When LiveOps, a cloud-based contact center solutions company, needed to improve employee’s motivation, they turned to Rajat Paharia, widely recognized as the father of gamification.
He came up with the solution: gamifying employee’s activities to engage them in their work and decrease their turnover rate. He created an app whereby employees earned rewards based on their speed in completing customer service calls, the number of calls they take or the level of customer satisfaction. It had an 80% participation rate in the first week, and participating agents outperformed no-users by 23% in their call metrics and boosted customer satisfaction by 9%.
This case shows that gamification can improve productivity by making work more enjoyable, fun and rewarding. Cause staff who enjoy their work perform better, work harder and stay longer.
This is not so easy though. By simply gamifying your strategies without a clear plan you won’t achieve these goals. In fact, all your efforts can go to waste just because of poor design. To ensure it is effective for you, gamification needs creativity, customization and meaning.
The most interesting thing about it is that it can be implemented in everyday work in so many ways. Within a company or at an individual level.
For example, you can use Trello for project management, and gamify it to make it fun, setting up the projects like levels-milestones. When you hit a milestone, you unlock the next level. With Trello, there are fun programs like Get Badges, that feature badge designs that are set in place to help get tasks accomplished. Another gamification app is Habitca. It turns life into a role-playing game and allows you to set daily tasks, to-do lists and habits to be rewarded.
In the end, gamification isn’t just about playing. It’s about using our affinity for games to drive positive behavior into getting more done. Who said games were a waste of time?