Your workers’ hearts start pounding faster, and their excitement grows with the speed of an avalanche sweeping down the mountain. They are ready to shift the Earth with their bare hands and achieve the impossible.
What can bring so much enthusiasm into your employees’ work routine?
The answer lies in gamification.
Let’s specify what it is, consider its psychological influence on employees’ morale, and see how you can gamify your workplace in a cringe-free manner. No matter what work mode you stick to (in-office, hybrid, or entirely remote), these are universal workplace gamification tips and examples to learn from.
So, what are you waiting for? Take the leap!
What Are Gamification Elements in the Workplace?
Workplace gamification is applying game design elements and principles to the work setting. The purpose is to make the whole process more interactive and enjoyable for employees. Simply put, it’s like turning routine tasks into an exciting game-like experience.
The following game mechanics can help you do that:
☑ Challenge, quest, or mission
☑ Score/point system
☑ Level-based system
☑ Leaderboard
☑ Badge
☑ Award or reward
Let’s review the most frequently implemented ones.
Points or Scores
Employers typically use a score or point system to gamify the work environment: employees earn points for completing specific tasks or projects.
Look at the following scenario with earning points in a sales team:
☑ Hitting targets for three months in a row = 200 points
☑ Finishing a sales training module = 30 points
☑ Helping a teammate with a sales presentation = 25 points
☑ Suggesting an out-of-the-box sales strategy that gets adopted = 85 points
Once workers stockpile their points to reach a certain number, they can swap them for rewards:
500 points = A prime parking spot
700 points = One extra day off
1,000 points = A chance to pick a preferred project
Leaderboards
A leaderboard is a visual representation or ranking that demonstrates team members’ performance relative to one another based on particular criteria or accumulated points.
Source: Adact.me
It’s one of the most vital components of workplace gamification. Here’s why: Leaderboards drive a competitive spirit by publicly recognizing the team’s top performers. Moreover, they help employees map out their milestones and set clear goals for the future.
Badges
Another widespread element that gamifies a workplace is a badge system. It implies that employees receive badges (physical or digital) for particular achievements.
The badge types can be as follows:
☑ For leadership → Visionary Leader
☑ For innovation → Innovator of the Month
☑ For societal contribution → Philanthropy Pioneer
☑ For collaboration → Teamwork Titan
☑ For skill mastery → Negotiation Ninja
For example:
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) gamified corporate training with a digital badge program. Their workers can earn badges for course completion in three levels: Fast Start, Specialist, and Administrator.
Source: HPE
Of course, the badge system may differ from company to company. You may also have it enabled by default in your task management system.
Another example:
In Nimble Work Management platform, your team members can earn a Gold, Silver, or Bronze Badge for completed tasks.
Nimble’s gamification feature motivates positive behavior through a “Thank-Talk-Celebrate” approach, allowing individuals to earn dynamic Gold, Silver, or Bronze Badges, fostering a culture of recognition and engagement. Give it a try here.
How does Gamification Improve Employee Morale?
Now, let’s see how gamification may work like a magical elixir to revitalize your workers and spur them to perform better in their roles.
Spoiler alert: There’s no magic about it. All benefits take root in physiology and psychology.
1. Relieving Stress
From a physiological perspective, gamified activities provoke a release of endorphins, aka “feel-good hormones” or “natural painkillers.” These tiny chemicals can soothe nervousness and dispel stress, contributing to employees’ mental well-being.
At the same time, they act as mood boosters and may even create a state of euphoria. This closely correlates with building a happier workplace.
2. Boosting Employee Happiness and Productivity
A gamified work environment automatically translates into a happy and high-performance workplace.
To back it up, nearly nine out of ten employees feel happier and more productive when they use gamification at work. In percentage numbers, these are 88% and 89%, respectively.
3. Evoking a Sense of Achievement
Now, let’s take the psychological aspect of reaching an objective or accomplishing something.
Successful workplace gamification helps employees feel like achievers. They experience satisfaction, fulfillment, and self-worth with positive thoughts like these: “Wow, I’ve accumulated so many points this month!” or “Kudos to me! I reached this OKR goal, landing me in the top three of the leaderboard.”
4. Encouraging and Motivating
If you struggle to motivate your team—gamify.
In fact, 72% of people claim that gamification encourages them to perform tasks and work harder.
Here’s how it works. A gamified workplace often presupposes motivational elements like rewards for task completion. When you lay out tasks in a game-like format with prizes or awards, your team members will be more eager to participate because such activities become rewarding.
Then, there’s a theory of self-efficacy suggested by Psychologist Albert Bandura. It states that tackling challenging problems strengthens people’s belief in their capabilities and inspires them to accept even tougher challenges in the future.
5. Cultivating Team Spirit
Gamification in the workplace may also include team-based activities that foster a culture of collaboration and teamwork. When employees work together to solve a problem or find a solution, they grow mutual trust like a muscle supporting transparency and honesty in communication.
Besides, competition evokes the feeling of fellowship when it is external (between two or more teams) rather than internal (within one team).
Still, gamification doesn’t undermine employee relationships even if teammates race neck-to-neck as contestants. It rather creates a healthy competitive atmosphere.
