Marketers use gamification for different purposes, such as driving engagement, promoting users, increasing user lifetime value, and much more. Regarding the Human Resources field, gamification can be spotted at all levels in some way: from recruitment to onboarding to enhance engagement, motivation and productivity.
Let’s take a look…
Recruitment
Gamification can be a powerful tool regarding mass recruitment at large organizations. The creative part like screening candidates and leading the critical talents through the recruitment funnel falls on the recruiter’s shoulders. That’s when gamification comes into play.
Online and offline quizzes, for example, can help HR test candidates’ behaviour in work-related conditions and bring in more talents that want to compete.
Hackathons (virtual, internal, or interactive) reduce the interview cycle and select the suitable candidates offhand.
Lastly, points can also be used for recruitment. Collecting points is used for increasing the number of referral candidates from their colleagues. For instance, employees get points for each referred candidate that goes past the screening phase. Point after point, users will have the opportunity to spend their accumulated points on prizes.
Employee Onboarding
According to recent studies, employee onboarding is crucial for organizations. It improves retention rates by 82% and productivity by 70%, so organizations with weak onboarding are likely to lose new hires within the first year due to lack of engagement and socializing with company culture.
There are key elements to improve this stage, like mentorship and coaching to help new hires assimilate the culture and on-demand learning in the workplace.
Gamification mechanics such as points and rewards systems are useful to engage employees and increase their motivation and productivity. Points, badges, and rewards motivate employees to level up.
Employee Training
Several studies show that 83% of employees that train with gamification feel motivated. Gamification boosts seamless (and sometimes boring) training and keeps employees engaged, happy, and productive.
Gamification prepares employees for real-life work scenarios. For instance, McDonald’s created a VR-immersive replica of their restaurants to train managers to control the customer flow and maintain the current number of employees in the right place. McDonald’s achieved impressive numbers with this training experience, saving around £1,5 million on training costs of more than 50.000 employees. It’s also possible to boost seamless training through microlearning-based games. Microlearning is based on short training formats like quizzes, trivia, quests, educational videos, etc. With microlearning, it is possible to increase healthy competition through leaderboards, as Deloitte did, encourage leadership management and complete internal training courses.
Employee Engagement
Human Resources use gamification elements to boost user and employee engagement.
Typical gamified employee engagement techniques are games, challenges, quizzes, spin-to wins, and scratch cards. Point systems allow employees to exchange for rewards/prizes or even transfer to fellow employees. Collaborative tasks to boost networking and socializing can also increase employee engagement.
Compliance with Company’s Policy
Sometimes keeping up to date with the company’s rules and policies can sound a bit boring. Gamification can change the situation. Gamify your company’s policies to engage employees in training and make them comply with the company’s regulations.
Google did something similar years ago when Google employees forgot to submit their expenses after business trips. To fix this issue, the company implemented a gamification mechanic.
This mechanic helped Google reach the striking 100% of compliance with travel policy.
Gamification in a work environment isn’t purely about games, entertainment and having fun. This innovative approach helps Human Resources solve several core tasks, such as promoting a culture of continuous learning, improving recruitment processes, successful onboarding and so much more.
At InnoWave Group we care about how our employee’s engagement with the company’s initiatives. Gamifyou is helping our employees to better engage with our culture, values and processes through an app that rewards employees’ good actions such as participating in training sessions, sharing knowledge with their teams, or even participating in social responsibility initiatives.
And you? Are you already using gamification?
Gamification is the solution!
by André Gonçalves, Global People & Culture Director at InnoWave Group
