Employee experience gamification provides a unique way to boost engagement and improve all round performance across your entire workforce. Game mechanisms can be leveraged to influence behaviors, streamline processes, deepen connection, and deliver important information you want to embed. Our team of employee engagement experts has compiled a list of 5 powerful examples that you can use immediately to benefit from the power of gamification in and around your workplace.

Why Does Gamification Work?

The role of an employee is of course to help the company attain its goals. Employees are more likely to perform well when their workplace experience (whether ‘at the office’ or remote) meets their human needs. Conversely, if their work experience is all work and no play, employees can come to dread the time they spend working and performance will slide.

While ‘Fun’ is not specifically stated within Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Human Needs, perhaps it should be! Fun can deliver in all 3 of the uppermost layers of this renowned pyramid as it can positively impact our belonging, esteem and self-actualization needs. Gamification harnesses fun and engagement to create a highly beneficial stickiness for companies and organizations when it comes to employee experience. 

A playful work environment can also help contribute to a company’s bottom line – more than 80 percent of the employees at Fortune 100’s Best Companies To Work For claim that their workplaces are fun places to be. 

Eloops is here with 5 effective gamification examples that you can start incorporating today!

1. Adding Items To The Office Fridge Wish List

Goal: Make employees feel taken-care-of. Let them know they have a voice (& some choice!)

If your workplace has a kitchen or break room, post a QR code on the wall for your employees to scan. Have the code direct them to a “wishlist” of food & beverage items to choose from. 

Employees should be encouraged to pick whichever items would give them a physical or mental boost the next time they’re in the kitchen. These could be as simple as a specific brand of coffee, or more out-there requests like imported chocolates and artisan cheeses. Have fun with it!

Our customers use our pre-made “Office Kitchen Wishlist” on an ongoing basis to make it fun and easy for their employees to say what will make them happy, plus they earn virtual coins for participating and making their voice heard.

2. Follow Us On Instagram

Goal: Make sure everyone is in the loop and knows what’s going on between the company and its customers.

As soon as a new employee comes on board, ask them to follow your business on social media. They can follow your Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, or Instagram pages and stay updated on all your outward-facing company news. Simultaneously, they’ll be able to contribute their ideas and feedback there and share some love.

Companies that take care of their employees tend to care for their clients, and the public knows this. Having a buzzing social presence within which your employees celebrate their employer and take pride in what the organization is doing is vital.

We would like to share a top tip – your employees will be inclined to do this naturally, so the idea is to ask them in a fun way that doesn’t sound like it’s mandatory but instead suggests that it will be fun for them! 

3. Double Or Nothing Questions

Goal: Help employees know and remember what is important!

Your gamified platform can help your HR department and other parts of the company optimally guide behavioral, process and policy procedures. 

Using our pre-made “Double or Nothing” question format, our customers make it fun for employees to learn about what might be mundane but important processes and improve their ability to cooperate and get it right.

What might these be? A few examples of common problem areas that you could address:

• Reporting hours
• Dress code
• Inter-departmental requests
• Security processes
• Communication channels

Although you may tackle several things, the idea is to address one issue at a time. For example, “What should you do when you forget to punch in or out?”. In this ‘double or nothing’ scenario, if the employee answers correctly, they earn double the usual amount of virtual coins, and if they answer wrong, they get nothing — either way, they’re bound to remember the right answer!

4. Onboarding

Goal: Deliver a better experience when people join your organization. 

The onboarding process provides an excellent opportunity for gamification in the workplace. It helps employees integrate faster and have fun while doing it. They’ll quickly feel at home, and be eager to get on with their job.

Make our “Ask Your New Team” pre-made form part of your new hire welcome pack. This form features questions like “How many of your team members currently own pets?” or “Which team member has the most kids?” By gamifying elements of your onboarding process in this way, you encourage new hires to connect with their coworkers to get the answers – making them feel part of things from the start. 

Reward the new hires with virtual coins for each of the answers that they get right, and benefit from them getting to know each other in a way that creates deeper connection and helps foster stronger relationships for the longer term. 

5. Get To Know Our Supporting Team Members

Goal: Boost recognition for your people behind the scenes.

Introduce everyone to your support staff members, like the HR and IT departments or those who man the front desk or help desk, with fun quiz formats like True/False or guessing the right answers to ‘getting to know you’ questions that are about them as people as well as professionals.

This helps employees build stronger relationships with people they may interact with every day but don’t really know! And the ‘recognition’ works 2 ways, these staff members are rarely spotlighted yet they are essential to the smooth running of most enterprises.

The quiz questions should invite employees to learn interesting facts about their support-staff coworkers in addition to delivering important operational information. So as well as including  the practical like contact details and hours of availability, include something more personal such as: “What is the non-work-related subject that ‘X’ would most like to discuss the next time you talk?” with interesting answer options like: space, cooking, biking, or reality TV shows. Through fun quiz formats in which they make guesses then see the answers revealed, employees develop connections that lead to much richer interactions next time they encounter one another. 

You Can Start Leveraging Gamification For Employee Engagement Today

When your workforce is encouraged to interact more, and everyone gets to enjoy the fun of a gamified workplace, they’re likely to work better and to stay around longer. Use the examples of gamification that we’ve outlined above to build their eagerness to play their part in attaining your shared business goals. Gamification can help you to boost engagement and upgrade interactions around all the things that are important to you and your company. 

Eloops provides a gamified employee experience platform where you can create an engaging and entertaining environment for your employees. Would you like to talk with our employee experience experts to explore how you can gamify your employees’ experience for the best results? Book your demo today!