Gamification is more than just a buzzword. Studies have shown around 90% of employees feel more productive when they’re involved in gamified activities. Similarly, 72% of staff say gamification inspires them to work harder and 48% say it makes them more engaged.
The challenge for most companies is finding the right method of gamification to encourage healthy, engaging competition, without excess stress.
Fortunately for today’s business leaders, wallboard and dashboard technology could be the ultimate tool for gamification. Even hybrid and remote workers can check their stats, receive notifications, and participate in competitions. Here’s what you need to know about using your wallboards for gamification.
The Benefits of Using your Wallboard for Gamification
A properly designed, brightly lit overhead-wallboard is an excellent tool for gamification purposes because its presence will naturally draw attention to the factors you want your audience to be most focused on. With a customizable Geomant wallboard view for instance, you can display top-ranked employees (both in and out of the office) using metrics like first-time resolution or customer satisfaction scores while encouraging individuals or teams to aim for the top spot with prizes. This data could compliment other key performance metrics already displaying on your wallboards or can be displayed in a solo, targeted view.
Wallboards provide numerous widgets, interactive elements, and multimedia features to easily share your teams’ progress and data in real-time, customizable and visually appealing displays. They are perfect for keeping team members informed and focused wherever they are, while simultaneously getting them invested in their performance.
According to Harvard Business School, competitive challenges maintain and create efficiency in an environment where staff members may otherwise become disengaged over time. The added competition also positively increases psychological and physiological activation on a biological level, preparing the mind and body for higher performance.
Unfortunately, it’s easy to miss the mark with your wallboard strategy. If you want to see the best results, you need the right plan.
How to Use Gamification and Wallboards the Right Way
Effective gamification in today’s evolving workplace demands four things:
- The right technology: The correct wallboard technology needs to be interactive, feature rich, customizable, and suited to the specific needs of the business. It should be accessible across multiple platforms, to remote/hybrid workers and your on-site staff. Your wallboard needs to be fast and efficient at conveying near real-time scores and statuses as accurately and often as possible. A clear, easy-to-understand dashboard is a must-have.
- Motivational rewards: Over time, employees may come to feel the biggest reward for their hard work is the new skills and efficiencies they develop. However, you can immediately improve engagement by offering the right incentives. A prize that is considered valuable to your team (from a better parking spot to a nominal gift card) will make the competition feel more engaging. To make sure your reward makes the right impact, ask employees what they’d like to receive.
- A great strategy: There are various different ways to gamify your wallboard and contact center. One option is to split your staff into teams and have them compete for a specific score on something such as customer satisfaction or an NPS rating. Another option is to have employees compete individually with a variety of opportunities to rise up the incentive ladder. It all depends on how your staff prefers to work.
- Existing gamification system: Explore using this technology to display your existing reports, scores and progress displays using native features. This could be through an embedded web browser window or by extracting individual key metrics for a user designed display framing already existing gamification key performance metrics.
Questions to Ask when Embracing Wallboard Gamification
There’s no one-size-fits-all strategy for effective gamification, but you can improve your chances of success by asking the right questions as you build your plan. To begin, answer these questions:
What do you need to measure?
The purpose of gamification in the contact center is to get your employees excited about achieving great results in a specific area. This means you need to know which metrics you’re going to be focused on.
Think about your current goals as a business and what’s important for your team to work on right now. You can look at connected metrics which may impact the customer experience such as time it takes for agents to answer calls or how strong is the first call resolution ratio.
Name or Number?
Displaying and singling out team members by name may or may not work in your environment. Wallboard solutions such as, Geomant Wallboard, offer options to frame the gamification data using actual team member names. Or, if privacy is a concern, you can choose to show Agent ID’s or some other private identifier that only the team member and manager would know.
Who wins?
How are you going to identify the winner of your competitions? You might want to keep people working towards a higher satisfaction score at all times in your business, but this doesn’t mean you should have a contest that goes on forever. Set a deadline for each “game”, so your employees have something to work towards.
Having short sprints of competition can help to reduce the pressure on team members and keep the game exciting. For instance, it’s easy to lose interest in having the best call resolution scores for the entire year but having a winner every month means everyone – even the people who lagged behind the moment before, can have multiple chances to win.
How are you going to show off your scoreboard?
Everyone in your team needs a way to keep track of where they are on the scoreboard. It’s worth having a central display where everyone can see the people in the top spots for some of the most important metrics.
A bright, colorful wallboard with plenty of visual information will keep your employees excited and engaged by the gamification process. Don’t make your metrics look dull and boring by just publishing a list of numbers. You could also look into things like broadcast messages and announcements to let everyone know when something changes in the competitor line-up.
How will you reward your teams?
Choosing rewards can be a difficult part of gamification, as it’s difficult for some business leaders to know what it really takes to motivate their staff. Having a great parking space up for grabs won’t be much use if half of your employees are currently working from home. Similarly, while a gift card to a local steakhouse might appeal to some people, it won’t attract the vegans and vegetarians among your staff. Choosing the wrong prizes risks isolating members of your team.
Speak to your employees and find out what they’d most like to get from you if they managed to win something. You could even consider giving employees “points” for each win they get, so they can trade the points in for much bigger prizes at the end of the year.
Remember to Optimize Over Time
The results of your gamification tactics will give you a better view of where you can work harder at boosting engagement. Create a feedback loop in your business when implementing your new gamification methods and ask for reviews from your employees on how they feel about the experience.
Track performance metrics carefully over time and ask yourself whether outcomes are improving or whether they’re diminishing in some areas. The combination of employee feedback and quantitative data will help to ensure your strategy is still pushing your business in the right direction.
Need help setting up the perfect gamified wallboard? Reach out to Geomant today to check out our dynamic, interactive, and intuitive wallboard displays.
