7 Rules of Gamification & Gamification Strategy Tips

What basic rules of gamification do you need to know to motivate your employees successfully?

Here we’ll give you our expert view of the gamification strategies you should look at implementing. We’ll also tell you about our favorite gamification tips along the way.

Why Are Gamification Strategies Important for Your Business?

Gamification is an incredible motivational tool. 

Gamification is used to help to break down complex goals into smaller, more manageable chunks and reward employees when they make progress. The great thing about it is it does this in a fun way. 

Gamification creates healthy competition while encouraging self-expression and altruism. 

Although it inspires employees to reach personal goals, it can also bring teams together to help achieve company-wide goals. 

The thing is, you need to do gamification in the right way; otherwise, it can simply seen as manipulation. 

Plenty of gamification projects don’t achieve the desired results because they fail to follow the rules of gamification. 

So, let’s take a look at these gamification rules in more detail. 

7 Key Rules of Gamification

Gamification isn’t as simple as creating a few leaderboards – there’s actually a lot of psychology behind it. 

These rules of gamification will help you maximize engagement and utilize psychology to help motivate your employees. 

1. Understand Your Business Needs

Gamification is fun – there’s no limit to what you can do with it. 

However, this lack of limitations means it’s easy to get carried away and lose sight of your key goals. To combat this, it’s vitally important that you have a crystal clear picture of what you want to achieve through gamification. 

You can build a gamification system that wows your employees and gets amazing feedback, but ultimately, if it doesn’t help you achieve your business’s needs, it’s not been successful. 

Your gamification strategies should always start with your key business goals in mind. 

2. Set Realistic Goals 

This rule of gamification builds on the last one – you need to be realistic with your goals. 

Think about many games you see people playing on their mobile devices (Candy Crush, Angry Birds, etc. are great gamification strategy examples); the goals are incredibly simple. And yet, those games are enjoyed by millions of people. 

Simplicity starts with having realistic, achievable goals and then breaking them down into smaller steps. If your goals are too complicated, the steps will be long-winded and equally difficult to achieve. 

Remember, gamification is about motivation. 

Make sure your goals are challenging but still realistic.

3. Keep it Simple

Let’s go back to this idea of limitless possibilities with gamification. 

It’s true; you can create some incredibly detailed stories with unbelievable graphics and endless other features. The question is, do you need to?

The answer is probably not. 

Gamification is based on the psychological principles of rewards, and they don’t have to be elaborate to elicit the desired response. And, as we’ve already mentioned, many incredibly simple games have had tremendous success. 

Your employees’ first job is doing their day-to-day work; gamification shouldn’t distract from this. Simple designs are easy to understand, giving you more engagement and improved productivity. 

4. Seamless Integration

Your employees are adults and professionals. 

Many understand that gamification can be an excellent tool for building a healthy work environment, but there might also be some pushback. The more steps you require for people to engage with your gamification, the more the pushback will likely grow. 

One of gamification’s most important rules is to make participation easy and enjoyable. A simple way to achieve this is to make the gamification aspect almost imperceptible. 

Everyone likes rewards for their hard work, so find ways to seamlessly integrate gamified rewards when people complete their goals (leaderboards are a great example of this). 

5. Reward Early and Regularly 

Our brains are programmed to crave rewards. 

Whether that reward is a point, badge, level-up, money, or something else doesn’t matter; the same principle applies. The thought of that reward provides us with the motivation that spurs us on to achieve our goals. 

However, we don’t achieve our goals overnight. There are lots of little steps that take us towards achieving them.

If we’re not consciously aware of the steps that take us towards our goals, then we don’t get that happy feeling of knowing we’re progressing. Gamification changes this. 

One of the key rules of gamification is that you should reward early and regularly. 

Focus on competition-visibility (making it easy for people to visualize their daily tasks) and give people that great feeling when they’re making small steps towards their goals.

Suddenly lots of small steps turn into big strides.

6. Set the Right Time Frames 

Human motivation goes up and down. 

When you’ve just set a goal, your motivation will naturally be high, but if you leave it too long, it’s easy to lose focus. 

Gamification is there to improve motivation, but there’s only so much it can do. If you make your gamification scenario too long, people will eventually become less engaged. 

A great rule of gamification is to work in 12-week (quarterly) cycles. 

This is a perfect length of time for your goal setting before your employees move on to their next challenge. 

7. Give Continuous Feedback

You’re trying to inspire your employees to achieve the best possible results. 

You can’t do this if you only communicate with them when they take positive steps. If people aren’t getting their rewards, they still need positive feedback to help put them on the right track. 

Without regular feedback, your employees will be less likely to achieve their goals, and they’re also likely to stop engaging with gamification.

Understand how to keep regular communication even when employees aren’t performing well within the gamification. This is perhaps even more important than your communication with the ones who are. 

The Rules of Gamification Can Make a Big Difference to Your Business 

Successfully implementing gamification within your business can have a considerable impact. That’s why these gamification rules are incredibly important. 

When designing your system, you want to work with gamification experts who understand how motivation works within a business setting, and that’s exactly what you get with Spinify. 

Learn how Spinify can help you to motivate your team to perform better by making each goal more rewarding to reach. 

BOOK A DEMO today.