Gamification is a great tool when it’s used properly. But when it’s not it can just seem like a gimmick meaning companies aren’t seeing the best results from it. Using gamification in an enterprise is actually one of the most effective ways to engage and train your staff, have a look at some of the stats below:

Success stats

Omnicare introduced gamification to their IT service desk and saw 100% usage rates across the entire team.
CaLLogix reduced attrition by 50% and absences by 80%. They have saved $380,000 every single year.
Spotify and Living Social replaced annual reviews with a gamified solution with over 90% of employees participating voluntarily.
Deloitte training programs that are gamified took 50% less time to complete and massively improved longterm engagement.
Virgin Media gamified their learning and found that 65% of employees were voluntarily playing in their own time and 97.5% of employees like or love the gamification app. They also saw an increase of 7.4% in their knowledge rating from customers in just three months. Along with a month-over-month 2.2% average increase in sales.
Ford Canada gamified its learning portal for employees and increased actions per user by 100% within 5 weeks.
Engine Yard increased the response rate for its customer service representatives by 40% after posting response-time leaders to all employees.

8 of the most important best practice tips

As you can see gamification is incredibly effective when used the right way. Discover our tips to remember when you deploy a gamification solution in your business.

#1 Give your staff a reason to play

A lot of people think that because gamification is a game, employees will always want to play it. But just simply having a game isn’t good enough. You need to give them a reason to want to play as well. The reason could be prizes, a leaderboard so they can beat their colleagues, a storyline so that they want to get to the next phase in the story plot, or perhaps to be considered for a promotion you have to have completed all of the gamification modules. Whatever you choose will have a knock-on effect as to how much your staff engage with the learning solution.

#2 Leaderboards are essential

As mentioned above leaderboards are essential for motivating employees. They give users something to aim for and show them what the benchmark scores are. They are also a status symbol for employees, everyone wants to win and no one wants to be the loser on the bottom of the leaderboard.

Tips for the most effective leaderboards:

Make sure that employees can have their photo which shows up on the leaderboard.
Show their name, their team, their percentage for how many questions they have attempted to answer and the number of points they have earned.
Allow for different filtering capabilities of the leader boards. Users should be able to filter to see a leaderboard of just their team, their area, everyone, this month, last month, this year, all time.

#3 Have a quick link to what prizes are on offer

As mentioned above you should offer spot prizes to keep engagement alive. But you should remind employees of what is on offer to win otherwise they’ll forget. Our app has a prize pot parcel on the home screen which takes users to a page where they can see which prizes are up for grabs.

#4 Make it quick

The reason why gamification has such high usage rates is that it’s quick and easy to fit a little learning into your day. We have stuck to 3 daily questions for employees to complete every day. This works well to ensure learning happens regularly.

#5 Allow for collaborative games

Along with the individual games you need to have challenges where employees can all play together. This promotes chats around any knowledge gaps. For example, having buzz sessions where a manager can be the question master, then employees can buzz in on their phone when they know the answer. These are perfect for when work is quiet and you want to strengthen employee knowledge around the weakest questions.

#6 Editing capabilities of the questions

The beauty of gamification is that it’s quick, easy and in the moment. You need to make sure that your questions can be edited right up until the day before they’re published. This means you can train employees about any last-minute news whenever you want to. Making your gamification app more responsive means you can easily support a new product launch, back up a health and safety initiative resulting from a poor audit or introduce new working practices.

#7 Report and refine

What use is learning if your users already know the answer? Your gamification solution should search for knowledge gaps so that those weaker areas of knowledge are repeated to strengthen learning in that particular area.

#8 Keep it simple

Complexity and gamification do NOT go hand in hand. The simpler the better, the best games are arcade types such as whack-a-mole, space invaders, catapult, shootouts etc. Your users should be thinking about the answers not how to actually play the game.

We hope you follow these tips to get the most out of your gamification solution.

For more information on an enterprise gamification solution send us a message here, call us on +44(0)1273 778289 or email us hi@oplift.io

8 tips to make sure your gamification solution actually gets results