Maximizing productivity is typically high on a business owner’s to-do list. The problem is that managers often can’t find a way to motivate their people to do more effectively. One proven way to get more from your staff is to use gamification in business.
Let’s take a look at the practice.
Gamification of Business Tasks
Parents widely use gamification to convince children to cooperate on things that may not be in their best interests. As a business owner or decision maker, your employees come to work with their own expectations. To enhance those expectations, gamifying tasks may be just what your business needs to take operations to the next level.
The psychology of gamification is that it makes even trivial tasks seem important by presenting them as a competition. If this doesn’t sound realistic, consider the concept of “employee of the month.”
Why Gamification is Effective
Human psychology is a big part of why gamification has an impact. Certain desires strongly motivate human beings as a species, namely:
- Recognition – I want my efforts to be paid attention to.
- Competition – I want to win.
- Distinction – I want to be rewarded for my efforts.
Inherently, most tasks at work don’t carry anything but negative feedback. By gamifying even the most menial task, it injects fulfillment capability.
Employees will be more driven if they a) think they are competing against their work “rivals” and b) if they think they can get the recognition of being superior. As long as the incentives continue, you can expect these workers to be more driven to accomplish better work than without those incentives.
Adopting Gamification
If you are considering gamifying your more rote tasks, you have a lot of options in which to do so. Sure, different tasks, different workflows, and different industries will have different things they can do to jazz up workplace competition, but choosing how to accomplish this (i.e., what the game is) and what incentives there will be as rewards are all up to you.
Do you think that gamification will work for you?
Leave your thoughts and suggestions in the comments section below.
