You might be sick of the word gamification already, or you might be hearing it for the first time. A concept gaining more popularity by the day, gamification is the process of incorporating game-like features into a business to increase engagement. Just as people might be drawn to sports, crosswords, or video games, gamification can allow the same engagement to be be carried over to professional industries. Increasing motivation and the desire to improve, gamification is quickly becoming a new way to drive employee productivity and engagement in corporate fields.
But how could gamification be used in HR? We’re glad you asked.
Gamification can range in use all the way from talent attraction to onboarding to training to feedback. A tool especially useful for the new, increasingly Gen Z workforce, gamification could become the solution to feelings of isolation, lack of growth, and decreased motivation. By designing inclusive and fulfilling games to encourage healthy competition and a desire to improve, HR professionals can foster a better work environments for employees at all stages of their career.
Let’s take a look at how gamification works in recruitment, onboarding, training, and retention.
Recruitment
We’ve already gone over how ATS can be a life saver when it comes to reducing time spent on finding and attracting the best talent. But even then, HR professionals must come into play during the final stages of the process: choosing the best of the best, leading top talent through the final recruitment processes.
By including gamification as part of recruitment, HR professionals can get a better understanding of which candidates are most well suited to the company. Quizzes that can assess behavioural patterns, industry challenges that can showcase the talent’s field knowledge, and customised quests that can analyse the candidate’s fit within the company are all ways of using games to help HR make a better informed decision when hiring new candidates.
That’s not all, of course. Recruitment isn’t just tedious and boring for HR professionals, but for talent as well. By including games in the process, your business will stand out from the others by offering a fun application process to potential employees!
Onboarding
If you’ve been following our blog posts for a while, it must come as no surprise that a good onboarding system is the key to employee retention. By allowing new hires to integrate with their team and improve on their skills, businesses can foster a work environment that functions seamlessly without disruption. One way to make onboarding more fun for the new hire is to incorporate games into the system.
Allowing new hires to complete challenges and to earn points, businesses can foster a learning-oriented onboarding system in which new employees complete training at their own pace. And of course, if the stakes were always as high as being eaten by zombies or not, everyone would be motivated to complete onboarding games as efficiently as possible!
And if you have decided to opt for a points gamification system, you might want to assign rewards for certain numbers of points. Reached 15 badges? The option to work from home one day that week. Completed 10 levels within 3 days? A nice little head/shoulder massage from a professional. Because why not!
Training
Training, unfortunately, can still be seen as something that we all just have to do. But how do you stop training being a nuisance that most attendees won’t pay attention to, and make it into something that employees will be happy to participate in? Gamification, of course! Plus, think of all the times you ended up randomly remembering that battle from that century that was taught to you by that fun substitute teacher – we are simply more likely to retain information when we have fun while learning.
There is a way to gamify training for each budget. From VR headset experiences to weekly ‘pub quiz’ hours, training experiences can be made fun in many different ways. If you want to go all out, for example, consider having a virtual reality experience where employees deal with ‘real life’ scenarios in ‘real time.’ Assign rewards to the people who complete the task with no mishaps. Or, try having a weekly get together (perhaps on a Friday afternoon, with some beer) where you conduct quizzes and award experiences like paintball or movie tickets to the winning team.
If it wasn’t already clear, bonus points for making it a team building experience at the same time. Allow employee teams to participate in games together, assign themselves roles, and reap the benefits of each others’ success. Two birds with one stone!
Retention
Oh boy, where do we even begin. Employee retention is such a broad topic, with so many different facets and implications. You like your employees and you want to keep them, yes. But you also want them to be happy and to be committed to the business. And there are so many previous posts where we’ve dissected ways to go about employee retention, so for now we’ll just focus on gamification.
First up: Focus on employee wellness. This is where the previous gamification elements that you have put to use will come in handy. Why not make the points or badges earned by employees redeemable for self-care bundles or trips to a spa? Not only that, but gamification and competition in itself is a way to encourage employee wellbeing by fostering a team atmosphere and making the workplace more fun.
Next up: Employee productivity. Again, it’s quite easy to build preexisting gamification into the daily to-dos of your employees. Try finding games that will allow employees to choose their own workload, offering rewards for different milestones or leaderboard positions so that no one feels left out regardless of their pace. And, of course, don’t forget to give employees the option to opt out.
Another possibility is to have badges assigned for value and culture. This way, you can emphasise company values once again by rewarding employees who go above and beyond.
Including gamification in the 4 key areas of recruitment, onboarding, training, and retention can help your company become more attractive to current and potential talent by prioritizing employee learning and happiness while increasing motivation.