12 Reasons Gamification Badges will Motivate your Team + Examples in 2024

Updated: February 01, 2024

Gamification can make a huge and beneficial impact on your teams of employees.

So many apps and programs that everyone uses each day are gamified now. This is a familiar means of motivating people to engage with learning, new skills, and group culture that you can use for your workplace to create a positive change for everyone.

One of the best ways to make these improvements is to offer up gamification badges. These little motivational devices will help keep people working toward their goals all year long. You can promote all kinds of positive choices for your students or employees with gamification badges.

What is Gamification?

Gamification applies strategic game mechanics (points, rewards, leaderboards) to increase engagement and motivate behavior in the workplace.

Gamification is a process by which learning is fostered through the use of a game-based objective setting. If you have ever played a video game, you know that there are many stages to games, and you will win awards based on the completion of objectives within the game. These might be a more central aspect of games that are based on learning objectives, but even story-based games offer objective-based successes to participants. When you can achieve success along the way to a major objective, you are much more motivated to finish the large goal.

This is the main impetus for moving gamification into places like the workplace. Being able to foster fun and a sense of completion of goals to daily tasks can make all the difference in the way that students or employees experience task completion. Gamification taps into the reward center in the brain and makes learning information more fun and meaningful. Gamification can also help with retention and comprehension of the material at hand.

Designing learning materials to work like a game can be a great way to keep these learning experiences fresh and fun, and more rewarding for all involved.

What Are Gamification Badges?

Gamification badges are small (digital or physical) tokens of achievement that represent the successful completion of activities or milestones.

Gamification badges can be awarded for all kinds of different actions. You might want to use them as physical badges that can be hung up in cubicles or public notice boards, or you could be using an online format for your learning and continuing education processes. These badges are often placed on people’s online profiles when using an app or a learning site.

Reasons Gamification Badges Will Motivate Your Team

1. Promote Unique Achievement Recognition

These rewards can be personalized for your unique needs, and they might be awarded for all kinds of different achievements that you want your teams to push hard for. Gamification badges are quite common when you use apps that teach skills like new languages, and they can be really common in video games as well.

2. Access the Reward Center of the Brain

Gamification badges tap into the reward center in the brain, and they help to make large or complex topics easy to digest and break down into stages of learning. Being able to easily win some praise for your efforts is central to the benefit that gamification badges offer. Anyone who has played a video game or who has participated in an organization like boy or girl scouts understands the power of badges as motivators for greater efforts and daily practice.

3. Badges Encourage Daily Engagement

Many apps that are meant to teach or train better habits use gamification badges to help encourage connection to the material and daily engagement. You want your students or staff to think about the information that they have learned on a daily basis or to connect with learning frequently, and gamification badges can make this process easy to foster.

4. Badges are just Plain Fun for Teams

Learning should be fun, and gamification badges make the process of learning really interesting and fun. Everyone loves games and gamification offers this benefit to the learning process.

5. Badges Showcase Recognition

It can be hard to thank your teams often enough to make them feel recognized for their efforts. Gamification badges can offer this recognition in a public way that is very rewarding.

6. Display Physically or Virtually to Connect Teams

Whether you are using an app or you are making physical badges, your employees or staff can display their achievements when they win gamification badges.

7. Smaller, More Frequent Recognition

Tough subject matter or large chunks of information are easily digested when broken down into simple-to-access lessons. Rewarding these efforts with a gamification badge can be a great idea.

8. Friendly Competition for Badges

If you want to foster fun competition among teams, you can easily do so with these badges.

9. Remind Teams to Make it Fun

For adults who participated in things like boy scouts, revisiting reward badges can be a really fun and nostalgic way to benefit from learning.

10. Turn Boring into Playful

Gamification badges tap into the feel-good part of the brain, and this can help to make the process of learning feel really positive rather than boring.

11. Foster Daily Interaction

If you need your teams of staff or students to work on skills on a daily basis, gamification badges will foster the desire to engage regularly in learning materials.

12. Connect Teams to Your Company Culture

If you want to connect the learning journey that your employees or students are on with a story, you can easily make your gamification badges fit into your story.

How to Make Gamification Badges

Gamification badges are often part of the app or site that you are using if you are not making your own training materials and game system from scratch.

However, you may have some options to get to make your own badges in many cases. This can be an awesome opportunity to personalize badges to fit your company's culture, branding, or values.

If you are giving physical badges, you can make these items out of any material that you want in most cases. You can make pins, something that hangs on the wall, or an item that stands up for display. Consider platforms like Etsy for custom badges.

Alternatively, you can hire a designer or have your in-house design team to create some digital badges for your program. When digital badges are used, you will typically be able to modify all kinds of things about the badges that are used for your particular needs.

Gamification Badge Examples

There are many kinds of gamification badges that you can use for your needs with various kinds of teaching in mind. Make sure that you are using badges that work well with the topic that is being taught or trained on. You might not be able to make fancy badges with your system of choice or on your own, but you can still make sure that the award is named properly to match the topic being taught or refreshed.

Check out some of these highly creative badges for inspiration.

Here are some examples and ideas to get the wheels turning if you're interested in creating your own badges for your teams.

• Perfect Week
• Weekend Warrior
• Best Team Player
• Finished the Test
• Completion of Course
• Bronze
• Silver
• Gold

You can make any kind of badge that makes sense for your needs, and you can often make many badges for achievements that are outside the main coursework as well. This can help to make large and complex topics easy to digest and more relatable for people who are struggling to get through all the material. Motivation is the point of gamification, after all, and you can motivate your teams of staff or students to keep going if they can achieve perks along the way to bigger goals as well.

Types of Badges in Gamification

There are so many kinds of common gamification badges. You do not have to use all of these kinds of badges in your system of rewards, but there are benefits to using various kinds of badges to reward different actions by your students.

• Course Completion
• Team Player
• High Score
• Level Badges
• Points-Based Badges
• Generosity Badge
• Expert
• Novice
• Freelancer
• Extra-Credit

You can make as many badges as you wish, and you can make them as creative as you want them to be too. There is nothing stopping you from naming your badges silly things like animal types or anything else that your teams might enjoy. The point of gamification is for the process to be fun, so whatever makes it fun for teams or students to engage with the material is perfect for your badge names and types.

If you are providing gamification badges for a competitive environment, you can make your badges to be scaled based on points earned or some other metric that applies to all participants. These badges can then be used to foster friendly competition among people who are engaged in the learning process. If you do offer badges based on competition, make sure that you are also offering badges for individual achievement too. It can become frustrating to always be beaten by others and never win any badges, so you should be cautious about the way that you award badges that are based on competition.

Healthy competition can be really beneficial in some environments, but there are always areas where competition is not actually that healthy. Make sure that you consider carefully what kind of engagement you are trying to foster, and be sure that you are not discouraging anyone who is not that competitive by nature from being involved in the process.

If you are using a points-based system, you could even make badges that are based solely upon tiers of point earning. This is a common means to categorize success on many apps that train habits or teach skills, and these gamification badges still offer the same key benefits that more specific ones offer. You can use accumulated sums of points or smaller point achievements to award based on this model if you want to use a straightforward system.

Free Gamification Badges

If you are not sure what kinds of gamification badges you need to use for your teams or employees to reward their hard work, you need to check out these royalty free gamification badges.

No matter what other kinds of tools you want to use to promote a team effort and personal motivation at work or at school, be sure that you check out Scavify's gamification app and platform. Scavify can make your gamification plans much easier to execute, and your teams will have a ton of fun participating in the activities that Scavify makes possible in a variety of settings.