Gamification is slowly making inroads into the world of HR, right from recruiting, training, talent management, to all round development of an employee. Despite all the hype and glory, that surround gamification in HR, it is amongst the most misunderstood catch phrases in the industry.
Gamification is used as a strategic tool in HR to incorporate fun elements into the recruitment processes like win-lose psychology, design and gaming contests to understand HR’s ability in dealing with situations and organisational changes to recruit, train and motivate the team better.
Gamification in HR has the potential to change the dynamics of employee engagement, customer recognition, rewards and recognition globally. While the mechanics of gamification has been around as a strategic marketing tool in the industry for years, it is only digital world that has packaged the medium better to be used as a motivational tool for managers.
Why Gamification?
According to a recent report, the gamification market is expected to grow to $5.502 billion in 2018, with an annual CAGR of 67.1 percent from 2013 to 2018. Because of its usefulness in employee behaviour modification, more and more of gaming medium is used in HR to better employee engagement and enhance relationships with candidates and prospects.
Some of the gamification initiatives include PwC’s Bunchball platform for recruiting new employees and Badgeville to retain and engage employees.
According to a recent report by Gallup shows why companies are increasing focus towards gamification to find, hire, recruit, engage and retain the best talent. The study shows 31 percent of employees are engaged at work, 51 percent are disengaged and 17.5 percent actively disengaged.
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Millennials are the least engaged generation with only 28.9 percent engagement as in comparison to Gen X and Boomers showing 32.9 percent engagement at their workplaces.
To bring about a radical change in employee management and talent retention, gamification has been introduced into HR practices by many leading majors. This will help such employees to get more actively engaged into the organisational growth process.
Brian Burke Vice President of Gartner estimates “employee focused gamification applications now exceed customer focused gamification applications. The most significant change that we expect to see in gamification over the next few years is the broad recognition of the opportunities and limitations of gamification.”
Use of Gamification in HR
HR can leverage gamification capabilities to derive most of the team and achieve organisational goals. By gamifying the talent acquisition and hiring process, HRs can reward employees, acknowledge efforts and offer perks to performers for completing each step effectively, and this in turn will dramatically increase onboarding efficiency.
HR teams can also use gamification to incentivise employees for referrals and rewards top recruiters for bringing in good candidates on board of a company; this plays an active role in talent acquisition.
Gamification can also be used as a motivational tool to encourage, monitor, understand and reward employees for maintaining a great track record of performance. HRs can also influence a positive corporate culture with gamification for cross departmental collaboration, encourage participation in company-wide volunteer programs and offer product improvement suggestions.
While paperwork is unavoidable for a HR to manage benefits, payroll, leaves and attendance, enrolment forms and expense reports, some of these tasks can be allocated such as form filling to peers in return for tangible incentives and thus save on productive time.
Overall, gamification helps for creation of more open, interactive and actively engaged workspaces with a culture of collaboration in complete alignment with the company goals to strategic business objectives at the earliest possible time.
Also read: Managers need to engage with employees too, say business leaders
