How to level up your workforce communications with gamification

I never expected the hours I spent as a kid working through Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Brothers on the then-cutting edge Nintendo Entertainment System to eventually be useful experience for me, but today, those questing principles are actually becoming part of the corporate communications repertoire.

And that’s part of the point I’ll be making here — we play for its own sake. It’s its own reward. And that’s a very powerful motivator.

So is it any wonder, really, that we respond so strongly to trends like gamification?

When you think about talking to your workforce today, you have to remember that about 35% of the people in the United States have been born since the World Wide Web was invented, and of those, the biggest part were born after the dot com crash. The digital world is a basic part of our experience. One of the most popular science fiction books of recent years — Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (Steven Spielberg is about to direct the movie version) — is about nothing else. “Videogames,” its narrator says, “are the only thing that make life bearable.”

With the world immersed in these technologies, it’s only natural that they’re going to filter into the workplace. We’ve been watching the emergence of suites of hardware and software that allow for capabilities that were never possible in the past.

Things like Google Tango, for instance — so-called “mixed reality,” which blends real-world images with computer-generated ones so that in the future, your employees may be able to tap into a classroom or sit around a table with their colleagues wherever they may be in your building — or even wherever they may be in the world. Throw in the myriad of services like Slack and Workplace by Facebook, and it should definitely make you stop and think about how many of the processes in your company are still essentially digitized versions of paperwork you used to shuffle and what you could do if you weren’t fettered by the old rules of gravity and linear space.

Technology has enabled huge new opportunities, but the possibilities, we know, can be overwhelming. You know that your repair staff, say, are with your customers every day in their workplaces, seeing the issues they’re having, and you know that, out there, somewhere, technology exists that can capture these interactions and funnel them in useful ways so that the data can be acted upon. But what technology? What data? Where do you start?

The first big thing is to remember the old truism that we get what we measure for. You have to step back and remind yourself of what you’re aiming for — your goals and objectives. That feeds into what tools you’ll choose. And fortunately, among the bewildering array of tools out there, a couple of large “buckets” are becoming clear.

Gamification

Gamification — “the practice of synthesizing the best ideas from gaming, loyalty programs and behavioral economics, with the aim of driving user engagement over indifference” — is now a proven way to communicate with your workforce.

A survey by Salesforce found that “an astounding 71% [of companies using the technique] said that they are seeing anywhere from 11% to 50% increases in measured sales performance.” Salespeople are competitive by nature, of course, and games help visualize their progress. But this technique isn’t only for salespeople:

“Gamification isn’t about turning boring work into a grand quest, or simply providing fun distractions throughout the day; it’s something much more powerful. Gamification is a vehicle of trust that can improve communication and even help employees learn new skill sets: Badges and achievements can be turned into certifications, creating lifelong learners whose improvements bolster individuals (and the company for which they work).”

This article even goes on to give three very simple starting points for gamifying your business:

1. Take full advantage of the power of Slack.

2. Take a page from Foursquare by creating a badge system.

3. Don’t underestimate the smiley face.

Those of who have grown up with computer games — which is increasingly almost all of us — expect this kind of interaction in every area of our life. We expect some coins when we complete a puzzle. It’s how we work. It’s who we are. If we’re not tapping into that, we’re missing out.

Accountability

Another way that technology is upending communications is in the area of who’s doing what. We all know the feeling of the black hole of accountability — efforts are begun, tasks are launched, and then everything disappears into the shadows, forgotten.

Visualization, thankfully, is becoming incredibly sophisticated in this regard. Custom dashboards can pull from databases in real time to tell us exactly where tasks sit and how they’re progressing. Automated reminders can be sent to staff regarding follow-up duties and unmet opportunities.

The good news here is that you probably use some sort of customer relationship management software (CRM), and whatever that software is, off-the-shelf solutions probably exist to implement functions like these. With the right application of communications strategy, it may not be as complex a job as it first appears.

And thanks to the ubiquitous mobile phone, it’s easier than ever to capture those touch points. Just this month, for instance, we learned that mobile internet traffic surpassed desktop internet traffic for the first time. Your employees are now almost never more than a screen tap away from interacting with the company at crucial moments.

Streamlining

When you put things like gamification and accountability into place together, what you find is a workforce communications system that is more efficient, requiring less effort and fewer resources while simultaneously providing better outcomes. Those mobile interactions with your workers can even be made fun through gamification techniques.

Though there are of course associated investment costs, we only have to think back over the years of paper-derived legacy systems to see how many opportunities we’ve missed as a result.

So fire up the creative consoles in your brain, and let’s get to playing! Ready?

Ron Watt Jr is Founder + President of Watt + Company LLC (WATT), a B2B marketing and communications firm serving Fortune 500 clients worldwide, www.watt-co.com.