HOW GAMIFICATION IS CHANGING THE WORKFORCE

In the dynamic modern economy, business conditions change overnight and what worked today may not work tomorrow. That’s why it has never been more important for companies to be agile, flexible and willing to implement decisive action when required.

However, you can’t achieve that without strong employee engagement. According to Gartner, 70 per cent of business transformation efforts fail due to lack of engagement.

That’s particularly bad news for Australian companies with employee engagement rates in this country falling below the global average. Aon Hewitt’s 2017 Trends in Global Employee Engagement Study suggests that less than 63% of Australian employees feel engaged at work. That means almost 40% of your people are feeling disengaged from their jobs right now.

However, gamification may hold the solution to our poor employee engagement rates. A report by the Pew Research Centre revealed that 53% of more than 1,000 interviewed internet experts believe there will be significant advances in the usage and adoption of gamification in the workplace by 2020.

The mechanics of gamification

So what exactly is gamification? Gamification essentially applies game mechanics to existing work processes. It draws on psychological techniques that video game designers have long used to engage players and uses them in a business setting.

Such techniques include giving players – or employees – an immediate response to their actions, setting simple short-term goals or ‘missions’ that players must achieve, and providing evidence of players’ accomplishments through a scoring system that’s often linked to a rewards program. Read more

Ruth Mackay - Dynamic Business - 8 Jan 2018