How can gamification boost employee performance and engagement?
How can gamification boost employee performance and engagement?
Gamification is most commonly used in sales teams to boost employee motivation and to help them achieve high performance and increase sales results.
I. 3 simple ways to gamify your sales processes
Gamification is the application of gaming elements to another type of activity, like business administration. Common gamification elements include badges, points, leaderboards, and other players.
1. Badges
Badges can motivate salespeople because they set clear expectations and when achieved, they mark progress. Once you collect a badge, it reminds you about your contribution or accomplishments.
2. Points and leaderboard
The trouble with some approaches to using leaderboards is that they only motivate people who made it to the top. Adding the participants in groups where they all have equal chances to win makes them more motivated and engaged.
Updating the campaign points daily to demonstrate the progress, you can encourage both: the top players and the ones at the bottom.
3. Other players
Interacting with other players in a competitive environment makes it more fun. E.g. sales team A can compare themselves with sales team B and find new ways to increase their results.
II. 4 factors driving salespeople motivation
Tribee team spends a lot of time asking business leaders: “What motivates salespeople?”. We found these four factors to be the most essential:
1. Income
People come to work to earn money and make their ends meet. In every social group, a certain threshold income must be met to allow a person to cover their basic needs.
Earning below that threshold causes a person to feel insecure and does not allow them to focus on other factors that could potentially increase their motivation to work. Sufficient income is the foundation to help a person achieve autonomy in her life.
2. Recognition
We tend to think that recognition is only important to young employees... Our observation interviewing employees and managers with diverse levels of experience proves that they all need regular acknowledgment to be highly motivated.
If we don’t feel others see the results of our work, we struggle to maintain a high level of focus. Even (or especially!) the best salespeople want to receive recognition from their direct leaders, and they want it frequently!
According to Gallup, for a person to perform with the highest engagement, they need to receive recognition from their peers and leaders every week.
3. Growth
Mastery is one of the 3 critical motivation factors according to Daniel H. Pink and his book “Drive.” It’s critical for managers to help an employee see the results of their work and the progress they are making.
Having a constant notion of progress will keep them interested in their work and motivate them to achieve higher performance.
Finally, it means that we need to keep creating new challenges for our team members to give them new opportunities to level up!
4. Passion
Have you ever entered a shop where it felt like the employees were fans of the brand they were selling?
They might have been very knowledgeable about the products, passionate about explaining them to you, and very eager to help you discover the product.
If the salespeople are fans of the brand, they are always more motivated and sell more.
One of Tribee’s clients launched an initiative called “Proud moments''. They used storytelling to help employees understand its brand in a very engaging way.
This client also encouraged employees to share their parts of the story. The campaign attracted an incredibly high number of employees to participate, boosting their morale and motivation.
You may already be great at motivating your teams. What are the motivation factors you want to focus on more to drive better results?
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III. 2 methods that gamification can increase employee engagement
Salespeople can learn new skills and be trained in new ways with gamification. With large salesforce companies, by teaming up salespeople or coaching them with leaderboard results, gamification can improve their engagement and work productivity.
1. Team up people
If you’re contributing to the team, it is already bigger than yourself because of the team spirit, and you can not let your team down. That will push the employee’s performance and make them feel more responsible for what they are doing with the team.
So when you are teaming up with people, that’s how you gamify it.
2. Leaderboard result coaching
You can quickly see the top performers and ask their tips for being successful, then bring those tips to the whole team.
On the other hand, you can ask the bottom what happened that prevented them from achieving their goal.
With Tribee, we built the leaderboard to be real-time. That will allow the company to define “Who are the bottom 20% and how can we support them”.
It’s not just about the winner, but it’s also about who is contributing. And for each team or person to show where they are, how much they need to achieve their goal or go to the next level.
For more information about gamification, follow and contact Tribee.