It can sometimes be really challenging to complete tasks especially if they are repetitive or boring. Our motivation drops, thereby killing our productivity level. Gamification can help to increase your metrics.
Fortunately, there are a bunch of tricks to learn how to stay productive in any situation (check this course), and today we are going to see one of the most powerful, gamification.
More and more companies implement and design a complete workspace based on gamification because the results are completely crazy.
QUICK GAMIFICATION DEFINITION
WHAT IS GAMIFICATION?
Gamification is a science that uses game mechanisms and designs applied to work environment and professional goals.
As you may have noticed, the video games industry is exploding in the last past years, and the last biggest tournament gathered more than 40- million players. Why? Because video games are optimized psychologically to triggers motivation and pleasure, and this is exactly what we will transpose to our work methods to increase productivity.
This step by step guide will help anyone to implement gamification in any workspace in order to boost motivation and performances.
If you are really into productivity, those articles can also be useful to you:
– Everyday quotes to defeat procrastination
– Some must-known time management tips
GAMIFICATION FOR PRODUCTIVITY
1. DEFINE YOUR GOALS
Because gamification is a tool, you need to use it with a clear purpose. Otherwise you may not know if it’s actually useful and efficient. What do you want to reach? More productivity is really broad, try to specify it as clearly as possible. (Smart).
2. DEFINE YOUR GAMIFICATION METRICS
Your metrics are the incarnation of your goals and will be used as the aim of all the challenging system we are going to build, so they need to be really clear and provide immediate feedback. The player must know if he gets closer or further from his goal, just by having a quick look at the metrics. They will tell you if you increase productivity or not.
3. DEFINE THE RULES OF YOUR GAMIFIED SYSTEM
Rules are also important because they are challenging; they ask the player to do something under constraint, and therefore push him to use his creativity and energy to succeed. Rules are everything that the player can or cannot do, and the consequences of those actions. You don’t need a lot of rules to be too complicated, but enough to build a clear environment of action-results.
4. IMPLEMENT STIMULUS
The stimulus can be everything that boosts the player. It can be a reward, a surprise event, a bonus…
5. CREATE COMPETITION
Competition is important as it’s the essence of most games. If it’s not with the others, it’s with the player himself. Competition is what leads to mastery and mastery is what leads to trying again and again in order to get a new skill, proudness, success, or whatever the reward. Creating a competitive environment will add tension to players, and some of them may react intensively to it.
6. REWARD
When he finishes the game, or achieves a great result, a participant should get a reward, and this reward should be proportional to the effort. We may think of materials rewards like money, but sometimes the most memorable rewards are deeper.
7. TEST AND IMPROVE YOUR GAMIFICATION
Once you get your gamified workflow, you need to implement it.
This process needs to be adapted to your environment, and people you are working with. If they are usually used to brutal changes you can implement it as a whole in one time; if there are more stable routine workers, you will have to cut it into pieces to involve them step by step.
Once it’s implemented, it’s important to stay close to the participants, and pay attention to their behaviors and the metrics. Are they more focused, motivated, euphoric? Are some tasks too hard, or not rewarding enough? Are we closer to our goal? Improving will help you to reach the perfect system that is rarely found the first time. Remember your goal is to increase productivity and your metrics will tell you if you are closer or not.
