Why Gamification in the Workplace Works (Ideas + Examples) in 2024

Updated: February 01, 2024

Gamification is becoming one of the best ways to motivate team building, job satisfaction, and personal growth.

Gamification in the workplace can be a great way to help teams work together better, as well as encourage employees to invest in their own development. Gamification can also be a great way to keep information fresh and information retention high.

If you have not used gamification in the workplace before, you probably are not sure how to use it to motivate your teams. There are many ways that you can use gamification to make the workplace more fun, and you can customize your gamification to meet any need.

Using tools like Scavify's gamification app and platform can help to make the process of gamifying the workplace very easy and much less stressful.

What is Gamification in the Workplace?

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

Workplace in the workplace can be used in a wide variety of ways. You can offer achievements and rewards to your employees for actions that you want to promote, and you can also use friendly competition to help motivate production and more. Gamification uses the rules and structure that make games fun to make learning and continuing development more engaging and effective.

Gamification accesses the reward center of the brain to make learning and working on skills more rewarding. Gamification can be based on a story, goal setting, or achievement based. Gamifying rewards the formation of good habits as well as knowledge retention. Gamifying the workplace adds game-like elements to workplace actions to make them more fun and memorable and to improve the employee experience.

1. Getting Started with Gamification in the Workplace

Gamifying the workplace can be easier than you might think.

While gamification may sound technical and complex, it's really quite simple conceptually. And layering in the incentives and motivators attributed to gamification often isn't all that challenging.

First, you'll want to identify the areas or programs where you think gamification could help motivate employees the most. Then, you'll want to look at the current processes or systems in place and find areas where you can layer in the various incentives and elements of gamification. Finally, just like any other update to a system or process, you'll want to roll it out and communicate the additions to the teams and team members involved.

There are many apps and platforms that can make gamifying processes in the workplace very simple, which makes the benefits of this strategy easily accessible for anyone wanting to benefit from its use.

2. Examples of Gamification in the Workplace

There are countless examples, ideas, and strategies to gamify the workplace with ease.

You don’t need to just deliver boring information to your staff and hope that they will read it. You can make the process of engaging in work culture education as well as continuing education much more enjoyable with the use of these kinds of tools. There is no reason that you shouldn’t reward your employees for making this commitment, and these kinds of gamification benefits can do just that.

Example #1: Points-based Rewards

Points-based rewards allow employees to save up points they earn from taking part in continuing education, teams-based work, and more. This allows employees to seek the rewards that will motivate them the most, and it also gives them some control over their well-being at work.

Example #2: Friendly Competition

Putting staff on teams and having the teams work together to “beat” one another can make work more fun, and it can motivate more production. Friendly competition can foster all kinds of gamification benefits in your workplace that you were not tapping into before.

Example #3: Story-based Learning using Rewards

People love video games because the activities that they are engaged in at any given moment are usually connected back to a broader mission or storyline of the game. Almost any learning curriculum can be enhanced to tie sections, chapters, or subjects to a broader mission or storyline. Add in some points, levels, and rewards and it can quickly start to feel like a learning adventure. Everyone loves adventures, and being on an adventure as you learn and earn rewards can make your work much more engaging and memorable.

4. Gamification for Employee Engagement

Engaging employees in the workplace is always an ongoing challenge.

No matter what role you're in at your company, you likely face the ever-present and critical effort to keep employees connected to the mission of the company, communicating with their team, and satisfied with the nature of their day-to-day tasks.

The elements of gamification can quickly boost engagement efforts and programs. Whether it's incentivizing surveys to increase feedback, motivating employees to participate in company-wide programs, or creating cross-team challenges to increase communication, you'll likely find that gamification is a reliable and effective strategy to achieve goals.

There are so many ways that you can access the benefits of gamification for employee engagement and their are many tools, apps, and platforms specifically designed for employee engagement that you should have no problem giving your programs as boost quickly.

5. Gamification in Training and Development

Training and development can be one of the areas that are the most stressful for staff.

Whether these employees are being onboarded or they have to learn new information for continuing education, it can be hard to make this kind of work fun. This is one of the best ways to use gamification to benefit your workplace and to help staff to feel more engaged with learning related to work.

There are so many apps that make this process easy, and there are also platforms that are built specifically to make your own custom teaching program. You can create the right training and development program that uses gamification much more easily than you might think.

These learning processes can often be done online or in person and be equally effective as well.

6. Gamification for Onboarding Employees

Strategy #1: Onboarding Journeys

Whether you choose explicitly frame it as such, onboarding is a journey for new hires. Consider embracing that and taking it a step further by connecting the bits and pieces of your onboarding into one cohesive journey.

Map out what the journey looks like at the outset. Remind employees of where they are in their journey to keep them motivated and engaged throughout. Continuously tie back their first 90 days to the core mission of their onboarding program.

This is one of the most effective ways to use gamification for the onboarding process. You will be able to keep your new staff engaged in the process as they follow the journey from start to finish.

Strategy #2: Milestones and Goal-based Onboarding

Goal-based onboarding is a great way to make sure that your new staff gets through the onboarding process without getting bored or discouraged.

