Want better results from your team? Team gamification could be the answer you’re looking for.
The secret behind strong teams –business, sport, or otherwise – is engagement, motivation, healthy competition, relevant training, personalized coaching, and performance management.
All of these can be tremendously improved by leveraging gamification for teams.
What is team gamification?
Team gamification is when the techniques that make games and gaming so engaging, motivational, and successful are applied to the team environment. Examples include earning points, leveling up, badges, competitions, leaderboards, and more.
Main benefits of team gamification
Implementing team gamification in a business environment has numerous benefits to employees, managers, and the organization. Just some of these benefits include:
Increased commitment
Team gamification draws people into the team narrative and makes them part of something bigger than themselves. When team gamification is set up correctly, it unifies teams and increases each individual member’s commitment to both the team and the company.
Improved employee retention
When team gamification is implemented, employees feel more aligned with company goals, feel rewarded and appreciated, and enjoy personalized journeys. All of this serves to significantly boost employee retention.
Engaged and motivated employees
Team gamification makes work more engaging and fun, ensuring employees are excited about progressing in their roles and meeting their goals. Moreover, the best gamification platforms makes an employee’s training journey and progression plan highly personalized, helping to ensure employees are fulfilled, empowered, performing well, and retained.
Improved business results
When these elements fall into place, team gamification ultimately means better results. Improvements are not always incremental; rather, they tend to happen in large jumps. With increasingly motivated and engaged employees, you’re more likely to see KPIs being smashed across the board.
Ways of implementing team gamification in the workplace
You might think, all of this sounds great. But what does team gamification look like in practice? Team gamification taps into both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations to drive engagement and performance. Below are some elements to include:
Leaderboards
Leaderboards align everyone on where they stand. Two major types of leaderboards are team leaderboards and individual leaderboards. Team leaderboards pit whole teams against one another. They’re tremendously effective at galvanizing team spirit and getting team members to go above and beyond to beat competing teams. Individual leaderboards are used in a team environment; for example, a sales team might show which employee is leading in that quarter.
Healthy competition
As humans, we love to compete. As soon as something is a competition, there is an added edge, a motivator to do better. There are an almost infinite number of competitions that can be run using team gamification, so each team should choose one that resonates with them.
Levels
Generally, employees want to see their progress and be recognized and rewarded for improvements, whether in training or performance. “Leveling up” – that is, moving up from level to level – provides this.
Gaming narratives
Suddenly, your sales team isn’t looking at a leaderboard with names and amounts – they’re immersed in an exciting car race, with drivers getting ahead based on calls made, meetings set up, or deals closed. Team gamification has the power to completely transform any experience into one that is stimulating and engaging.
Points
Earning points has been shown to:
- Lead to higher motivation
- Promote higher organizational identification
- Boost employee engagement
- Increase satisfaction with rewards and recognition
- Create a greater preference for working for an organization with a points reward program
Assigning points to key tasks can reward behaviors, and lead to significant and sustainable shifts within the organization.
Badges
Badges are like medals. They show that this person has worked hard and achieved something0, and they are impressive especially to those who don’t have them yet. Team gamification
Real-world rewards
Some innovative companies allow employees to exchange points that they’ve earned for real-world rewards. This can be anything from movie vouchers to company swag, and even big prizes for quarterly or annual winners.
Ready to change the game for your enterprise? Have a quick preview of the Centrical platform.
Examples of successful team gamification
A powerful example of effective team gamification comes from Swiss Life Select, a wholly owned subsidiary of Switzerland’s largest life insurance company. This is how David Windlin, Head of Sales Coordination for Swiss Life Select, describes it: “In (sales) branches everywhere, hanging leaderboards were all over the place. Just imagine the excitement of our sales agents when we offered them a solution where they can look at the lead reports directly on their mobile phone.”
Swiss Life Select effectively used team gamification to generate 10.4% more per-agent sales and a 12.5% increase in sales.
Centrical solutions for effective team gamification
What was Swiss Life’s secret? It was Centrical’s effective solution for team gamification.
As Windlin notes, “We also brought incentives in the (Centrical) app to track (individual) performance so now everyone could see (performance data) directly on the app.” Centrical, he said, has “an amazing team.”
The Centrical platform engages and motivates employees, especially teams, with leading gamification techniques including those listed above. Centrical’s clients include some of the best-known enterprises globally, including Microsoft, and HP, and the results after implementing the solution speak for themselves.
Centrical users can access a massive amount of gamification options, and personalize these for their employees and teams, resulting in real improvements almost immediately.
To set up a personalized demo of the Centrical platform, click here.
Team gamification can – and should – be used by every organization
We’ve seen how effective team gamification can be at moving the needle when it comes to key metrics, and resulting in a workforce that is more committed, more engaged, and more motivated. Some key takeaways include:
- The proven benefits of team gamification include increased commitment, improved employee retention, happier team members, and dramatically improved results
- There are several ways to implement team gamification – in fact, you’re limited only by your imagination
- Large companies have successfully leveraged team gamification and saw improved results – even with something as small as displaying leaderboards on employees’ mobile devices
If you’re thinking of implementing gamification for teams in your business, speak to the undisputed experts in this field. Centrical is the most advanced gamification platform in the market, and all you have to do is take a look at a preview to understand why.
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