Gamify Your Team to Help You Achieve Your Goals

Most goals which we set for our teams involve many small steps along the path to ultimate achievement. This can make progress difficult to measure, which is demotivating and makes us less likely to reach our final goal. A feeling of progress is an important psychological aspect of motivation, and this is something games developers know, building in lots of markers of your improvement along the way to keep you striving towards the final goal. Wouldn’t it be great if real life were more like a game? If you could keep track of your score, and get constant updates on your progress? Well, you can build gamification into your life surprisingly easily. All you need is a spreadsheet. You can use Google Sheets, which offers a free online spreadsheet service. This is a simple step-by-step guide to gamifying your life and helping you achieve your goals.

1. Decide what it is you want to keep track of

This will completely depend on what your goal is. If your aim is to make connect with more prospects or solve more customer problems, you may want to keep track of how many calls you’ve made, or how many cases you’ve solved. If you want to track sales or ROI, this might be how many deals you close each day.

2. Choose a realistic daily target

This target should be the minimum you hope to achieve each day. If this target is too difficult to achieve, you may end up regularly missing it, and thus demotivating your team. To get the maximum benefit out of this strategy, you should choose a target that you will sometimes beat. Targets could be setup for team or individual goals.

3. Create your spreadsheet

The simplest layout for this strategy is to put the team members email on the left-hand column, followed by columns for each thing you want to keep track of. For example, if your goal is to close more deals, column A would be the team members email, Column B would be the number of deals sold.

4. Link your spreadsheet

Connecting Google Sheets to a gamification app like Spinify is easy.  It’s a simple configuration where you choose the target that you want team members to reach and choose the sheet and which columns contain their email and progress, eg deals closed.

5. Game your progress

Your team members will now have a game they can access on their phone, tablet, TV or watch.  They get updates with their progress and can compare their successes with their teammates. The instant feedback given by app helps them to psychologically see reaching your target as a game. Check out all the benefits of gamification with Google Sheets.

This simple process can make achieving any long-term goal easier by giving you instant daily feedback and turning the process into a game. If you’ve ever wondered why you can feel content doing some mindless activity on a simple smartphone game but find taking steps towards important goals much more difficult, the answer is that games are psychologically rewarding. If you can turn achieving your goal into a game, it could make achieving it far easier.