Your Productivity

Productivity is the metric every business uses to determine the health of their business, how their employees are working, and how projects are being handled. Some organizations have found it helpful to gamify their productivity to incentivize efficient and thorough individual and team performance. Let’s take a look at gamification, why it is so effective as a strategy, and some of the pitfalls that it can cause. 

What is Gamification?

Gamification is essentially making a game out of your business. Obviously, it isn’t a game, but structuring elements of your business as one has shown to have a lot of benefits. Let’s go through some of the points of emphasis should you want to enact this strategy for your business.

Defining Goals

Gamification only works if you have a set of defined goals for your project team and individual employees. This means understanding what you need to get done. That’s not to say that you can’t gamify a more flexible process, but for starters you want to be able to have a measurable metric in which to set a points system.

The Points System

Gamifying your business is effectively creating a game out of work, and to do this right, you need to have a points system in place that quantifies the completion and successful resolution of certain tasks. This can be a challenge, as it has to be created by department, or even by task. 

Remember, this is a competition of sorts, but crossing over into different departments might be difficult. This is why you should gamify things that you ask all of your employees to do first. Things like cleaning their desk, completing training, or any easily measured metric.

Rewards

There is an issue here that has to be confronted early on in the process and that is what the “winners” are going to get. You have to understand, you don’t have to offer massive prizes for gamification to work. In fact, the more you offer, the more you are going to keep having to offer and it can put a strain on your business. Remember, this strategy is about improving competition between employees. A majority of employees will be amenable to your gamification efforts as over 70 percent of surveyed workers find better engagement inside of them. 

Track and Report

Gamification can bring a layer of fun to productivity, but it is a business and the point of business is to make money. For this reason, you will want to continue to track employee performance as you would. One problem that most businesses that try to gamify their workplace encounter is that they often only celebrate the top performers. Just because you have some employees that excel doesn’t mean that you don’t need the contributions from every employee. By continuing to know where your employees stand, the better your operations will ultimately be.

Gamification takes strategy, technology, and a dedication to keeping the workplace a fun place to be. If you would like help gamifying your operations, or if you are just kicking the tires at options that can help your business be more competitive, give us a call today at 301-571-5040.