Leveraging gamification in employee communities

Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first

                                                                          – Simon Sinek (Marketing consultant)

The above statement clearly indicates the importance of employee engagement for business success. According to a survey conducted by The Engagement Institute, disengaged employees cost organizations between $450 to $550 billion annually.

So, if you don’t want to pay for the disengagement of your employees, we suggest you evaluate your eNPS.

What is eNPS?

eNPS stands for the employee Net Promoter Score. You can calculate it by asking a simple question to your employees: “on a scale of zero to ten, how likely is it you would recommend this company as a place to work?”

Employees who give a rating of 9 or 10 are called ‘promoters’, while those who rate your organization 7 or 8 are called ‘passives’. On the other hand, employees who rate it 6 or below are called ‘detractors’. eNPS is then calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from that of promoters.

The idea behind calculating eNPS is evaluating how good you are as an organization for your employees.

How does employee engagement drive growth?

In 2012, Gallup conducted a survey among 192 organizations across 49 industries in 34 countries. Calculating the work-unit-level relationship between employee engagement and performance outcomes, the researchers came up with the following ‘employee related factors’ which could impact business growth:

• customer ratings
• profitability
• productivity
• turnover
• absenteeism
• safety incidents
• patient safety incidents
• shrinkage (theft)
• quality (defects)

These factors confirmed that employee engagement is a major predictor of an organization’s performance.

What is the role of employee communities?

Employee communities have been an active part of successful businesses for quite a while. From maintaining transparency to solving a problem and promoting collaboration to emphasizing social networking, employee communities have played a major role in increasing revenue and boosting business growth.

How does gamification increase engagement in employee communities?

Gamification has become a growing trend in increasing employee engagement. Known to raise the interactivity of a non-gaming environment using game mechanics, gamification is a great technique to engage and motivate employees.

Elements such as rewards, points, badges, leaderboards etc. motivate employees to take on even the most difficult tasks. Motivated employees prove to be more productive, thus make a significant contribution to an organization’s success.

Here are some ways you can leverage gamification in your employee community:

Improved Learning/Training Experience

Gamification elements make learning/training a fun experience for new employees. With gamification, you can make lessons more interesting, thus promote a better learning experience. Experienced employees can also learn new skills easily with gamification.

Increased Customer Satisfaction

Gamification rewards can encourage employees to resolve customer queries more efficiently. Gamification promotes innovative solutions, which leads to customer satisfaction.

Higher Sales

Gamification improves collaboration between employees. You can use it to create a better understanding among your teams and encourage effective teamwork.

Acquiring customers and closing deals becomes a lot easier with gamified solutions.

Better Process Management

Rewarding employees for coming up with innovative ideas can motivate them to complete projects on time with results that drive growth.

From product development to inventory management, gamification can streamline major processes of your organization.

Healthy Organizational Culture

Gamification also encourages employees to shape and promote your organization’s culture through different projects and programs.

It makes the shareable information of your organization easily accessible to all employees.

Motivated Human Resources

Last but not the least, you can track your employees’ performance through gamified strategies.

HR professionals can leverage gamification for promoting peer participation, developing leadership skills among employees and more.The gamification market is expected to reach $11 billion by 2020. With all the points mentioned above, it’s easy to see why. Gamification can be used to increase employee engagement across multiple areas and boost business growth.

Want to leverage gamification in your employee community? Let’s discuss.