I learned something new at our seminar last week. The topic was Workforce Optimization but we got into some pretty neat tools to use to make work a little more fun. Have you heard of ‘Gamification’? I had not. So, since it was new to me I did what I always do. I googled it. Here’s Merriam Webster’s take on it.
The basic concept of gamification isn’t new, but the word itself is a 21st-century addition to the English lexicon. In other words, gamification is about making something potentially tedious into a game. Gamification is effective because it taps into people’s natural desires for competition and achievement.
It’s been around since 2010. Okay, so the concept is not that new, but some of these tools are. Have you ever tried to run a contest at work? It sounds like a great idea. Gets the staff motivated. Builds a little friendly competition. Goals are met, people have fun. Then you have to figure out how to track, measure and post the scores and progress. Ugh! That’s a lot to think about not to mention time consuming, and who has more time, right? There were several people in the seminar that said they used contests at their company. When asked if the contests were hard to manage, the overwhelming response was YES.
Well, there may be a solution. What if you want to track the number of outbound calls your sales department makes? You want to reward the person making the most calls but you want to make sure no one cheats and you’re truly measuring quality calls. The latest version of Encore software from dvsAnalytics adds a ‘Gamification’ piece to the many reports and tools included in the software. You simple tell the software who is playing and what you want to measure and it does the rest for you. You can even build a points system that will allow points to accumulate for each employee. Maybe the points convert into bucks to use to buy things like time off or an extra hour at lunch. The possibilities are endless. The results can be posted to a monitor in the department or to individual desktops. And you don’t have to be the one to post and track the data every day. You can just sit back and watch your happy employees be more productive than ever before. Nothing like a little friendly competition to get people going. As one of the guests in last week’s seminar noted “this can help me manage an ideal that’s been proven effective in our organization.”
In a nutshell, the ‘gamification’ software we saw last week automates tabulations. If you’d like to learn more about this, please contact us through our web page or directly at 502-459-9141. We’d love to show you all the easy ways to make work fun. And isn’t that what everyone wants?