How to Gamify Your Work Environment in a Non-Awkward Way
1. Never gamify for the sake of hopping on the gamification trend.
When companies gamify just in the name of trendiness, Albert Kim, VP of Talent at Checkr, refers to this phenomenon as “synthetic gamification” in the workplace, a forced and unnatural process. He explains:
“Gamifying work for the sake of it results in shallow engagement. In this case, employees will participate without genuine involvement and emotional response. And if gamification is insincere, it is usually impersonal, too. It totally dehumanizes the workplace. Employees may feel they are treated like elements in the system rather than unique personalities.”
For that not to happen, Albert Kim advises employers to “inject maximum authenticity in workplace gamification.”
For example:
Suppose you want to help new hires adapt to the workspace faster and begin with an ice-breaking game. Think of unforced and creative ice-breakers to kickstart a natural dialogue and shatter an invisible awkwardness barrier between team members. Also, make participation voluntary and let your workers join in whenever they feel ready.
2. Be Mindful of Workers’ Personality Types
Do you gamify work activities to match every employee’s psychological profile and behavioral style?
Consider several employee personality types and appropriate workplace gamification strategies for each:
☑ The achiever: Keen to achieve different levels and earn badges or awards like “Employee of the Month.”
☑ The socializer: Works best in group activities and team challenges and enjoys public recognition and teamwork awards.
☑ The introvert: Feels more comfortable during individual challenges and games without too much noise and communication with teammates.
☑ The collector: Prefers collecting badges, rewards, or other in-game assets.
☑ The leader: Gladly accepts team leadership challenges and takes the leader’s role in workplace games. The best motivators for this personality type are awards that acknowledge leadership skills (e.g., the “Best Team Leader” badge).
Nora Sudduth, Founder & Owner at Nora Sudduth Coaching, integrates this approach in her training programs and notes, “You can’t expect all employees to have the same psychological profile. So, more often than not, you’ll have to adapt your gamified scenarios at work to morph them into something very specific that meets your employees’ expectations and needs.”
3. Prepare Job-relevant Challenges
When you gamify work in your team, it’s better to organize challenging activities that link well with your employees’ roles and organizational goals.
As one of the company’s team leaders, Chris Aubeeluck, Head of Sales and Marketing at Osbornes Law, is known for his role-driven activities when challenging his team members. He emphasizes, “Legal marketing requires creativity and ambition to push boundaries and outshine the competition. That’s when job-oriented challenges push our law firm marketers and sales reps to think outside the box, brainstorm extraordinary ideas, and experiment more enthusiastically.”
Here are several challenges for marketers (disregarding the niche) from Chris Aubeeluck:
☑ Lead Generation Quest
☑ SEO Sprint
☑ Content Creation Marathon
☑ Influencer Collaboration Hunt
☑ Email Marketing Challenge
☑ Client Testimonial Collector
For example:
In 2024, the Tata Group (one of their core values is innovation) launched an idea competition, the Tata Imagination Challenge, with certificates and gift vouchers.
Source: Tatahoodies
Earlier, the company had the Tata Innovation Challenge, focusing on employees’ innovative ideas and solutions.
4. Personalize Rewards
In the words of Sergey Taver, Marketing Manager at Precision Watches, “Personalized rewards, from extra childcare days to x-day trips to luxury gift certificates, can be super-motivational in gamified workplaces, and even more so when selected thoughtfully and individually. The anchor point here is personalization: tailoring them to the individual tastes and needs of every worker.”
But how can you know what your team members want and need?
Simply ask them. Build a continuous feedback loop with surveys or polls to discover their reward preferences.
Alternatively, create a “market” (list) of rewards for your workers to choose from.
For example:
Vivid implements gamification with V-Points earned for above-and-beyond actions. Employees can later exchange them for gifts in the Vivid Store based on their preferences, from tech goodies (laptops, headphones, scooters, etc.) to Vivid merchandise (hoodies, water bottles, etc.).
Source: Vivid
Virtually, Vivid coined an internal currency (V-point) and created a marketplace to redeem points.
5. Add Game Elements to Team-building Activities
It’s not only routine workdays that need a flicker of gamification.
Gamify team-building events, too. This will make them more joyful and exciting and, therefore, memorable and impactful.
Grab the following gamified team-building ideas:
☑ Quest rooms
☑ Puzzles, quizzes, or trivia with points
☑ Role-playing games (e.g., Mock Courtroom Trial for lawyers or Code Break Simulation for web developers)
☑ Scavenger hunts
☑ Blitz tournaments between teams
☑ Sports contests
The only thing left to note is this recommendation from Roman Zrazhevskiy, Founder & CEO at MIRA Safety:
“While using gamification for team-building, tailor it to your employees’ interests. For instance, our team is obsessed with preparedness-for-all and survival games. That’s why we prefer tactical adventure races and endurance competitions to try out our skills and strengthen bonds between team members.”
For example:
Team MIRA participated in the “Wolverine 5K” contest. This competition tests orienteering skills, speed, and endurance through tactical tasks based on the Red Dawn movie.
Source: YouTube
Let’s say your employees love sports. Wouldn’t Team Olympics with a series of outdoor games be a wonderful team-building idea for them?
Or in case you have gamers on your team, they would definitely enjoy video game tournaments or AR/VR games.
Gamify Your Way to Employee Success
Gamification for a workplace is like fuel for an engine—it keeps employees engaged and motivated and lets them drive your corporate performance.
You may turn every task into a game, yet remember to make it worth playing. And if you want to tighten the grip on your projects, use Nimble’s work management solution and gamify it with its built-in Badges feature. Give it a try here.