How Gamification Transformed Employee Performance at Sun Life Global Solutions

Sun Life Global Solutions, a leading financial organization, transformed employee engagement and performance through the creation of the G.A.M.E. (Gamified Achievement, Microlearning, and Engagement) Club, a community of frontline team leaders dedicated to optimizing the Centrical platform and creating innovative game-based learning missions. The initiative led to impressive business results, earning the company the Gamechanger Award at the 2025 Centrical SELECT Awards. 

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We spoke with Kshitij Kohli, Global Head of Operations, and Charyne Tatad, Assistant Vice President at Sun Life Global Solutions, to hear how their employee-driven gamification strategy became the heartbeat of daily operations.

The Challenge: Spreadsheets, Manual Scorecards, and Inconsistent Feedback

Years ago, Sun Life Global Solutions found itself at a crossroads familiar to many contact center operations. 

The Philippines-based arm of the global financial organization had evolved over decades of operations, supporting Sun Life business units across Canada, the US, and Asia with contact center operations, back-office support, and comprehensive technology services. But the company’s performance management system was trapped in an analog world, with spreadsheets, manual scorecards, and inconsistent performance feedback. 

The challenge extended beyond mere digitization. Sun Life acknowledged the need to engage a workforce increasingly composed of younger, Gen Z employees who expected intuitive, mobile-friendly, interactive technology. The organization also faced application overload, with different systems in use for KPIs, coaching, training, and daily workflows. 

Without a modern, engaging performance management and coaching platform, Sun Life risked losing the battle for employee engagement and motivation in a competitive talent market. Centrical transformed the contact center’s performance management and employee engagement. 

This year, in an effort to refresh the game built within Centrical for Sun Life employees, the company put its frontline employees in charge of their own performance by involving them in the creation of a new experience—one they would want to use every day.

Key Innovation: How Sun Life Transformed Performance Management through Employee Ownership

Rather than designing the platform from the top down, leadership made a critical decision. They recognized that the platform represented a blank canvas that could greatly benefit from frontline voices to bring it to life. This approach led to the creation of the G.A.M.E. (Gamified Achievement, Microlearning, and Engagement) Club . 

The G.A.M.E. Club brought together approximately 20 volunteer frontline employees and team leaders spanning the length and breadth of operations across different lines of business. These champions became architects of the employee experience, wielding influence over every aspect of how their colleagues engaged with the platform. 

“This group of employees—mostly frontline and team leaders—come together and then they give us advice on the changes we should be making to the platform, the kind of content that is the most appreciated by the team members,” said Kshitij Kohli. 

The G.A.M.E. Club’s responsibilities extended far beyond providing feedback on the platform. They actively created new competitions and engagement activities within the platform—sometimes work-related, sometimes adjacent to daily operations—that attracted employees, especially new hires, to explore the platform. This created a natural gateway that drew people in through fun activities before exposing them to performance management, coaching, and learning content. 

The team added new components and levels to the game, creating a more dynamic progression system. They designed platform icons that were more relatable to their contact center representatives, making the visual experience feel personal and relevant. They also established new content creation guidelines that shifted focus beyond KPIs to emphasize continuous learning and broader engagement. 

“We were able to put more focus on all of those contents that are critical to our businesses rather than focusing [solely] on performance,” said Charyne Tatad. 

This evolution reflected a mature understanding of gamification: the platform had successfully built performance-tracking habits over the first three years, and now it was time to leverage those habits to drive deeper learning and engagement.

Embedding Centrical into Daily Operations and Workflows 

Sun Life’s success stemmed from making Centrical indispensable to daily operations. 

For contact center representatives, checking Centrical became as natural as logging into their phone systems. Employees built the habit of accessing the platform whenever they wanted to see improvements in specific KPIs. 

“It was interactive. It was easy to use. And we were thinking this is something that our Gen Z employees would really use,” said Charyne Tatad. 

For team leaders, Centrical became the foundation of pre-shift huddles that started every workday. Rather than discussing KPIs in abstract terms, leaders used the platform to surface missions (learning modules) released by each line of business and to discuss focus areas and pain points, while employees could immediately access relevant training content. 

The platform transformed from a performance tool into a library of learning resources and knowledge checks that employees could reference anytime clarity was needed. This shift from push to pull learning—where employees sought out information when they needed it rather than only consuming scheduled training—represented a fundamental change in how the organization approached employee development.

Change Management: The Secret Ingredient 

Perhaps one of Sun Life’s most critical innovations was the team’s relentless focus on change management and team leader involvement from day one.

Team leaders quickly became the platform’s champions. The shift in coaching conversations proved transformative: instead of simply reading numbers during coaching sessions, leaders now drive strategic action plans, using real-time data to have more meaningful, forward-looking discussions with their team members. 

