Gamification is a growing business trend used to recruit, train and evaluate employees, as well as to increase organizational productivity. Before determining whether this makes sense for your practice, we should make clear the definition of gamification.

Gamification is designed to make an environment, process or task more like a game—employees or prospective employees are rewarded with badges or points, scores are tallied, players are ranked and achievement is recognized.

The basis is the belief that people repeat behaviors that offer positive reinforcement and that it represents a better approach to engage and motivate employees.

Why Gamification?

We see gamification played out in many ways, and it’s not simply with employees. Some well-known uses of gamification include Fitbit, which tracks activity with colorful charts and progress status, and Duolingo, the language-learning app that rewards level completion with badges or coins and uses humorous reminders to complete a course.

By making tasks fun and interesting, employees, customers and clients are more likely to stay engaged. This heightened engagement is likely to result in greater completion rates and higher levels of comprehension and retention of the material.

For employers, gamification can offer the benefits of reducing training time and expense, while increasing the effectiveness of that training. Moreover, such training content is more portable than training guides and manuals, which allows for anywhere, anytime access to such content for employees to reference when required.

One of the reasons gamification is so effective is because it can be made into a competitive exercise (e.g., leader boards that are team- or individual-oriented), which taps into employees’ competitive spirit and makes training more accountable.

There are caveats attached to gamification in the workplace, though. One big risk is the potential that it could demotivate workers by highlighting underachievers. And, done improperly (for instance, by making it too simplistic or overusing the approach), gamification can lose its effectiveness.

One final caveat—gamification won’t fix issues that result from poor management, inadequate staffing and bad employees. Those problems will require old-fashioned management leadership to address.

Please reference disclosures at: https://blog.americanportfolios.com/disclosures/