Gamification in the workplace: supercharging the employee experience to drive productivity (Introduction)

Applying Bartle's taxonomy of player types to your workplace gamification strategy can transform the employee experience. 

You can run but you can’t hide #

Since covering gamification in this blog last year, we have seen a big increase in the number of companies engaging us to see how gamification can help them. Why? Gamification is everywhere. The use of game-like concepts in enterprise-level applications is not new and more companies are becoming open to the concept. We see gamification used all around us such as in loyalty schemes and completion trackers when we create profiles. Gamification could make a real difference to your organisation as more engaged employees elevate their productivity and employee retention improves.

The aim is real return on investment for clients and we avoid features that seem exciting but do not speak to the user’s motivations. At the heart of gamification is the user experience (UX), taking into account the goals of efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction and extending further by adding engagement. Even meticulously planned UX can fall short from a lack of user adoption if users don’t enjoy interacting with the syste

Raising the game with Bartle’s Player Types #

By providing staff with engaging touchpoints within the tools that are (more often than not) being used on a daily basis, businesses have the ability to redefine the employee experience and motivate staff to deliver a greater customer experience. Greater customer experiences lead to better brand perception and greater customer loyalty. But we first need to understand  the ‘gamers’ and their motivations. Richard Bartle created a useful method for categorising people based on how they like to play games. By studying your user base, you can discover which of the four categories is their dominant trait and create features to suit them.

Killers #

• Approximately 1% of players.
• In gaming, these players love topping the leaderboard and crushing other players to get there.
• At work, these players want to be better than everyone else such as outselling or outperforming their colleagues.

Achievers #

• Approximately 10% of players.
• In gaming, these players want to earn as many points and badges as possible.
• At work, these players want new opportunities and to grow their understanding of their project/company.

Socialisers #

• Approximately 80% of players.
• In gaming these players enjoy playing with others and collaborating to achieve larger tasks.
• At work, these players love sharing ideas with their colleagues and interacting with people.

Explorers #

• Approximately 10% of players.
• In gaming, these players love exploring large maps and seeing new things.
• At work, these players want new opportunities and to grow their understanding of their project/company.

Shall we play a game? #

Do you think you know what type of gamers you have in your team? I’ll be writing up a blog for each player type, giving examples of how to get the best out of them when applying them to work tools.

Part 2: Killers >>