Gamification is a powerful way to get employees more engaged, but how does it work? The psychology behind gamification explains how implementing one simple tool can increase project completion rates and employee enthusiasm at work. Through positive reinforcement and friendly competition, gamification excites and motivates users to repeat desired actions. If you’re searching for ways to boost SharePoint and Office 365 adoption, don’t overlook gamification. Read on to learn more about how it inspires your employees to succeed.
Checkout Gamify for SharePoint & Microsoft Office 365
1. Real-time reinforcement
By congratulating someone on a job well done, you boost their confidence and their drive to repeat the same action. Gamification makes doing this so much easier. To recognize each employee in person would be time-consuming and would most likely result in at least a few forgotten employees. With a gamification system, users are reinforced for their positive behavior automatically. This instant reinforcement makes them feel more driven to repeat their successful behaviors.
We can see the same type of reinforcement on social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. When someone uploads a post to Instagram, almost instantly people begin liking their post. This real-time feedback excites the user and motivates them to continue posting on the platform. By incorporating gamification into the SharePoint portal, you can inspire users to repeat positive behaviors, such as liking comments and writing posts.
2. Achievement
Similarly to reinforcement, instilling a sense of achievement in your employees is another crucial component of gamification. By making the employee feel like they’ve accomplished something, he or she will be more likely to repeat the action. People are more likely to return and do something again if they feel like they’ve done a good job. When users are faced with a large project, it’s easy for them to become discouraged and want to give up. By breaking down a large goal and rewarding users after the completion of each subgoal, users will feel a sense of achievement throughout the project, not just at the end.
Ensuring that users feel achievement throughout a large task, such as training or a project, is critical for its full completion. By making sure that users feel like they’re achieving something and that it’s not going unnoticed, your Office 365 adoption rates will continue to rise.
3. Positive competition
From a young age, people grow up competing with themselves and striving to do better than they did in the past. This inner competition still exists in adults and gamification can help it to resurface. When you incorporate gamification into the workplace, employees can see physical metrics for their actions. For example, dashboards that show employees how far they’ve gotten through their training or what type of tasks they completed this week in Office 365 are crucial if you want employees to improve. Seeing their scores for the last month will incentivize employees to work even harder this month. Also, this streamlines their focus. Instead of them continuously performing the same actions, these dashboards can show them what skills they can enhance.
On the other hand, competition with their colleagues is another strong motivator for users. Dashboards can also help with this as they show how the user ranks against their peers and who has the top score. This gives employees another clear goal to work towards. Just like with reinforcement, social media is also another example of this. If you post a status on Facebook and it gets fewer likes than your friends’ statuses, you will want to post again but with different content to get more likes. Seeing others’ scores inspires people to change their strategy resulting in new ideas and increased Office 365 adoption.
4. Control and transparency
Incorporating a gamification system gives users more control. Instead of having to continuously check in and tell the user what their next steps are, gamification allows the user to do that all on their own. This is important because it makes the user feel in control of their progress. They can choose when to click on the next steps and decide which of the available actions to complete next. Giving users this type of freedom makes them feel more independent and in charge of their own actions, which is essential to keeping employees happy and motivated.
Gamification also makes what managers want from their employees more transparent. At some companies, workers go through training or complete tasks without being aware of how many steps are next. When users don’t fully know what’s going on, they don’t feel trusted. By allowing users to see their progress and where they stand, they will feel more at ease and respected by their company. At the same time, a gamification tool also makes the users’ actions more transparent to others. Managers can easily access the dashboard and see what tasks employees have completed and assign tasks for them to work on in the future. Having transparency on both sides ensures that everyone is on the same page and that no task is overlooked.
5. Your brain chemistry
Gamification triggers a dopamine release in the brain. When you do things you enjoy and that challenge you, like playing games, there is a release of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that controls pleasure. This dopamine rush lights up your brain’s reward pathway and makes you want to repeat the action that initially released the dopamine.
This is why some people get addicted to video games and why apps try to use gamification to get their users to keep coming back. Battling challenges and earning rewards is exciting and encourages repeat visits. This powerful reaction is one of the reasons why gamification provides such strong results.
Gamification for Office 365 is also an amazing method to encourage end users to explore more content, get familiar with new ideas, and ultimately become better employees. Unlike other traditional tools that mainly provide value to admins, managers, and stakeholders, gamification is a unique tool that provides value directly to the end user, making him the focus while increasing his adoption and improving his productivity. One SharePoint gamification tool that can help you succeed is GAMIFY by CardioLog Analytics. By providing your employees with real-time recognition through points and scoreboards, GAMIFY can increase your Office 365 adoption in a snap.
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