When it comes to organizing a corporate challenge, gamification allows you to use game mechanisms to boost your teams' motivation and commitment. To do this, you first need to identify the levers of engagement, i.e. what will really mobilize them according to their temperament. These levers can be identified by means of various tests adapted to the company's needs, and then activated as part of a challenge. Gamification is a key strategy for maximizing the effectiveness of these challenges.
Are you new to the concept of corporate gamification?
Alexandre Duarte, French gamification expert and co-author of "La Boîte à outils de la gamification", warns that "Gamification is a serious, forward-looking subject, and you need to get on board before your competitors do". Gamification in business can significantly transform the way challenges are perceived and engaged by teams.
Gamification consists of "applying game mechanisms to a process, an application or a situation, in order to achieve specific objectives. Its primary aim is to engage people over time, essentially to build loyalty, motivate, train, involve, challenge and reward."
Indeed, gaming is known to generate positive psychological states in players, notably by releasing "feel-good" hormones such as dopamine.
Frédéric Roulleau, Managing Director of the Tibco Group and a gaming enthusiast, explains that all over the world, teams of gamers form in a matter of minutes: they play, win together, and leave with a reward, even though they don't know each other and are thousands of kilometers apart. Enough to make any manager dream! Among the many mechanisms of video games, Frédéric Roulleau mentions 5 in particular, which should be applied in business, and which you can find by reading our article dedicated to the integration of gamification in business.
Aware of these issues, some managers think they're doing the right thing by adding a few gamification elements to their corporate challenges, such as points and badges. But that's not enough; it's not what motivates employees. They need to be stimulated where they feel that they are being touched at the deepest level, hence the need to identify their levers of engagement.
Following the example of other international gamification experts, Alexandre Duarte has identified 9 engagement levers to generate emotions and thus appeal to the main human motivations.
His company, Fidbak, offers a quick test that enables test-takers to see their engagement levers in graphical form:
To optimize the effectiveness of your challenge, we recommend that you get to know the profiles of your participants. There are a number of tools at your disposal: the Bartle test, the Bewizyu test, inspired by Bartle, or a more complete personality test with AssessFirst.
On the strength of their experience in organizing challenges, Objow and Fidbak have found that to engage an employee, the challenge must mobilize at least two levers of corporate gamification. They also advise varying the forms of challenge to reach all employees: for example, group challenges to stimulate collaboration, individual challenges for competitive employees, etc.
Among the most interesting engagement levers that can easily be exploited for a challenge are :
Ø Competence & Mastery: The need to distinguish oneself, to improve and to surpass oneself. Points, badges, levels or grades are recognized and very effective mechanisms for measuring and comparing performance based on different criteria. Beware, however, that an employee may not succeed in a challenge. To avoid disappointment, which can be a source of disengagement, we advise you to make sure that each person has an overall objective and several sub-objectives that correspond to various skills.
Ø Meaning: Give meaning to your challenge, if it represents a real stake for the company, for its development, for its teams or for its customers. It can also be for ecological, humanitarian or associative purposes.
Ø Scarcity: Some information is made available only to certain players, which may give them an advantage in the game. It may be necessary to meet specific conditions to have access to it. New rules may also be offered for a few days (points are doubled for 2 days, a bonus is offered to the best player on a specific date...)
Ø Immersion: Creating a challenge around a specific theme can be an interesting lever. It is necessary to build an immersive experience, with images, videos, stories, characters, animations, a journey... We can even go further by organizing a role-playing game where the usual hierarchies will be shaken up, around an exit. Among the greatest movie actors, there are many shy and introverted people who transform themselves through acting on stage! Thanks to immersion, an introverted collaborator, under the cover of a fictional character, could reveal himself!
Ø Curiosity & Unpredictability: Rewards, bonuses or malus, for example, can be assigned randomly. The use of suspense is also very effective: "something's up, get ready..."
Ø Loss aversion: This may be related to the fear of losing a position in a ranking or the fear of missing out on an important opportunity/bonus during the allotted time. Or simply the fear of being ranked lower than your colleagues on the challenge, or of losing your team. Setting up various challenges can also allow each employee to stand out and get a reward in due time.
Ø Social influence: the possibility of being recognized, of having a special status. Multi-criteria rankings are often very effective in achieving this. We also find the notions of team (feeling of pride to be in a team rather than another / feeling of belonging and group spirit), of role to play / responsibility (ambassador, captain...) and finally the likes and comments, now known by all.
There are dozens of models and mechanisms available to gamify your challenges. However, we advise you to focus on the quality and relevance of the model and mechanisms you choose, rather than their quantity. Above all, they must not be perceived as infantilizing by your teams.
The gamification of a corporate challenge can't be improvised! Whatever your level of gamification maturity, the Objow solution has been designed to adapt to your organization, its context and its needs, and to offer mechanics adapted to your different player profiles, with quantitative and qualitative objectives, friendly rankings where only the top X players will appear, etc.
Objow helps you to manage and animate the performance of all your teams in a simple and fun way, and boost their commitment, all year round. To find out more, please contact our teams.
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