Abstract
Many small businesses around the world are continuing to use gamification as a strategy to motivate the workers. This strategy is becoming popular in marketing and other industry. The main aim of gamification in businesses is to help increase the chances that a worker repeats desired steps and providing an opportunity to influence human behaviours through games. Games that are used in the gamification strategy include the ranking systems, virtual goods small incentives and scoring systems. According to Alsawaier (2018), gamification strategies raise customer commitment and loyalty and also motivate employees. This paper presents an analysis of the strategies to motivate the workers of a small business using the gamification technique. The paper will present the importance of the gamification techniques, as a strategy to motivate workers of small businesses. From this analysis, we learn that gamification plays an important role for the workers, employees and the productivity of the entire organization.
Introduction
Gamification is used in business to improve employee engagement and marketing efforts. Through the gaming technique, business management will be able to offer a reward to the employees for their actions that help to improve the organization’s productivity. In the world of the consumer world, using apps and games, gamification is an important tool that keeps users to engage and continue to use the products. In business, gamification helps to establish a way for employees to view their progress and develop a continued engagement with the company. Many employees apply gamification in employee training because this technique is fun and engaging, it is also easier for the workers to retain knowledge, drives behavioural change among workers (Rigby, 2015). This technique is preferred by many employers because it created fiction between workers, online and offline. It also creates recognition, whereby workers can be rewarded with the actual or online prizes. This paper will discuss the various strategies used by small businesses to motivate workers using the gamification technique. The paper will explain the importance of the gamification technique and also present a case study which explains how gamification can be used in small businesses.
Gamification in small business enables the business owners to develop an easy way for the workers to view their progress and develop continued engagement within the business. For a business to succeed in gamification, a business should employ the right strategies. For instance, the business owner needs to first identify the main goal of the business. The business owners may decide to undertake this strategy to help improve the employee performance or improve the employee engagement. During gamification, the business owners need to avoid going too deep too early. They need to ensure that in everything they do, they need to appreciate the workers (Lister, 2015). The owners also need not emphasize the rewards. It is a fallacy for the owners to think that the workers will participate in your program if the rewards are extra and flashy. Providing big rewards to the workers may bring problems because the business at some point in time will not be able to keep providing big rewards over the long-term to the workers. Gamification may also be a problem. After all, it creates false incentives because some of the workers may end up doing things that they are not required to do and also cutting corners just for the sake of achieving the win. During gamification, the business owners should create a level playing field, to help every participant understand how the game operates the goal of the game and strategies to employ to succeed. Gamification in the business environment is about creating new opportunities in business, creating new leads and increasing brand reach. When rewarding to motivate the workers, the business owners should come up with creative rewards for their workers. The best gamification rewards should be connected with professional recognition and advancement. The rewards need to be of the right costs so as not to affect the revenues of the business. It is also important for the owners to connect the gamification to the entire business to improve productivity. When undertaking the gamification strategy, the business owners need to track and report every step of the process. Tracking is important because it enables the workers of the business to know where they stand and how they can improve their skills and experiences. It also helps the business managers to have a clear understanding of the program and if it is helping to achieve the business goals set. All small business owners should find the right ways to organize and execute their gamification strategy and programs to help achieve better results. The research conducted by Richter, Raban and Rafaeli (2015) shows that Gamification techniques are intended to influence the worker’s natural desires for socializing, learning, competition, status, achievement and self-expression. Starbucks Reward is an example of a technique where gamification is mainly set to transform a traditional loyalty card program into something more complex.
Importance of gamification techniques
Introducing the gamification technique in small businesses has many advantages and welfares. Gamification is important because it improves the productivity of the business. According to….The more motivated the workers are, the more productive they become at the workplace. Gamification help to increase the skills of the workers thus leading to an increase in productivity, as a result of generating a relaxed and collaborative environment. Gamification increases the motivation of the workers because it uses rewards, goals and achievement systems which encourage workers motivation. This helps to improve the productivity of the business. Introducing gamifies products improves employee satisfaction and their overall performance. Through gamification, employee creativity is improved. By introducing playful activities in the business, the creativity and commitment of the workers are improved if they are given a chance to participate (Mekler et al., 2017). Gamification helps to strengthen communication processes in the businesses. While taking part in the chosen activity, the workers learn to communicate with others and also the management. They also learn to listen and follow the set rules and policies of the game. The departments of human resource play an important role in implementing gamifies techniques for the training of the workers, identify and ensure their efforts are acknowledged by providing them with feedback basing on the complaints and views they presented. Communication between workers of various departments and improved because, through gaming, they can socialize and share ideas that may be important for the growth of the business. Gamification strategy favours the workers’ engagement. It encourages employee engagement because workers can easily achieve a higher commitment to the organization. This technique also helps to improve the workers’ sense of belonging to the team. Game-based learning helps to easily generate a greater identification with the business goals. This strategy helps to identify and develop specific skills of the workers in the business. The training programs offered are essential because they make the workers improve their important aspects to grow in many important areas such as leadership, negotiation and communication skills and stress management (Perryer et al., 2016).
Case study: Swash
Mary-swash is a modified app. This app explains how a business brand can stay connected with its customers and employees through a gamification element. Then, this app aims to stay in contact with the workers and help gather information about them, thus allowing the business owners to know how to motivate and reward them based on their preferences. Swash used gamification techniques as a way of giving incentives and motivation to the workers while performing their activities at the workplace. The workers competed against others and gathered their latest achievements and overall performance. Swash collected the overall data about the users who were valuable about content marketing. The app is also connected to social media so that users could compare performance from every part of the world. After completing different levels, the workers are rewarded through means like free vacations, increased salaries and bonuses, promotions and public praises. This motivates the workers to keep working hard to achieve the business goals. Though the game, loyalty among worker s and employees is improved.
Conclusion
Gamification techniques are important strategies that help to motivate workers. Gamification in small business enables the business owners to develop an easy way for the workers to view their progress and develop continued engagement within the business. For a business to succeed in gamification, a business should employ the right strategies. During gamification, the business owners need to avoid going too deep too early. They need to ensure that in everything they do, they need to appreciate the workers. The owners also need not emphasize the rewards. It is a fallacy for the owners to think that the workers will participate in your program if the rewards are extra and flashy. Small businesses should employ the gamification techniques to help motivate the workers and improve the productivity of the business.