5 Ideas To Motivate Your Employees Through Gamification

3 min readFeb 21, 2022

Within organizations, gamification has taken on ever-increasing importance in recent years. Companies now use gamification to engage, train, reward, and retain employees when dealing with HR-related issues. The use of gamified concepts has begun to permeate real-world processes such as recruiting, training, and development. In recent years, Game-mechanics has become increasingly important in improving customer service, sales, and training.

GAMIFICATION: WHAT IS IT?

Gamification refers to applying game mechanics, behavioral elements, and design techniques outside of a gaming context. The idea is to spread essential elements from games, such as design, structure, rewards, and competition, to things that aren’t naturally games (e.g., buying tickets or completing work assignments) to drive engagement. Points, badges, and leaderboards have been the most commonly used game mechanics in gamified environments.
Despite its misleading name, Gamification entails more than just creating games for business purposes. Instead, it focuses on expanding the application of an already existing process or experience rather than creating something entirely new from scratch. Gamification is not synonymous with games. Nonetheless, gamification in the workplace can certainly be a gamechanger.

Gamification is best used in business if it incorporates the following components:

1. ONBOARDING

It is vital to engage and encourage new hires as much as possible. Your company should immediately make it apparent that it is a great place to work. Gamification of further hire training is a great way to achieve this goal.
Having fun at work will encourage them to do their best, and you’ll have better employees from the start. You can add a points system to training quizzes, have people play games instead of just taking tests, and so much more.

2. SALES

Many companies rely on sales development to succeed. Traditional sales training isn’t always as practical as it once was.
Gamification can reward individuals with points or pit them against each other in sales competitions, and the latter has been done for decades. Sales contests, competitions, and giveaways have been used to promote business and get their sales teams to improve and generate more profits.

3. COMPLIANCE

Compliance training is one of the most tedious and challenging training modules for any organization. Regulations, guidelines, laws, and other compliance-related issues are hardly fun to train on.
It is now possible to gamify training, for example, by creating safety games or having competitions to see who knows the new state laws in your industry best.

4. LEADERSHIP

Creative engagement is the key to leadership training. The best teachers lead by example. If you provide your leaders with fun, gamified ways to develop their skills and improve their abilities, they will also respond.
When you gamify their training and practice, you’re giving them exactly what they want: a sense of progress. Instead of just moving forward, people like to feel like they’re rising through the ranks. This area can even create games and competitive opportunities for departments to work together.

5. EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT

Employees of today desire engagement and the feeling of belonging. Especially in today’s highly remote world, having games and other fun ways of engaging can be helpful when building relationships and connecting your teams. In addition to simple training refreshers, game-based learning can also be used as a fun way to have a team-building event.

Those who are unfamiliar with the concept of gamification may find it intimidating. You’ll see that it’s just about making traditional learning a little more fun and engaging when you break it down.

This is more significant than ever for today’s employees and companies. This is one way to improve your company culture, whether by engaging remote teams in future training or enhancing your company’s training plan.

For more ideas and exciting discussions, head to my podcast, Figuring Out.