Gamification An Efficient Anti-Boredom Workplace Solution

Going to work is the daily routine of the planet’s population. While some jobs have the excitement of saving lives, creating fun campaigns or developing various captivating innovations, even those can get tiring after enough time. Work meetings become a boring nuisance that demotivates workers.

As an employer, you have the power to change this scenario. You can break the monotony by implementing a variety of solutions to combat workplace boredom. There are different benefits you can put in place, like special themed days at the office or workplace activities that bring workers out of their shells.

This article will cover the issue of gamification in the workplace. It will contain explanations and examples of strategies to help you with your brainstorming process. The discussion will touch upon the issue of the leaderboard and competitiveness in the workplace, and where it can go wrong.

What is gamification?

To start with the basics, you should know that gamification is a strategy that integrates gaming elements into contexts that are not necessarily related to gaming. The main goal is to increase motivation in engaging with the product/service.

It is a popular practice found throughout our society, digitally, in the workplace, for educational purposes and in many daily encounters. The elements you could encounter include: points and badges, leaderboards, progression and levels, rewards and incentives, among others.

Gamification for work meetings

Employees look for excitement in their day-to-day life, which is why the work environment, and especially the long meetings, can get boring. This is where gamification comes into play to boost productivity, engagement and motivation. It can transform meetings into awaited activities rather than dreaded ones.

Some elements that can work for gamifying work meetings include:

Points and scoring: asking questions, volunteering for tasks, coming up with ideas, and attentiveness can earn the meeting participants points that create friendly competition.
Team challenges: as a little creative break during a meeting, the team can come up with ingenious solutions to a problem. It can be a real issue or a fictional scenario that helps the participants brainstorm ideas together and apply their knowledge.
Quizzes: in the case of informative meetings that could become monotonous, you can implement quizzes to encourage higher engagement. The winners could receive extra points or other bonuses.
Elements of randomness: this could work as a ‘Wheel of Fortune’ with discussion topics or various questions to break the ice.

These stimulants serve as management’s tool to keep participants’ attention throughout the meeting. This concept is very similar to how the gambling industry offers the latest casino bonus codes in order to keep its players active and engaged. The management team of a company offers breaks, extra points that could lead to monetary rewards, extra vacation days, the freedom to choose the projects to work on, and more.

How to actually bring results

While gamification is a promising approach, it requires careful planning to work effectively. You ought to understand the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. While intrinsic motivation works for more entertaining and fulfilling tasks, repetitive ones that get boring after a while need extrinsic motivators.

These could be the gamified badges, points or rewards that incentivize the task, but the overall activity must be motivated by an internal desire to do the work well. This way, you have to understand employees’ motivations and adapt your gamification strategies to their needs and desires.

You must adapt your strategy and gamified elements in accordance with your company’s corporate culture and goals. The system should be flexible and undergo periodic modifications to remain efficient. As soon as it becomes a part of the routine, it can get boring and lose its benefits for your team.

Another aspect to consider is the types of workers you have. Some are competitors, while others are cooperators. The first category thrives on challenges and competitive activities, where they can finish first and receive rewards. On the other end of the spectrum, the cooperators prefer to have their merits recognized rather than be put to the test alongside others.

How leaderboards can negatively affect workers

Leaderboards are an important aspect of the whole gamification strategy. They reward the competitive individuals and allow them to work towards higher positions on the board. These motivational mechanisms can also have downsides, so you must be careful how you implement them.

If the competition is taken too seriously by the first category of workers, the cooperators could feel pressured to participate, which undermines the purpose of playful, efficient engagement. While the top of the leaderboard gets their satisfaction and motivation boost, the bottom of the board could start experiencing negative emotions.

They might feel discouraged and unmotivated to keep working. Intrinsic motivation can fade in the face of extrinsic competitiveness, which could lead to a better ranking on the leaderboard, but a more superficial approach to tasks.

Conclusion

It is essential to balance the gamified aspects just enough to keep workers motivated while completing repetitive tasks, and to grant serious rewards based on merit. Gamification should provide the workers with a fun experience that breaks the day-to-day pattern of office life, rather than another stress factor.

This is why you must let the employees participate of their own accord, rather than impose the system on everyone. While the competition can be good for some, others could feel demotivated, even if they otherwise enjoyed the overall work and tasks before the implementation of gamified elements.