Break the journey up into key milestones using time and/or subject matter as key delineators between milestones. For 90-day onboarding programs, you may consider weekly milestones with various daily goals inside those milestones. Or you may choose to use training in different tasks as key milestones for new hires.

Breaking the onboarding process up into digestible chunks that are interconnected will help new hires from feeling overwhelmed in a critical time for their success.

Strategy #3: Show Appreciation with Reward-based Onboarding

Rewards-based gamification can be really nice for new employees because it offers the chance to thank them for joining the company while also getting them caught up on the things they need to know about working at your company.

Small financial and non-financial rewards can be key motivators and reinforce that your care about the employee's performance and well-being. A coffee gift card, a fun t-shirt, or a tangible badge of achievement can be small but effective tokens of appreciation that can keep employee's motivated throughout their journey.

7. Gamification for Sales

Sales gamification can be really effective, and sales-based businesses use gamification all the time to promote goal setting and success.

Sales-type jobs are fundamentally based around competition, and friendly competition can help to make teams work better together and be more effective. Sales teams can also access gamification tools through some really excellent apps and sites that help to track sales performance and reward specific goals.

Sales jobs are also often really stressful, so making your employees happier every day can be very beneficial for so many reasons. Your teams will be much more effective if they are not stressed every day. There are so many ways that you can access gamification for sales-based work and make a big impact on the well-being of your employees.

8. Gamification for Marketing

Gamification for marketing is a great way to make consumers want to interact with your product on a regular basis.

This is the foundation for many apps these days because this tactic is so effective. You can encourage all kinds of behavior with gamification because the reward structure of this system helps with information retention and also helps to form new habits. Even small rewards can help to motivate interaction, which is usually essential for the success of products.

Gamification can also be used to create loyal customers by offering discounts and other perks for those who buy more than once in a while. Gamification also encourages specific behaviors in customers, and this can be just as valuable as motivating interaction that is consistent. Marketing leans heavily on gamification these days for all kinds of functions, and you will be missing out if you are not using this motivator for your business.

 

9. Gamification Apps and Platforms

1. Engagedly (Employee Performance)

This really fun HR-based tool offers you the right way to gamify employee performance and communication. Employees can see progress bars that tell them how they are progressing toward performance goals. Employees can also communicate with management through the tool, and management can see how employees are doing as they interact with information and goals within the platform.

2. Influitive (Customer Loyalty and Advocacy)

This tool allows customers to advocate for themselves as they provide customer reviews, and they are rewarded for their time and interactions. You can also use this tool to offer webinars and other interactive perks that can make people engage with your brand over and over again. Online reviews can often be delivered thoughtlessly, but this tool makes sure that a business can get real reviews that mean something and can take care of the customers that offer them.

3. Edapp (Online Teaching Courses)

This is one of the best learning platforms that gamifies interactions with the subject matter. It can be easy to build a custom teaching course on this platform, and you can use this tool for work-based learning as well as school-type learning. The templates on this site include quizzes and games, and more, which makes it simple to make your course perfect for your needs.

4. Scavify (Onboarding, Employee Engagement, Training)

Scavify can gamify all kinds of learning and business-based knowledge so that your employees have a great time as they develop new skills and learn to work together. Scavify is well-known for its scavenger hunts that can be hosted live or online, but there are so many other tools that Scavify can offer to create engagement with information that needs to be relayed and retained.

5. Raptivity (Participatory Learning)

Learning online doesn’t have to be boring or without personality. You can make an engaging and interactive learning experience with ease using Raptivity, and your staff or students will thank you for offering them this fun way to learn. Quizzes, games, flashcards, and more are offered on this platform, and you can create any kind of training program that you need with ease using the included templates.

6. Kahoot (Quick Quizzes)

Kahoot! is perfect if you need to create quick quizzes that are meant to reward employees and students who are working hard to learn new skills or create new habits. This is a really good option if you want to offer access to the benefits of this tool through a quality app as well. The analytics on this tool is excellent as well, and they can offer HR staff or teachers, and bosses lots of information about the interactions that users are having with the learning materials that they have created.

7. Qstream (MicroLearning)

This is the ideal tool to use to scale employee training, and it can make a big difference in the way that employees guide their own learning. Gamification is a huge part of the process of progressing within this tool, and there are leaderboards and comparisons that can help to foster friendly competition among staff or students. This is a really ideal choice for the workplace because it can help boost productivity, and it can also help to identify knowledge gaps that might be impacting work processes on a daily basis.

 

Gamification in the Workplace is Highly Effective

There are so many ways that gamification can be highly beneficial to your work teams. You can make learning new information fun, and you can make it easy for your staff to work on new skills without getting bored or frustrated. You will want to be sure that your staff doesn’t feel burdened by reinvesting in themselves and the company. This is one of the main reasons that gamification can be so helpful for companies.

If you are struggling to get your team of workers to reinvest in the company that they work for, gamification can be really helpful toward this goal. You can also make sure that you are offering staff the chance to make the most of their daily activities when they come to work through the use of gamification. Rewarding employees can help them to be committed to your company and to their own growth without feeling like they are being pressured to find time for activities in their busy days.