Uncomplicate – How to gamify employee experience
Uncomplicate by Freshworks brings you crisp and insightful videos which will focus on answering one tactical question around sales & marketing, support & collaboration, employee engagement, and growth.
Gamification is one of the most misunderstood words in the industry. The moment you say gamification, people immediately think it doesn’t apply to them, or relate it to lack of productivity. But there are many organisations which are successfully using gamification. We spoke to Sanjeev NC, product consultant with Freshworks, talking about how gamification can be a game-changer, pun intended.
Yukai-Chou, a leading gamification expert, defines gamification as human-focused design as opposed to function-focused design. In a function-focused world, processes and rules are defined for humans, who are expected to follow rules blindly, like machines. However, in a human-focused world the system accounts for an individual’s feelings, their motivation, and other core drivers to take action.
It is called gamification simply because the gaming industry was the first to master human-focused design.
When we look at gamification from an employee engagement context, it suffers even further. Organisations want to keep their employees motivated but don’t look at gamification as a viable option. You’ll often hear them saying “Oh, it won’t be taken seriously!” but I’d just say that they don’t understand gamification properly, or haven’t implemented it and seen how it can work.
Let’s look at an example. Anyone who has to travel for work loves the experiences they gain, but hate what comes after. Having to file for travel expenses is one of the most tedious and long-winded procedures to have to endure, right on the heels of a refreshing and productive business trip. But Google has managed to achieve 100% compliance in travel reimbursement thanks to gamification. Yukai-Chou explains this further in the book, which is clearly a must-read.
Most organisations also fail to understand that gamification doesn’t necessarily mean everything needs to be called out on a leaderboard. There are many implied gamification techniques that doesn’t make it so obvious.
If someone’s running around saying ‘I’m implementing gamification’, well – perhaps take a closer look! We’d love to hear if you’ve implemented gamification in any of your practices. Let us know in the comments below! And if you read about what Google did in order to achieve that 100% compliance, drop us a line about that too!