Sun Life also launched targeted learning missions focused on specific process pain points, strengthening knowledge retention and improving refresher training. This became especially valuable during peak seasons when employees needed rapid preparation. They redesigned new hire onboarding to be more interactive, reducing the manual preparation time for trainers by 50% while improving learning outcomes.

The Results: Measurable Impact Across the Board

The results paint a picture of comprehensive transformation across multiple areas: 

1. A boost in performance 
2. Stellar employee engagement 
3. Time savings for managers 
4. Consistent and faster new hire onboarding 
5. Personalized employee experiences 

A 10-15% Boost in Performance among Engaged Employees 

Employees who actively used the platform showed consistently better results than their less-engaged peers.

“The employees who use the platform more than the others typically have 10-15% better performance scorecards or ratings,” said Kshitij Kohli. 

This 10-15% performance advantage persisted across multiple measurement cycles spanning several years. Platform engagement predicted performance outcomes. 

Engagement Surged Across Every Metric

The engagement metrics told a compelling story of platform adoption and sustained usage thanks to the refreshed experience: 

• +32% increase in weekly active users 
• +100% increase in average weekly sessions per user 
• +51% surge in mission completion rates from 2024 
• +300% increase in weekly coaching compared to the previous year, showing that the platform enabled more frequent, meaningful development conversations 

Each represented a behavioral shift that contributed to operational excellence.

Manager Time Savings Multiplied Bandwidth and Effectiveness 

Team leaders experienced impressive time savings. By eliminating manual scorecard preparation, dashboard creation, and huddle content development, each team leader saved 2-3 hours every week. 

This freed capacity allowed leaders to focus on what humans do best: coaching, providing feedback, and developing their own leadership capabilities. The platform essentially created hidden capacity within the existing workforce, making every leader more effective without adding headcount.

New Hire Onboarding Reached New Levels of Consistency 

The new hire experience improved across two dimensions. First, learning curves accelerated by approximately 5% year over year as Sun Life refined the onboarding race within Centrical. This specialized journey provided milestones, rewards, and recognition throughout the first 180 days, giving new employees a clear progression path. 

Second, consistency across new hire cohorts improved dramatically. With Centrical, the new employees’ learning curves became more uniform across different new hire cohorts, reducing outliers and making ramp-up timelines more predictable. 

Personalization Transformed the Employee Experience 

Beyond the quantitative impact, Sun Life Global Solutions made employees feel seen and supported as individuals. 

By leveraging Centrical’s ability to track KPI trends and development areas, team leaders delivered personalized coaching tailored to each employee’s specific performance gaps. Employees received targeted learning recommendations, personalized challenges alongside team competitions, and regular performance updates that showed progress. 

“People have started to appreciate quite a lot about learning which is not the same for everyone but tailored to their requirements because, [with] Centrical, you can see the trends on different KPIs metrics and also our development areas,” said Kshitij Kohli. 

The personalization element proved especially important for employee motivation and recognition.\

What’s Next 

Expanding the Model to Canadian Operations 

Success in the Philippines naturally attracted attention from other regions of the global organization. When partners from Canadian operations visited Manila as part of regular cross-location travel, they witnessed firsthand how teams were using Centrical and benefitting from it. 

“They saw how the teams are effectively using Centrical, and of course, they were very impressed not only by the team’s ability to use it but also the platform capabilities. And they said, yeah, we want that,” said Kshitij Kohli. 

The Canada expansion launched just a few weeks before the SELECT Awards announcement, with plans to expand to approximately 500 employees in Canadian operations. The model Sun Life built—combining technology, employee ownership, and change management—can be adapted across different cultures and business contexts.

Building a Gamification Center of Excellence 

The team now wants to transform the G.A.M.E. Club from an operations-specific initiative into a formal Gamification Center of Excellence (CoE) serving the entire organization. 

“We are proposing gamification as a way of working, and it doesn’t have to be limited only to the contact center,” said Kshitij Kohli. 

This Center of Excellence would function as an internal consulting initiative, helping other departments and business units improve performance through gamification strategies. The G.A.M.E. Club members, having developed deep expertise over years of successful implementation, would guide new areas through change management, content creation, and engagement strategies.]

Leveraging AI and Next-Generation Features

Sun Life plans to stay at the forefront of employee experience technology by adopting Centrical’s latest AI-powered enhancements. 

These enhancements include an AI Assistant for Managers, which promises to save even more time for team leaders, enabling them to focus on high-impact activities. The organization also expressed excitement about upcoming AI role-play simulation tools that will help with practice scenarios, particularly valuable during onboarding and nesting phases, as well as reskilling programs.

Sun Life Global Solutions exemplifies what happens when organizations trust frontline employees to shape their own experience. 

“We believe that everyday performance should feel purposeful, social, and fun. The G.A.M.E. Club has turned Centrical into part of our employees’ daily workflow, boosting engagement and productivity, and reinforcing our goals,” said Kshitij Kohli. 

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