How to Use Gamification for Better Business Results

Gamification has been around for a long time. However, it’s only recently that the concept was named and adopted by businesses. Everyone knows you can use it to boost business. It pushes your workers to get better, creates healthy competition, and increases revenue. 

The question is, how can you use it to better your business results? How do you make full use of this revolutionary concept? To understand this, you need to know the basics of how it works, and its different elements before you can get into how to use it. 

How gamification works

Gamification is the process of adding game principles to a business system. The two central tenets are rewards and competition. Adding them in business helps it grow because they can manipulate their workers’ human needs to win. 

Smart businesses use it to push their workers to work at their best. To get to this goal, they offer prizes for specific acts. For example, they can give someone ten points for getting a new buyer. These virtual awards then give workers exclusive privileges. 

Game elements

Before getting into how you can use this tool, you need to know more about what it is. And here, the various parts of gamification come up. 

Games like monopoly or tic tac toe may have different rules, but the basic principles are the same. You get awards for making the right moves and winning. Everyone playing then tries to get these awards. 

You can move some of these elements to businesses. For example:

• points
• badges
• levels
• challenges
• leaderboards

Because getting these items can lead to more rewards, pride, and fame, people change their actions to get them. Getting people to change their behavior is the key to gamification.

Key Principles

Now that you know what tools you have, it’s time to learn how you have to use them. Gabe Zichermann knows all there is to know about this topic; he once said that to use gamification the right way, all you need to know is how to play the mind, and it’s true. 

Gamification depends on you being able to change people’s behavior. To do that, you need to get in their head. The Fogg Model helps us understand how you can do it.

To put it simply, you need three things to make change people’s actions. 

1. Motivation

You have to push people to do a task. For example, you can promise them a reward for when they finish.

2. Ability 

They must be able to do the task you give them. Remember not to ask too much of your workers. 

3. Prompt

Give them a little push to get started. For example, you can display a leadership board to kickstart some healthy competition. 

All three aspects must work together. If you nudge people to get started but haven’t offered a reward or vice versa, it will not work. Having said that, there are a few principles you want to add to your project before you start. Consider this a checklist.

Rewards

A reward is something people will feel good about getting. They must want it. If they don’t, you can’t offer any motivation, and your gamification will fail. 

Create a fear of loss  

It’s human nature to want to avoid losing anything you already have. Most people even prefer not losing things over getting new stuff. And you can use this human behavior to your advantage. Don’t have people start at zero points; start them at a baseline of five or ten. They are likely to work to keep those points or maybe even get more.

Make it a competition

A lot of people care about relative success more than they do about individual success. This is why you should always have leaderboards. Even if workers do not want to better themselves, they do want to out-do their friends.

Feedback

Keep giving regular feedback. As soon as a worker completes a task, no matter how small, log it. And then award points. This shows people clear outcomes of their actions. It also shows them that someone is noticing their effort. 

Outline your goals

Generally, gamification will benefit your business. However, you need to know precisely what you want it to do for you. Do you want better customer engagement? Or do you want more personal motivation? And how are you using gamification to get there? 

These are five goals and how to get there. You can go off of this or make your list.

1. Create more self-motivation

The human brain wants people to like it; it wants compliments. If you offer validation for an action, it will repeat that action to get the serotonin again. To get people motivated, you can set KPIs. 

If you break a big goal down into small tasks and then offer rewards at the end of each, your workers will want to complete them. They will speed through small tasks. And before you know it, the big task will be completed.  

2. Drive competition

Everyone knows that if you pit people against each other, they will struggle to come out on top. Since people are motivated, they will work more and work better. You can set up a leaderboard or offer an employee of the month award to get the competition going.

Left on its own, toxic competitive feelings can come up. Using gamification, you can make your office a safe and healthy space. 

3. Give employees direction

Having fantastic workers run in different directions does not help anyone. A clear path is essential for any success. By making a daily do and don’t list, you can set one for your company. 

4. Employee Training

Having clear KPIs set out can help people understand what their role is. You can level them up as they finish more complicated tasks. But even if they are doing smaller jobs, they still get rewards so they will be happy and work hard.

5. Create Transparency

If you want to better your team’s efforts, you need to know where they are lacking. When the process is transparent and visible, you can quickly look at the data, which will allow you to give better advice, arrange the right training, etc.

Sales gamification software is a potent tool if you know how to use it. Make a clear plan keeping the three principles in mind, and you will be able to get better results for your business very soon!

Want to read more? Check out this article: Making the Client “Numero Uno”