Almost 4 out of 10 workers worldwide were not engaged in their workplace in 2017. Disengaged workers are less productive and more absent. Businesses with highly engaged employees, on the other hand, outperformed those without by 202% and had 100% more job applications
But what makes employees disengaged? It turns out employees value their wellbeing above financial benefits like salary bumps and flexible working hours. Stressful work environments are responsible for almost 3 out 5 employees feeling less productive and disengaged.
Mismanagement, ineffective communication, and work overload contribute to performance issues. The more work piles up, the longer hours employees work. The less productive and more stressful they become, the more work piles up.
A positive and healthy workplace culture is necessary to keep employees involved and invested in their jobs, which in turn is very beneficial to both the workers and the business. Implementing initiatives that recognize employees for their performance resulted in overall higher engagement rates, lower turnover, and lower frustration levels.
Google, Microsoft, Cisco and many others have already incorporated gamification in their business strategies to recognize, motivate, and enable employees. Deloitte, for example, reduced the time to complete training curriculum for senior execs by 50% just by implementing status badges and leaderboards into the process. Promoting healthy competition and rewarding achievement boosted activity and engagement among the growing number of participants.
Gamification tools tap into the brain’s reward system and use recognition, rewards, and sense of completion to provide an engaging experience. Receiving rewards for successfully completing a task straight away is far more gratifying than waiting until the next performance review.
Rewarding workers with points for completing goals tied to their KPIs can significantly increase participation and engagement. With our API, employees can earn and store their points on a personal cloud wallet. With the functionality to spend and transfer points, participants can also redeem rewards and benefits for their performance.
Extra vacation days, wellbeing benefits, or bigger end of year bonus, the freedom to choose offers extra motivation to get involved. Promoting friendly competition with leaderboards and bigger prizes for top-performers can form a more efficient system to recognize employees than traditional performance reviews.
By converging better technology and psychology behind human motivation, businesses and workers can achieve more without sacrificing wellbeing. After all, people can make or break any enterprise. What would you do to improve your workplace?