Why You Should Gamify HR (and How to Do It)

Gamification is becoming a trend in the workplace, and it’s easy to see why. Gamification techniques done right can make the most boring HR processes more fun (or at least a little less boring) and engage employees.

Gamification takes competitive, social, and progress-based game techniques and applies them to non-game environments. This can help HR managers help employees feel rewarded in ways outside of traditional compensation.

Some departments like sales and customer service may have already successfully used gamification to reward employees for providing more sales or optimal service (i.e. who sold the most or received the most 5-star customer reviews). Gamification can also help HR reward employees for completing tasks that are repetitive and boring but still critical to the success of the organization.

How Can Gamifying HR Help Your Organization?

You’ve got enough going on in your department. Do you really need to add games to the mix? Here’s why you should consider it.

Improve the hiring process: Having trouble moving new employees through the onboarding process? By rewarding prospects for finishing each step of the application process, you are able to keep them motivated and speed up the onboarding process.

Reward recruiters: HR can apply gamification to improve the recruiting process by incentivizing recruiters to bring in top candidates. You can also use it to incentivize employees to bring in more referrals.

Promote your culture: Want to improve your culture? HR can use gamification to reward employees for going out of their way to help other departments. This could be by improving processes or products or making suggestions that improve the company. Reward employees by giving them badges or points for living by your organization’s values.

Make training fun: While mandatory training (i.e. harassment, compliance) typically isn’t much fun, gamifying these types of training can help employees feel engaged and progress through each module quickly. You can offer employees badges or points as they progress through levels.

Get your required paperwork filled out on time: Using gamification, HR can reward employees using recognition or incentives to complete their HR paperwork on time. You can use it with onboarding documents or when it’s time to update tax or insurance paperwork by rewarding points for accuracy and timeliness.

How to Gamify HR

Getting the proper level of difficulty for your HR games is critical. The game should be difficult enough to be a challenge, but not so hard as to frustrate employees.

As you tweak your game content, you can use leaderboards, points, and badges to track employees’ progress.

Leaderboards: Leaderboards allow a healthy competition among employees by creating a scoring system that shows the top employees on the leaderboard. Encourage staff to try to one-up each other.

Points: Points can be awarded in a variety of ways for achieving goals. They are a good way to track employee progress against themselves and other employees, and you can offer rewards for different tiers of points.

Badges: Badges and awards can provide tangible rewards for employees that show exemplary performance. Encourage them to show off what they’ve earned.

What are You Waiting For?

Take advantage of improving the hiring process, promoting a great corporate culture, and getting employees to turn paperwork in on time by adding gamification into your HR tech stack. You can use a combination of leaderboards, points, badges, and awards to make your HR gamification a huge success.

Author Profile Jon Forknell is the Vice President and General Manager of Atlas Business Solutions, Inc., a software marketing company specializing in employee scheduling software, including ScheduleBase employee scheduling software, and other business software solutions. In the past, Jon has been recognized by the U.S. Small Business Administration as a SBA Young Entrepreneur of the Year. Atlas Business Solutions was named as one of Software Magazine’s Top 500 Software Companies in 2004 through 2007, and 2010, 2013, 2014, 2016 and 2017.