You can’t deny that adrenaline rush and elation when your favorite team wins. Or when the lottery ticket you bought last week had the winning numbers. The competitive streak is something we all have in common. And businesses recognize the importance of keeping their employees engaged, given the risk of losing high-performing workers to rival firms that offer better perks and growth opportunities.
Gamification techniques are in place today to tap into our need for instant gratification. , with tools that score the workforce based on their problem solving ability. When you gamify work, you not only get creative solutions from diverse channels but also reward exceptional performers for the results produced.
Whats’ more, gamification techniques let your employees take on new challenges with enthusiasm.
Gamification was previously considered counterproductive to workforce productivity. In other words, a workplace distraction that risked pulling your staff’s focus from urgent tasks. MordorIntelligence, however, predicted that by 2024, the gamification market’s valuation will be up by 30%
While the learning curve and associated costs to retrain your people are shortened considerably, gamifying work also makes picking up a new skill fun. After all, the trigger to improve rests on having something to look forward to in the future, as well as looking back to see progress made along the curve.
Before stacking up the building blocks of a future-ready workforce, let’s do a quick fact-check on what gamification involves!
1. What is gamification in business?
Quite simply, gamification in project management introduces game-oriented thinking into non-game areas. Interestingly, initiatives like Employee of the Month and the Wall of Fame are gamification techniques employers rely on to reward track, monitor and reward increased employee engagement.
It serves the dual purpose of recognizing true potential and inspiring mediocre performers to to scale in the right direction. After all, when participants see that model employees are rewarded, they too, are motivated to emulate a similarly favorable behavior.
At the end of the day, gamification is a 75-25 mix of psychology and technology. And when it comes to managing your resource pool scientifically, the following 3 gamification strategies should hold you in good stead-
A. Scalable resource planning
Your projects are as good as the people on it. And the first step in resource planning is to know which projects your resources are assigned to, and how workloads look like at any given point in time. A visual resource calendar feature within a tool like Saviom’s Enterprise Gantt chart scheduler, for example, visibly depicts resource and project workflows. It lets you allot work on the basis of availability and billable utilization on project hours.
The more visible work and resources are, the better informed you are of the contributions your resources make toward a project, and their ability to reach the finish line while delivering quality work.
For example, if a certain activity ended before proposed timelines, you can not only get your employees started on the next project sooner but can also verify which competencies were leveraged that enabled the previous work to finish in the shortest time. Consequently, you can record your staff’s participation and enthusiasm determine the appropriate incentivization programs. More on that in the next point!
B. Level-based Reporting
Ever taken an online personality quiz before? You’d have definitely noticed a pattern to the questions being asked. Your final score is generated at the end based on the input provided. In some cases, the difficulty of the questions increase according to your previous responses. This is yet another example of gamification that runs on an algorithm, instantly informing you of how you fared.
The booked versus actuals report works on the same principle. It is a handy feature in smart resource management that lets you plan resource assignments for current and future work. Booked hours refer to the hours planned for upcoming work in order to notify competent staff in advance. The actual hours are pulled from employee timesheets and record the time spent by your resources across tasks.
The first step to doing so it to break work down to bite-size chunks. Not only does it orient you around a task’s complexity scale and interlinked dependencies but also points out if skills and expertise are shared optimally amongst your staff.
You can then set up levels for every milestone reached and award your staff points that enable them to move to the next level. This way, project workflows sync the time cost and effort estimates per resource utilized.
Booked versus actual hours let you plan out future project effort estimates. If a certain type of work’s actual hours overshot the originally booked hours, it lets you devise a gaming strategy to get your employees to complete work with the shortest turnaround time.
C. Gamify skilling measures
Points -based gamification techniques acts as the catalyst for staff wishing to upskill and expand their expertise for future relevance. It highlights shifts in demand for skills for work.
Put simply, staff on the bench can use the time between projects to retrain and ready themselves for newly created roles and responsibilities. They are then sufficiently work-ready when more, and new opportunities are explored.
A critical step in resource capacity planning is to size up your resource pool by strength and ensure you have the right hands in line with the quantity and quality of work. This lets you gamify existing work such that your employees can work as a cohesive unit. Participating ‘gamers’ can strategically employ their knowledge and skills towards hitting a learning objective faster.
Based on a comparison of your existing resource availability and utilization levels, you can fit gaming events in optimally so that the time in solving challenges is put to good use. Creating a scorecard for job-based learning lets your staff self-gauge their progress. Including a time component to complete courses by a certain date ensures your staff make upskilling a priority without rushing through the course material.
This way, when you test how ready your workforce is, you will be able to ascertain how invested your resources were in the learning journey.
2. Will You Play Along?
Gamification lets your employees deal with workplace stress while encouraging them to bring their A-game to work. After all, wouldn’t you want to be part of a work ecosystem that functions on collaborative competition?
Post unravelling Saviom’s core reports, you’ll gain resource-centric insights that aid project decisions. Better still, your firm will benefit from a workforce that works towards the common goal of getting more done, efficiently and effectively.
