Moving to a remote work model is a great way to minimize your overhead costs and enlist the best talent, but it comes with its own distinct problems.
One of the most prominent is creating a sense of culture and drive within your company.
With your workers spread throughout the world, the workday can often seem detached and isolated.
But one way to remedy that issue is to employ gamification.
By turning objectives into competitive and collaborative games, you can engender a sense of management and a more solid workplace culture that otherwise might not be present.
Here are six strategies for incorporating gamification into your remote work model.
1) Identify Your Objectives
What is your reason for bringing gamification to the table?
The process will cost you time and money, so it’s worth understanding what your objectives are and creating metrics that allow you to determine whether the gamification process is improving the workplace.
One of the main reasons that remote companies use gamification is to promote worker engagement.
A survey conducted in 2014 determined that a mere 29% of workers feel engaged by their work, and that’s an issue that’s estimated to cost between $450 and $550 billion in the United States alone.
But engagement isn’t the only reason for adding gamification to your business model.
Whether you’re looking to increase productivity, provide a morale boost to your employees during crunch time, or establish concrete metrics that your management teams can use to track employee success, gamification can help improve this.
And establishing your goals in concrete terms
can help you track progress over time, whether you measure that in terms of
employee satisfaction surveys, project milestones, or employee retention rates.
2) Decide on a Platform
Every competitive game has a means of scorekeeping.
Whether that takes the form of a scoreboard at a basketball game, a kill/death ratio in a game of Call of Duty, or a high score table in Space Invaders, clear scoring metrics provide a sense of accomplishment that’s more directly satisfying than periodic workplace assessments or praise from managers.
It also puts employee progress into concrete terms that managers can assess, and that’s an important factor when you’re dealing with remote workers.
Good scorekeeping means establishing fair goals across your entire workforce that you can track in real-time, and that’s why it’s important to settle on a single platform.
There are several gamification platforms available for businesses today and finding the right one will depend on your specific business model.
- RedCritterTracker is an open-ended system that’s highly customizable to your workplace and allows you to establish specific milestones and issue badges accordingly.
- Todoist offers something different in the form of its Karma feature that tracks and visualizes each employee’s productivity. Employees can collect – and lose – their Karma points, and ultimately reach new Karma levels.
- HabitRPG, a fully immersive gaming experience, visualizes objectives and challenges as a fantasy roleplaying game and encourages employee cooperation to achieve larger goals.
While company
culture can often seem vaguely defined in a remote workplace, framing the
experience as what’s essentially an online game of Dungeons and Dragons can help employees see themselves as part of a
larger and more concrete group.
3) Don’t Neglect the Rewards
In the day of arcade games, the reward for success was seeing your initials on the high score screen.
But modern games have developed more tangible reward systems.
Competitive shooters offer players new weapons and skins as they progress, while roleplaying games have characters becoming stronger at each level.
High scores and badges can go a long way towards encouraging your remote staff, but a small investment helps with employee morale.
A simple gift card, a monthly bonus, or even a charitable
contribution in an employee’s name can translate
success on the scoreboard into a tangible sense of reward.
4) Personalize the Game
In a remote workplace, chances are that many workers will have never met many of their peers in person, and managers can often feel like faceless entities.
That’s why it’s important to display gamification results in a list of graphs, charts, scoreboards, and static rewards.
A hands-on approach is necessary to keep morale high and your staff engaged, and that means that you can’t just set the gamification system to the side and let it do all the heavy lifting.
Take the time to get to know your employees.
Be sure to provide public praise to individuals even outside of the metrics tracked by your gamification platform and try to provide rewards matching your employees’ interests.
Any gameplay system will have its flaws, and chances are good that an employee may excel while not achieving the metrics for success defined by your platform.
Give praise where praise is due in situations like these.
Understanding their hobbies and platforms, you can create a more harmonious environment and make the game feel like something customized to their experiences.
5) Diversify Your Goals
As games become more sophisticated, so do the tasks that reward players in them.
Massively multiplayer online games may reward characters for killing monsters, but they also provide tangible rewards for healing teammates, crafting equipment, mastering musical instruments, and harvesting materials.
Similarly, success on the job doesn’t just boil down to sales numbers and development milestones.
Tasks like helping coworkers, catching up on administrative work, and fostering positivity are important tasks for the overall health of workplace culture.
And while they often get overlooked in traditional workplaces, that issue only compounds in remote, gamified workplaces where a set of narrow criteria measures success.
Get creative with
goals you establish for your remote workers and pay attention to objectives that foster a sense of community and
personal growth besides raw quotas and sales numbers.
6) Emphasize the Friendly in Friendly Competition
Competition can drive employees to work harder, but an environment where everyone is competing against one another solely to sit at the top of a scoreboard is one that can breed acrimony and fracture your team culture.
That’s not to say that you shouldn’t encourage employees to outmatch one another, but it’s also important to set out tasks that create a sense of unity.
Putting teams in competition with each other is a great way to create a bond of camaraderie between different layers of your company, but also take measures to set out cooperative goals for the whole workplace.
When everyone at the company feels like they’re working together to accomplish a larger objective, they’ll be more inclined to reach out to people on the other side of the world and provide help where they can.
You can help foster this sense of community through the use of internal message boards, Slack channels, and social media groups.
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This is a guest post by Joe Peters. Joe is a Baltimore-based freelance writer and an ultimate techie. When he is not working his magic as a marketing consultant, this incurable tech junkie devours the news on the latest gadgets and binge-watches his favorite TV shows. Follow him on @bmorepeters
