Gamification has become an essential part of any digital business strategy as a way of digitally motivating people and overcoming barriers of scale, time, distance, connectedness and cost.
As Mr. Burke from Gartner Inc. said and I totally agree “Game mechanics and design have been used to engage and motivate people to achieve their goals throughout recorded history”. “Gamification is about rethinking motivation in a world where we are more often connected digitally than physically. It is about building motivation into a digitally connected world. And we are just getting started in this journey. Gamification will continue to develop for many years to come.”
Gamification has tremendous potential to motivate people, but right now most organizations aren’t getting it right. The road to gamification success is full of pitfalls, and many companies don’t understand how critical player motivation is to success.
What organizations need to understand?
- Gamification is about motivating people to achieve their own goals, not the organization’s goals.
- Use gamification to empower their customers, employees and communities to reach their goals.
- Gamification talks about share goals. If a business can identify the goals it shares with its audience or provide its audience with goals that are meaningful to them, then it can leverage gamification to motivate these players to meet those goals, and the company will achieve its business outcomes as a consequence.
- Business leaders must understand the opportunities to leverage gamification to digitally motivate customers, employees and communities.
- A digital engagement strategy challenges business leaders to go beyond interactions; it challenges IT leaders to go beyond transactions. Rather, it requires the design and delivery of digital experiences.
The opportunity and the future
The opportunity is to focus on engaging people at an emotional level. One way to motivate people is to present them with practical challenges, encourage them as they progress through levels, and get them emotionally engaged to achieve their very best. Gamification does just that.
At its core, gamification is about engaging people on an emotional level and motivating them to achieve their goals. However, most organizations rely primarily on transactional engagement strategies in their interactions, for example by focusing on employees’ concern to earn a living and to meet the minimal expectations of the employer.
Organizations need to shift focus to emotional engagement if they want to truly motivate people.
Those organizations that are more aggressively adopting gamification already have multiple gamified solutions in place that support different business areas, address different target audiences, and achieve a wide range of business objectives.
Borja Burguillos
Global People Strategy 