Smart CIOs are encouraging the use of gamification within business applications to drive adoption and bring a B2C experience into their B2B offerings.
What is gamification?
Gamification is the application of game design principles in non-game environments. The goal is not to make a game, but to use the features of games that stimulate the desired user behavior.
Why bring gamification to the enterprise?
IT organizations can no longer assume that employees will use it just because they built an application. Over the past decade, the line between an employee’s professional and personal information systems has blurred dramatically. Especially in recent years and the previously unprecedented number of employees working from home have only accelerated this proposition.
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In our personal lives, we have come to have high expectations of the applications that we download and use on a daily basis. The Apple Store and Google Play have given users so many choices, the bar for user experience and engagement is set pretty high.
As these expectations spill over into employees’ digital expectations for their professional lives, gamification can be a powerful tool to increase adoption and drive results along a path to mastery. Taking advantage of a human-centric innate gameplay, gamification is a proven way to make technology and the work environment more attractive.
Steps for Implementing Gamification
If you’re ready to try gamification in your organization, these four steps will get you started.
Start with the end in mind
Make sure you have a clear understanding of the current business scenario. What is the friction point? What is the desired target result? Today, if employees are taking too long to complete onboarding and enroll in the benefits program, set new goals around that specific behavior—for example, your gamification mission could be to cut onboarding time in half.
Get to know your users
The success of any gamification effort depends on a clear understanding of the user. Is your user a customer support representative? Or maybe accounting and invoicing? It is important to identify everything about these users. Common people-centered research techniques such as interviews, surveys and people people will help. Game-specific research techniques such as the Bartle test can help measure the motivations of a particular team.
Apply game mechanics
Once you understand your mission, your users, and their motivations, you’ll want to create your core game loop. This means your game rules and the specific gamification elements you will be applying.
Start simple: the game mechanics relate directly to human psychology. As such, gamification elements fall into two categories: intrinsic and extrinsic. The former refers to those things that users do for their inherent pleasure or satisfaction, while the latter refers to tasks performed to reap specific rewards. The most successful examples of gamification are elements of both intrinsic and extrinsic motivators. Below you will find a number of specific examples of each.
Intrinsic drives:
- Autonomy
- Learning
- Mastery
- Curiosity
- Belonging to
Extrinsic Drivers:
- Points
- badges
- Milestones
- Rankings
- Competitions
Inspect and Adjust
It is important that stakeholders understand that gamification is not a project. It must be an ongoing program to succeed. That means starting small, capturing meaningful metrics, monitoring and continuously refining.
Third-party gamification platforms
If your organization is looking for help getting started with gamification, there are a number of sellers offering tools and platforms that can jump-start your efforts. When comparing in-market solutions, it is important to consider a number of factors.
| Factor | Considerations |
|---|---|
| Technology | Choose a platform that is technology independent so it can be deployed anywhere the company wants to integrate game mechanics. |
| Analytics | When done correctly, gamification is highly data-driven. Platforms must be able to provide comprehensive data points so that executors know what works and what doesn’t. |
| Secure | Make sure that all the tools you use for your gamification strategy support enterprise-level data encryption. |
| cooperative | There are legal and ethical issues that affect gamification in the business. The platform you choose must comply with employee privacy and protection laws in your country or region. |
| Customizable | Ultimately, you want to be able to implement different gamification strategies for different parts of your business. Look for flexible solutions that make it easy to tailor your program to your specific needs. |
Final Thoughts
In a highly competitive job market, the digital employee experience is high on the list of considerations that weigh on the modern CIO. With gamification, savvy CIOs can leverage the power of game mechanics as a means to effectively engage employees and drive behavior.
