Inspiring A Healthier And More Productive Work Culture

How gamification can do that

Everyone loves playing games. Games grip the world and understanding why can offer fascinating insights that can make our lives happier, more fun, and more fulfilling. What if we could replicate the thrill of scoring a last-minute winner in a football match, beating your whole family at Scrabble, or emerging triumphant on Fortnite’s battle royale – and apply it to the real world? What if workplaces could tap into our natural competitive streaks to encourage us to feel like we’re momentarily on top of the world?

Gamification – the application of gaming principles in non-game contexts – can do just that in the workplace, especially when allied to sophisticated technological methods. Gamification can personalize the workplace, tailoring performance indicators to each individual employee, stimulating engagement between colleagues, and rewarding healthy and positive behaviour.

We know that people don’t do what they need; they do what feels good to them. That’s why people are more likely to play a computer game than to file their tax return – computer games are fun and enjoyable, whereas tax returns are just tedious. The games category in Apple’s App Store is the most popular, accounting for almost a quarter of all downloads, more than education, lifestyle, and health apps combined. Games are effective because of two key concepts: control and creativity. On the one hand, games reinforce our feeling of control. There are rules, structure, and a clear premise. On the other hand, they engage our imaginations and spur us to think creatively. 

These principles can and should be applied to the workplace, especially today, when technology is at the heart of everything we do. Not only games, but also social interactions, shopping, and banking – virtually everything can be done digitally. HR is no exception to this rule, and gamified, app-based employee incentive platforms can help to personalise the workplace, offering employees perks and benefits according to what best suits their needs.

For instance, employee apps can reward workers for putting time and effort into wellness activities, and use the data they collect to benefit the user. An app can record whether someone has taken a 20-minute walk at lunchtime, which we should all be doing rather than staying glued to our desks, and convert that ‘achievement’ into a personalised reward. We can take this principle even further and drive up workplace performance through game-style challenges and tasks – whereby reaching goals or taking professional courses are seen through the lens of ‘levelling up’ with a clear reward of reaching the next level. By embracing gamification in these contexts, employees will be happier, healthier and far more productive, creating a win-win across the board.

A gamified experience drives higher levels of engagement. It’s not enough simply to create an employee app; instead, employers must provide an app that employees love. In a successful model, a significant majority of employees at a company will have downloaded their app, around half will use it at least once per month, and up to a quarter will use it on a daily basis. There is no point having an employee app that workers download and immediately forget about; or, worse still, never download because they don’t consider it worthwhile.

A personalised app using gamification to reward healthy behaviour creates positive brand equity. Despite heavy spending on employee engagement (Deloitte forecasts that by 2021 the corporate wellbeing market in the U.S. alone will reach $11.3 billion), according to research carried out by Gallup only 13% of employees actually engage with employers’ programmes and schemes.

The reason why most engagement efforts fall short is because they are designed to cultivate commitment in a generic way. Naturally, a company where most employees are in their 20s and 30s should offer different benefits to a company where the age range is more diverse. A company based in London is different to a company based in North Wales. One-size-fits-all solutions are out of touch with the reality that every business has a different ethos and workforces have different demographics.

Instead of providing generic, catch-all options, enterprises would benefit from taking into account that when employees can interact positively with services their HR managers provide for them, they are more likely to feel that their employer cares about them and values their wellbeing. People respond better to personalised solutions, which in itself is a key component of gamification.

People enjoy games because they feel as though they can determine the outcome through their own capabilities alone. In a football management sim, your favourite team is dependent only on your tactical prowess, and so – in theory at least – you can engineer an outcome far more favourable than what your players’ real-life counterparts can achieve on the pitch. The same is true in the workplace. People want to be able to control which benefits they can receive and how they go about accessing them. Products need to feel relevant to each employee’s personality.

As a teenager, I spent a lot of time – probably too much time – playing the fantasy multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft. In the game’s parallel universe, players are always striving to level up, improve themselves and progress further. Moreover, in order to complete missions, you have to cooperate with other players and build relationships with them. These keys to success aren’t so far removed from real-world settings. You can’t go it alone at work, and managers want to see employees grow into better versions of themselves. Making work into a game is the natural thing to do if we are to see coming into the office as closer to starting a new round of Candy Crush than downloading forms from the HMRC website.