Now that we know what gamification is and what it could be used for within an organisation, it might also be useful to know which benefits and disadvantages there are.
Benefits
Interaction user and company
The biggest benefit of gamification used by companies is that, if properly developed, the interaction between user and system becomes more and more challenging and thus more interesting. With the right mix of game techniques and game thinking in business processes, like clear rules, achievable goals, fast feedback and recognition for prestation’s, employees should show a better motivation and more involvement. This in turn ensures better work results.
Encouraging employees
Gamification can also promote the development and training of employees. For example, by using game simulations and process-related games, the skills of an employee will most likely increase. Gamification is also ideal for crowdsourcing, as ideas are encouraged through competition and reward. Gamification also accelerates change management, through imitations of real business situations, gamification provides more involved real-time feedback.
As a result, employees adapt to new processes and systems more quickly and effectively. With gamification you create a fun competitive environment where employees collaborate with each other through creativity, so that innovation takes place in all departments. Gamification can therefore help an organization or company to increase its engagement, it is a nice way to let employees make their work more fun, but mastering gamification can be very difficult. It requires a broad perspective and a large number of areas of expertise such as design, technology and psychology.
Disadvantage
Tracking employees is NOT healthy
Some organizations use gamification as a way to monitor their employees. They use the system to track, manage and sometimes manipulate employees. In these cases, gamification is used to force people to do something, and this is NOT healthy for your employees.
Gamification should be a tool to positively encourage people in their positions to give more meaning to their work.
Random elements
Companies often don’t think about gamification either. Too often, game elements are set at random. Badges or points without values mean nothing and only cause confusion.
With gamification the aim is to respond to the intrinsic motivation of the user. This allows you to positively change behaviour and achieve sustainable results, with which you can add something positive for your user. You cannot force people to enjoy their work or to like something.
Danger of leader boards
Gamification is intended to create the conditions that enable people to have fun. Gamification must be performed voluntarily to achieve this. Leader boards are often used to gain insight into the performance of other players as a user.
This can also be disadvantageous, as long as you are at the top you will probably be motivated to defend your place or possibly rise in the rankings. But if you are not in the top ten, the motivation will decrease as your position drops.
Tips
It is important to focus on a collaboration rather than an individual player. If you absolutely want to use a leader board in your organization, it is good to reset the leader board to zero every week or every month, in order to create fair opportunities.
Furthermore, it is useful with a leader board to divide users into teams, you could even see if you can evenly distribute the players in the top five among the teams.
Installing gamification
Another pitfall is that after installing gamification, companies no longer pay attention to it, while a gamification system always needs adjustments and adjustments. Your organization is constantly changing and you have to adjust your gamification accordingly so that everything stays within the correct flow.
Concrete objectives
Companies often also have trouble setting clear and concrete objectives for a gamification project. The behaviour that is rewarded in your system must be based on your goals. If the objectives are not clear, your gamification system will fail to achieve the objectives. So always set clear goals so that your gamification system is a success.
Recap
When using gamification I urge you to keep everything I told you in mind in order to prevent failure. Gamification is a great tool to engage with your customers if applied in a good way.
If you have read all my blogs I want to thank you for your patience and I hope you learned something from it!
