Gamification + Microsoft Teams: The New Work From Home Juggernaut

To be honest, working from home might seem easy and fun but when it is the only option, things may get pretty one-dimensional. Also, considering the lockdown scenario, the work from home style takes on a whole new meaning when you work from home and can’t get outside since almost everything else is closed. Remote workers can easily get depressed and as a result, and that is not a recipe for an organization to retain staff or see success.

So, what is the solution? Do we simply approve of the low performance from a remote team or do something to change that? With gamification and Microsoft Teams, we can create high performing, ultra-charged, and engaged remote teams. These teams can be more than just freelancers, but rather a group of employees who can understand your organization’s goal and work in collaboration to achieve those.

Introducing Gamification

Through gamification, you can make your remote teams more engaged, aligned, and higher-performing. Although gamification is not only limited to remote teams, however, in this piece we will mainly be discussing remote staff.

Gamification can be simply defined as a set of activities aimed to enhance the performance of teams. You want your sales team to show better sales numbers this month? Throw at them an activity attached with some sort of incentive and they are more likely to perform better. Gamification is all about enhancing the performance of teams. This enhancement can be in the form of feel-good activities, or activities aimed at boosting the overall performance of the team.

A gamified process for employees can result in rewards, prizes, recognition, points, and other forms of both cash and non-cash incentives. What gamification does is that it makes employees think of normal tasks like games and while playing those games, they are actually achieving your company’s most important metrics. When implemented the right way gamification can motivate remote teams in a fun and exciting way.

How Can Microsoft Teams Help With Remote Teams

Microsoft Teams can combine all the goods of gamification and bring them to your remote teams.

Makes Teamwork Exciting

When recognizing the employees, it doesn’t have to be on something extraordinary. You can recognize your remote team workers on something as small as posting the most GIFs in a group chat. Through Microsoft Teams, the idea should be to make the remote teamwork exciting.

Continuous Learning

Through Microsoft Teams, remote teams have all the fun while staying on top of their duties. Teams enable teams to learn continuously. How? By staying up to date with all the information all the time, by never missing an important message, by keeping an eye on what other team members are doing, and by making sure that no team member is left behind.

Work Plus Fun

With Microsoft Teams, employees just don’t have fun, but that fun is tied with the overall performance of the team, and the individual as well. Employees from sales, service, manufacturing, compliance, or any other department can be provided with real-time stats of their performance on their dashboard. This can boost team performance and healthy competition in a fun and positive way.

Team managers can also have access to this information and provide real-time feedback on performance or tailor their own strategy based on their teams’ strengths or opportunities.

Conclusion:

Gamification when combined with the right tools can do magic to remote teams. Microsoft Teams is one such tool that can truly unleash the full potential of gamification for your teams. The best thing about Microsoft Teams and combining gamification is that it is extremely easy to use. You don’t need to have extensive coding knowledge for customizing features within Microsoft Teams. Your regular system admin will be able to deploy, use, and customize most of the options.