No matter what business or industry you find yourself within, one of the greatest issues managers and human resource professionals encounter “across the board” within their corporations is a lack of employee engagement – often-times for new company initiatives but also for routine tasks that can’t be measured for ROI, thus holding little “threat” or “promise” to motivate greater participation.
We can’t say we really blame employees for their lack of enthusiasm. Today’s work world is faster than ever before, with more workers managing multiple projects & tasks outside of their core skillset, as well as handling higher volumes of communications with clientele thanks to social media and email. Companies also are routinely trying to improve efficiencies with new tech systems – each one featuring a learning curve and battling against human nature’s resistance to change. “We’ve done it like this for five years – do we have to implement a new time tracking system now?”
Fortunately, at Designing Digitally, Inc. we’re finding that the adoption of serious games and the gamification of rote business processes can truly advance a company’s internal efficiencies. Indeed, gamification can take once-dreaded tasks and turn them into enjoyable experiences that employees actually like doing. And while the serious games we design are created specifically for each client using sophisticated programming and technology, stories like the one featured in this post on InsideView show that gamification can be social in nature as well as technological.
InsideView is a company offering CRM intelligence via “a suite of software solutions for sales and marketing leaders that delivers critical intelligence directly into CRM.” We found a blog post on their website that highlights some of the details of serious gaming for those new to the concept, as well as some of the stats and metrics involved with gamification. Most interestingly, InsideView details their own gamification experiment as they attempted to get more of the employees to use social media to promote the company and products.
As the blog post reports it, “Research shows that financial rewards for gamers is only one incentive and not even the primary factor that people play games. We saw this internally at InsideView when we wanted to drive social media adoption by the company. The only game mechanic we had to put in place was a monthly email that highlighted to most active employees on Twitter. The internal competition to be in First Place drove up the number of updates from employees 312%.”
Did you catch that statistic? An over-300% increase in social media tweets simply through the use of an email that listed the most active Twitter users – that’s pretty effective motivational success with very little expense involved, all through a gamification concept.
Another CRM-and-employee-motivational account of gamification success comes from the pages of DestinationCRM.com, the online presence of CRM Magazine. In an article on gamification strategies for motivating employees & customers, Kelly Liyakasa writes about the value of play for influencing behaviors in employees. Friendly competition, either against oneself or against peers, turns out to be a strong factor in the success of serious games for companies.
As Liyakasa explains, “Gamification can also be used to motivate employees. Pharmaceutical company Omnicare, which uses IT management cloud service ServiceNow, introduced gamification to improve its IT Service Desk operating model. ‘We had stories of twenty-minute hold times, and our abandonment rate was in the twenty-five to thirty percent mark,’ says Kim Liston, senior director of service delivery…What followed was the creation of an automated OmniQuest game, which included achievements, rewards (in the form of badges), and real-time feedback within the ServiceNow platform. It saw 100 percent participation from team members. Introducing game techniques into the enterprise can motivate employees to perform specific behaviors, but it can also improve morale and excitement around tasks, projects, and even job roles. ‘I was struck by [a comment] made by one of my overnight technicians,’ remarks Tim Deniston, help desk manager at Omnicare. ‘He said, 'Bossman, I'm so excited. Every night I come in, I can't wait to see what my badges are.' Competition is another thing that can come of this. You hear chatter like, 'I just leveled up for this particular badge.' It's very valuable. It gets people excited.’ "
Whether you’re striving to provide meaningful training experiences for employees or seeking to boost operational efficiencies involving large numbers of workers, serious games are an effective and engaging way to educate and motivate. If your company or corporation is looking for serious games development, you should probably talk to us. We’ve got an impressive client list that continues to grow, and we’d love to have you as part of our big, digital family.