10 Tactics for Gamification for employee engagement in 2024

Are you noticing a decrease in engagement in the workplace? Are you on the hunt for fun and innovative ways to push your team toward success? Maybe, you simply want to encourage team bonding or give your team a reason to show up excited and ready to take on the work day.

If you agree with any of these statements, you could benefit from utilizing employee gamification to boost employee engagement. Gamification employee engagement is a tool businesses can use to keep most employees engaged and connected with their coworkers. 

Why is this important? 

Studies suggest only 36% of employees are engaged in the workplace. We only expect this percentage to decline as the world shifts to remote work and most engaged employees start spending most of their time at home. However, it’s essential to remember that a highly engaged workplace can increase your profitability by over 21%. This means that extra engagement efforts powered by gamification can provide you with a unique opportunity to improve productivity and build a workplace that thrives on success. 

With the help of gamification tactics, your business can keep your team engaged and build a company culture that thrives on some fun, friendly competition. Every day, your engaged employees will come to work excited to connect and engage with their team and take on new competition. In turn, you can reduce employee turnover while increasing employee morale.

With the ongoing move to remote and hybrid workforces, keeping employee engagement activities in mind can be challenging. We’re here to walk you through 10 tactics for gamification for employee engagement so you can build a thriving workplace culture and help inspire employees complete projects.

Let’s dive into the gamification rewards and recognition efforts you can start utilizing.

Motivate Employees With Reward Systems

Every company needs a reward system that incentives your team to go above and beyond. With a reward system, you can encourage your team to come to the table with innovative ideas and challenge them to do more throughout 9-5. 

When creating a reward system, you’ll want to create a point system. This ensures ongoing efforts are measurable and quantifiable. You’ll also want to keep your team in the know on different rewards and incentives to ensure they start their day ready to play. If you’re having trouble gauging your team’s interests, you can send out a survey to understand their likes and dislikes. 

Create Department Leaderboards

Team leaderboards help your employees visualize their success and provide a clear understanding of what each individual needs to do to come out on top. Consider creating a point system that is easy to track and helps with workplace gamification hr. With the point system, your most engaged employees can easily map out their path to success and restructure their workday to beat their competition. 

With the help of gamification software, you can easily track the success of each employee for a specific month or quarter. Throughout the duration, you can track employee participation and inspire a friendly yet competitive workplace environment. 

Pro tip: If you really want to put your employees in the competitive spirit and promote collaboration, consider grouping everyone into teams. This is a great way to inspire authentic communication between coworkers and help them learn to work together as a team.

Trivia Night

Looking for a quick and easy way to improve your staff members’ morale? Plan a trivia night. With friendly competition and some fun trivia questions, you can inspire your team to foster new connections with their coworkers and improve engagement levels. 

Trivia also challenges your employees to work together in a team setting. They’ll need to work together to take home the win and focus on their collaboration skills.

Trivia nights are great for remote and hybrid teams because they are easy to set up virtually for everyone to enjoy. They are also a great tool to help your team relax after the chaos of the workweek. Planning monthly or quarterly engagement opportunities is a great way to increase employee morale and lower the risk of burnout. 

If you don’t have time to plan a fun, interactive trivia night experience, consider utilizing online resources or preplanned trivia experiences. 

Spin-to-Win

Spin-to-win takes the wheel of fortune to the next level. If you have an employee of the month or a reward system for meeting your goals, consider turning them into a spin-to-win experience. Spin-to-win is an excellent tool for incentivizing employees and encouraging them to outshine others and always do their best.

Spin-to-win and other game-style reward systems are great for remote and hybrid teams if you don’t see them in person but want to find a way to reward them. The best part? You don’t need to limit yourself to spin-to-win. You can also consider scratch-off incentives or spontaneous rewards.

Increase Employee Productivity With Goal-Tracking

Say goodbye to traditional modes of goal-tracking and look for a gamification concept instead. Goal-tracking holds your team accountable for their everyday tasks. It pushes them to do more throughout the workweek. However, if you don’t take the time to outline goals, deadlines or review progress: Your team may fall behind on their goals or won’t have the same motivation to complete them. 

With the help of goal tracking, you can hold your team members accountable for their goals and helps them plan out their success. With a gamified system, you can keep your team actively engaged with ongoing projects and reward individuals when they hit milestones. 

Reward with Company Swag

Who doesn’t love company swag? Promotional products are a great tool that can help bring your team together and help them feel like they are part of something bigger. To you: It may seem like just a jacket or a backpack with your logo on it. However, these branded items can improve the employee’s relationship with your company and help them feel appreciated.

If you have an employee of the month program, you can easily reward them with branded apparel or a nice swag bag for their hard work. When they flaunt their new backpack, jacket, or t-shirt: Other team members will want to push themselves to get employee of the month next.

Physical rewards also have a high-perceived value and have the power to improve employee satisfaction. Consider providing different monthly rewards to keep your team fully engaged and push them to do their best in the workplace.

Recognition Program Software

Recognition software uses gamification elements to encourage your team to stay on top of their projects and complete complex tasks. Most software makes it easy for your team to stay connected with other coworkers and see how they compare. This will inspire healthy, friendly competition and keep everyone on the path towards success in the workplace. 

Plus, leaning on the help of software is a great way to keep your company organized. Since everything is preplanned, you don’t need to do any of the manual work to create leaderboards, goal-tracking systems, or any other gamification for employee engagement programs.

Incentive-Based Travel Opportunities 

Have a big conference coming up but can’t afford to send your whole sales team? Consider creating a gamification program to find which employees to send. This is a great way to keep improving employee motivation, track progress, and see which one of your team members has what it takes to be a business leader. You can create a point system that allows them to stay competitive with one another, pushing them closer to there.

Before the travel opportunity or event, set rules and create a point system for your team to follow. Let them know what they need to accomplish if they want to attend. This will help inspire friendly competition and push your team to go above and beyond to get the opportunity. 

Instant Gratification With Shoutout Channels

If you use Slack or Teams, consider creating a shoutout channel. This channel works as a recognition outlet to promote positivity in the workplace and push individuals to go out of their way to recognize others. Shoutout channels are a great way to give your team members instant gratification for their hard work and ensure nothing goes unnoticed. 

You can use the shoutout channel to spontaneously reward your employees for all their hard work and give them a reason to go out of their way throughout the workweek. Consider giving them recognition certificates, incentives, or rewards that push them to continue recognizing their team members. 

Game-Based Training and Onboarding Programs

Let’s be honest: No one enjoys filling out endless paperwork or watching all of the new hire how-to videos. These training experiences can make or break an employee’s first-week experience. 

Including game mechanics in your onboarding process is an interactive way to keep your team engaged and help them get started on the right foot. Consider including quizzes, trivia, and icebreakers to keep new employees engaged and give them a taste of your company culture during their first few days. 

You can also use the same game-style approach for training and game-based learning programs. This is also a great way to break up the monotony of training and onboarding programs and add some fun to the workweek.

Boost Employee Engagement to the Next Level 

Spinify makes it easy to incorporate game-based elements in the workplace. We designed our platform to boost morale and help you implement gamification principles that help you get results. 

Our automated employee recognition will help your team better visualize their daily tasks and help them produce higher-quality work. Every day they clock in, they’ll feel like they have something to work towards and feel inspired to work harder.If you want to achieve goals and build a company culture you can be proud of; you’ve come to the right place. To discover how gamification can increase employee engagement programs Book a demo today!