Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/295251
[ 41 ] APRIL 2014 | www.hrotoday.com Learning A few, simple ground rules can make a big difference to the success of your gamification initiative: 1. Link points to real rewards and recognition. An over-emphasis on points and badges will quickly lead to fatigue among the "players," unless the points actually lead to career growth, financial rewards, and/or peer recognition. 2. Make it relevant to your business. Your gamification initiative should provide direct benefits to the business, and add to the value created by the employee. 3. Consider your demographics. The real benefits accrue when the game is in line with your company policies, vision, and culture. Expectations around user interface, collaboration, sharing, and rewards change dramatically based on geographies, age groups, and industry verticals. Your underlying platform needs to be able to adapt accordingly. 4. Avoid duplication of work for sake of the game. Nothing hurts more than additional overhead on already-stressed employees. 5. Keep it fresh. Even if you have everything ready, deploy only one subset at a time. Users will be thrilled at the continuous updates, and the strategy will help maintain interest when fatigue for the game starts to set in. 6. Create appointment dynamics. Ensure that users have some reason to keep coming back to check on status updates in the game. This is absolutely critical in the initial days when the game is not yet a habit with users. 7. Avoid gaming the game. There is nothing worse than knowing other users can game the system and do better than you. Build enough safeguards and approval workflows. 8. Have an internal champion. Before embarking on the project, ensure there is a passionate champion with direct approval and blessing of senior management. 9. Avoid over-simplification. This is related to points 1 and 2 above. Ensure that the use case you choose to gamify brings some real value add to the organization. 10. Start small and simple. Attempting to change an employee appraisal system that's been in use for a decade can be a very difficult target to achieve, but starting with gamified rewards and recognition and then gently nudging the company toward a new appraisal regime is a better action plan.