Does Gamification Improve Employee Engagement?
Employee engagement has significant correlation with the key factors, such as absenteeism, turnover, safety incidents, quality, productivity, profitability, etc., that can directly impact the organization’s performance (“Gamifying Business” 3). By conducting a survey, Gallup found that, in United States, there are more than 70 percent of workers are “either not engaged or actively disengaged in their work (“Gamifying Business” 3).” Gallup indicated in its report that, in United States, the amount lost in productivity due to actively disengaged employees is approximately $450 billion to $550 billion per year (“Gamifying Business” 3). To improve employee engagement, organizations in various industries start to utilize gamification, which can stimulate employees’ motivation and improve their performance in workplace (“Gamifying Business” 2–3).
Based on the explanation in Cognizant report, gamification is not just creating entertaining games, but essentially means to integrate game elements into an organization’s existing operational procedures (“Gamifying Business” 2). Therefore, I think the gamification does not change the task itself, instead, it changes employees’ attitude toward the same task, converting negative feelings to positive outlook. As a result, applying gamification can help employees to sharpen skills, drive intrinsic motivation, improve performance and productivity, and enhance engagement (“Gamifying Business” 2). The ability of gamification in boosting employee engagement can be proved in several orientations.
First of all, gamification can improve employee collaboration (“Reinventing Customer” 5). Icebreakers, designed for helping people interact with each other in the team, can be a good example. Members in the team can be motivated to thoroughly know each other while feeling relax and immersing in the fun games; consequently, employee collaboration and cooperation can be enhanced. Because of known more about his colleagues, an employee knows who would be the right person to seek for help when dealing with specific problem (“Gamifying Business” 5). Secondly, gamification can solve the issue that employees are not engaged in the routine assignments (“Reinventing Customer” 6). Routine assignments are usually repetitive and tiring; however, organizations can mix some elements of entertainment, such as rewards, into these tasks for making them more interesting. For example, the motivation of an employee can be incentive based on his individual performance of specific tasks. He can be rewarded because of completing all paperwork without errors.
Besides these two orientations mentioned above, gamification also assist an organization in performance management (“Reinventing Customer” 6). A leaderboard, one type of gamification, is a good example and was mentioned in the report. Leaderboard can reveal each employee’s performance and clearly present the results within the organization in a pleasant way; therefore, an employee can easily keep track on the progress of his tasks, and his colleagues can provide suggestions and help when it is needed (“Reinventing Customer” 6). Moreover, the processes of new employee training can be helped by gamification as well. During the onboarding stage, an organization can leverage gamification when they hold the training session for new hires (“Gamifying Business” 4). Sitzman’s research showed that novices’ training outcomes can be enhanced by using competition-formatted training sessions (qtd. in “Gamifying Business” 4). Furthermore, gamification can stimulate employees’ creativities and innovation, and contribute to the organization’s product development (“Reinventing Customer” 8). By using gamification, an organization creates a flexible and comfortable working sphere for the employees; subsequently, the employees could be inspired by gamification, generate more creative, feasible and unique ideas and be willing to explore new areas of study (“Reinventing Customer” 8).
There is a trend that more organizations will use gamification as one of their primary management strategies. Gartner predicts that, by 2015, there will be more than 40 percent of the Global 1000 utilizing gamification to enhance employee engagement (“Gamifying Business” 3). Overall, by using gamification, an organization can help its employees work on their tasks efficiently and effectively while subconsciously immersing in the games with positive attitude. Gamification can allow an organization to capture its employees’ nature of competition and stimulate their intrinsic motivation on finishing tasks or dealing with undesired changes; accordingly, employee engagement can be boosted.
Bibliography
Cognizant Reports. “Gamifying Business to Drive Employee Engagement and Performance.” September 2013.
Cognizant 20–20 Insights. “Reinventing Customer, Employee Engagement Through Gamification.” April 2013.
