If you’re not already familiar with gamification in HR, you might be a little late to the party. The concept revolves around providing employees with systems that implement elements of competition, milestones and rewards into everyday processes. It’s most commonly used in learning, turning those long, boring health & safety training manuals into engaging quizzes or point-and-click puzzles.

It’s not just learning, though – if it was, this article would fit better on our sister show’s website! Gamification can be used throughout your processes, from something as intrinsic as hitting KPIs to encouraging wellbeing among your staff.

The data shows it works, too, with 90% of employees claiming they’re more productive when applying gamification, and companies using gamification achieving seven times the profitability of those using none.

However, there are risks involved in introducing these systems poorly. Some may feel patronised by a burst of virtual confetti when they complete an everyday task, and less competitive employees will be disinterested – or worse, disillusioned – by having their work pitted against that of their colleagues. It’s not enough just to play: there has to be something to play for.

Mechanics, Dynamics & Aesthetics

This framework, shortened to MDA, represents the three pillars that will decide whether your gamification will be successful. This framework is actually taken from traditional game design; it’s used to ensure a game is well-rounded, interesting and fun to play.

Applying the same principles to your gamification initiatives will mean you’re prioritising the engagement of your employees with the system itself over anything else. This avoids the appearance of arbitrary rewards systems masquerading as gamification. If all you do is attach points to your employees’ work and let them spend them on food and cinema vouchers, soon people will decide they can live without seeing the latest entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and disengage with the system entirely. The enjoyment and satisfaction of using the system must be its own reward first – then you can introduce more tangible ones.

Mechanics

These describe the functions and features of the game itself. It’s the baseline of what makes a game a game in the first place, all to do with controls and progression. A strong set of mechanics is essential to engaging your employees.

How are achievements represented? Through points, badges, trophies, ranks? Do employees have some kind of avatar that grows or develops alongside them, like a flourishing tree or a maturing animal? Without a representation of how well someone’s doing or how far they’ve come, they’ll struggle to be motivated to continue.

How is the game controlled? Do people take turns? Do they fill out questions, click on buttons - do they have to do something out in the real world before logging it in the game? Do they need an app on their phone? If employees don’t interact with the system itself, and are instead assigned point values externally, they’re not really playing a game at all, are they?

What do milestones look like? Once employees achieve a certain score or complete a certain challenge, do they go up a level? Receive a new title? Are there quests to complete or company records to beat? Similar to achievements, there needs to be a function through which additional challenge is introduced. There’s only so many times you can complete the first level of Super Mario Bros. before getting bored and turning off the Nintendo.

Dynamics

The dynamics of a game are best thought of as the “why”. Why should someone spend time on this? What skills will they develop, what lessons will they learn, what challenges will they overcome? As they progress through the game, are their observation skills improving? Their critical thinking? Will they begin to better understand the company’s products and services?

This point is where you introduce elements of competition and collaboration. Are people working in teams or by themselves? If they are in teams, why? What will collaboration on this task produce or teach? Is success completely dependent on skill or knowledge, or do you want to introduce a certain amount of chance to keep things exciting?

What’s motivating people to progress through the game? Is there a reward of some kind? Will there be consequences for failure? It’s important to note that while these rewards or consequences are best tied to something from the outside world, they shouldn’t gatekeep opportunities. Maybe there’s a snack bar that only gold-level players have access to, for example, but you shouldn’t use someone’s game rank to criticise them in a performance review. If someone feels that playing the game is mandatory for their career, that would take away from the fun. And if it isn’t fun, then what’s the point at all?

Aesthetics

Your game’s aesthetics are where you place the faceless components of your game in an emotional context. The ship in Space Invaders isn’t just popping balloons, it’s protecting Earth from an alien invasion. Pac-Man isn’t wandering around a maze for the hell of it, he’s trying to survive the onslaught of the ghosts hunting him down.

Here is where you produce an emotional response from your employees. In the above examples, the introduction of threat produces fear, while the idea of protecting Earth gives a sense of duty, all adding to the player’s motivation to continue in these games (which both happen to be designed without an endpoint in mind).

We’re not saying you should scare your employees into playing your game. But, how do you want your employees to feel when playing and progressing? How will you shape its look to produce that effect? Maybe as people overcome challenges, they climb a mountain, eliciting a feeling of pride and achievement. Maybe it’s styled like a sports tournament, so people are competing for recognition as the best in the business. Maybe the whole thing is set in space, producing a sense of exploration of the unknown in an environment of technological advancement – this would be well-used in an onboarding context, as fresh talent is brought into a new environment and tasked with familiarising themselves with the business.

Put together in the right way, your gamification’s Mechanics, Dynamics and Aesthetics will each complement each other and produce an experience your employees will be genuinely excited to engage with.

Gamification in Action

We’ve been using a lot of technical language to describe hypothetical situations, but how could you actually put them to use? Well, in the study Level Up Your Strategy: Towards a Descriptive Framework for Meaningful Enterprise Gamification, author Umar Ruhi describes one company’s gamification of customer calls. Players were given virtual customers to interact with, who would give a random complaint of some kind that players then had to deal with. This drew on and expanded on their objection handling skills, while the randomised element kept them on their toes. The employees reported that solving these customer complaints in a controlled environment not only let them practice their skills and knowledge, but gave them the confidence to handle the inevitable curveballs that would later be sent their way by real customers.

That’s one specific example, but here are a few quick ideas you can use to get started on your own project:

• For every support ticket a member of the IT team closes, they earn a ‘ticket’ to spin a Wheel of Fortune that can win them a number of different prizes
• Over the course of a month, the Sales department is split into teams for a virtual Olympics, with Bronze, Silver and Gold medals representing deals of a certain size
• Compliance training represented by a pirate’s search for treasure, with each clue on the map being compliance-based riddles
• A company “pub quiz”, where employees split into teams to answer questions based around the industry your company serves and the services it provides
• An event marketing campaign mapped onto an adventurer’s quest to find a lost kingdom, with each milestone represented by some obstacle the adventurer must overcome
• A fitness movie club, where participants need to set personal bests on a fitness app to earn an invite to a cinema outing at the end of the month

Conclusion

At the end of the day, gamification isn’t all fun and games. It simply isn’t enough to slap a points system on a multiple-choice quiz and hope that will produce a huge spike in employee engagement. Implementing real gamification requires you to design an experience from the inside out; you need to keep in mind what you want people to do, how you want them to feel when they do it, and what they should learn throughout the journey.

Achieving this is difficult and not something to be undertaken lightly. If you’re considering implementing gamification into your processes and would like some guidance, there’ll be some fantastic businesses at HR Technologies UK – and Learning Technologies, too –  who deal in just that. If you haven’t already, register for your free visitor’s pass today to join us at ExCeL London on the 23rd & 24th of April.