Why employees engagement?
There is extensive scientific literature on the relationship between employees engagement and companies’ results. The higher the engagement, the higher the results: the higher the results, the higher the profits. With this linear correlation, how easy or not, it is to enhance people’s engagement at their daily tasks?
Easy, it´s like playing.
It seems that gamifying some parts of their routine tasks can help boost their performance, but what is “Gamification”?
In a nutshell, gamification is the application of elements of game playing (e.g. point scoring, competition with others, and rules of play) to other areas of work. Companies can use gamification to train employees in a fun way that encourages motivation, competition, and solidarity as well as to motivate workers and optimise the workforce. It also helps to gather data that can be used for actionable insights into a business.
At Barcelona Ambassadors, we feel the need to tailor incentive trips so that they also include gamification components such as:
- Competition; igniting the fire of competition is a tried-and-true method of motivation for most (if not all) employees;
- Tangible achievement: some employees need more than just the satisfaction of a job well done to motivate action. Awarding badges for completion and mastery could make all the difference;
- Group sharing and collaboration; imagine that an employee gets stuck on a specific quiz question or activity, she/he might give up and disengage from the situation, but imagine if she/he had the capacity to use tokens or points toward asking a group of colleagues for their inputs. Social tools make collaboration simpler, creating a symbiotic relationship between the learner who needs help and the learner who wants to demonstrate his knowledge base.
- testing for knowledge; social gaming is the ultimate test for where each employee falls in the pack. Sizing up proficiency against other co-workers helps each learner understand his or her strengths and weaknesses.
- Feedback looping; don’t forget that social gaming also offers benefits for leadership and management. Scores, leader boards, and badges are simple ways for management to see real-time feedback in form of proficiency and engagement. Issuing feedback and pointers then become more effective and personalised, based on a learner’s actual performance.
Gamifying incentive trips allows the employees to boost their motivation and engagement whilst having fun and discovering new things through authentic experiences.
