Gamification, or making ordinary training practices into interactive employee games, is a popular trend sweeping offices throughout the nation. While there are proven benefits to gamification for sales training, such as making training fun and more memorable, it also has significant pitfalls, such as distracting your employees and reducing productivity. It’s up to you to compare the pros and cons before deciding if it’s the right course for your business.
Good: Better Employee Engagement
Gamification increases engagement for your employees. It’s no secret that almost every business can benefit from more energetic and determined workers. A 2013 Gallup poll revealed that as many as 70 percent of employees in the United States don’t feel engaged in their jobs.
LiveOps did a study about adding game elements to reward its employees. The single change actually shortened call times by as much as 15 percent, increased sales by 8 percent, and increased customer satisfaction by 9 percent.
Bad: It Can Be too Generic
If you don’t make the efforts to create a thoughtful and customized plan, you could actually be doing more harm than good. Generic enterprise gamification just slaps point systems and badges onto any process instead of putting emphasis onto the ones that matter. In fact, as much as 80 percent of gamification efforts will fail because of this.
Good: Encouraging Progress
Gamification also provides immediate signs of progress and achievement. Employees get many smaller rewards that help track their progress and show their rankings to colleagues and supervisors. This keeps them motivated to always move forward and strive for improvement.
Bad: Mandating Drains the Fun
The point of gamification is to encourage workers to play games and have fun. Forcing everyone to partake defeats the purpose. Unfortunately, many employers make this mistake and end up making their workers resent the changes that were supposed to make them happier.
Good: Filtering the Best Employees
A gamified workplace also allows the best and brightest employees to shine. The people who make the most progress will stand out. This opens up an entire new platform for recognition and can help businesses pick out good employees.
Bad: It Can Cause Discord
People are unavoidably competitive. Gamification creates an outlet for workers to try to cheat their way to the top. This can cause personal issues between employees as they try to scrabble toward progress and rewards.
There are disadvantages to gamification, of course, but with careful planning and implementation, it can be a vital tool for encouraging engagement in the workplace.
