The Best Employee Engagement Software and Gamification: How to Leverage This Combo to Keep Your Staff Happy

As organizations shift toward more remote work, managers are dealing with the challenge of finding new ways to engage employees. It is not an easy task to keep engagement levels high with the work-from-home system in place, and hence a lot of companies are using gamification as a strategy to bridge the virtual-world gap. They are vouching for the best employee engagement software to get the most enhanced gamification features.But hey, what do we actually mean by gamification?Gamification is the incorporation of gaming elements - including competition, rewards, level ascension, and more - to keep customers or employees engaged in a task or learning scenario. The underlying idea is that employees will take part in a game-like activity, perhaps where they earn points with a win or completion of a desired action, and if they reach a certain threshold, they are entitled to receive some rewards.Gamification can be immensely effective in a workplace where team building and teamwork, work satisfaction, engagement, and motivation of employees is given top priority. When an employee feels like he has accomplished something, even if it’s a small task within the gamification booster, he feels more satisfied with his job and the work environment. And with the best employee engagement software at hand, this job of making your staff happier becomes much easier.

Now that companies are making more space for gamification techniques, it is only natural that they are looking for ways to put those techniques to use. That’s where we come into picture. We’ve compiled a list of ways in which you can leverage your employee engagement software along with gamification, to engage your staff at work. Read on.

1. Use Gamification in Recruitment

The best employee engagement software will give you numerous ways of employing gamification in your day-to-day workplace activities. Recruitment is one area of the business that can reap multiple benefits from gamification.Once candidates are hired, a good mix of gamification elements along with the onboarding process can make the process exciting and fun. A candidate deals with a lot of doubts and nervousness on his first day at work, and hence having not just a good, but the best employee engagement software becomes very important. The benefits of this are many. Fresh employees will are more interested in the training content, they get a positive impression of the company culture right away, and they’re more enthusiastic to work at their new workplace.Another place where you can put gamification to use is in the training process. Adding contests, quizzes, tasks and other quirky methods to the otherwise boring training content makes employees more involved with the process and they’re more likely to remember it.One fabulous example of onboarding gamification in action is from Deloitte. People at Deloitte created a game on their virtual meetup platform centered around a zombie apocalypse, in which the new recruit had to make a series of decisions to save humanity while being trained in basic consulting skills. This clever implementation of the gamification feature helped new employees learn decision making and consulting skills at their own pace and in their own way, rather than following a prescribed route of learning.

2. Reward and Incentivize Employees Using Creative Ways 

Think back to a time when you were recognized for an achievement? How did it make you feel? We humans love to be recognized. It makes us feel valued and gives us the much-sought-after validation for our work.

Gamification on your company’s virtual meetup platform can help you create the right environment of appreciation for the employees. Here are three ways in which you can do it:

• Simple, sweet and the one which always works: the shoutout. Doing a shoutout for your employees is a great way to give them a boost of motivation. You can use the reception page of your virtual event software to put out the achievement and the employee's name publicly. Add to it a few emojis, pictures or gifs and you have a great shoutout post ready!  
• Carve out some time in your routine meetings and schedule an interactive activity. Here, each employee will recognize another employee for a task that he performed really well that week/month. This will make sure that all the team members know about the work well done. This way of promoting peer recognition requires minimal effort and creates a huge impact.
• Give out badges, virtual goodies, coupons! A virtual meetup platform has a lot of options to give out creative badges, titles and other encouraging items to employees. Leverage these to your advantage.  It shows other employees that if they do great work, then they can get incentives. It’s called the technique of positive reinforcement.

3. Gamify Employee Activities and Interactions

Employee engagement is not a one-time action. It’s not a task that can be ticked off from your checklist as “completed”. It is an ongoing process, the one that begins from an employee’s first day and continues every day after. Engaging your employees doesn’t work with an on-off switch – it’s the company culture, a language, a way of doing things.

Inculcate fun activities, games, quirky polls, out-of-the-box quizzes in your weekly meetings. Keep taking reviews and feedback from employees to fill up any cracks in the organization. Games are loved by all, and if used correctly, they can drive humongous value to your employees and your organization.

Gamifying your business activities with a virtual meetup platform creates a friendly work culture among employees. It keeps them motivated, boosts productivity and they go home with smiling faces. What else do we want?And in case you are hunting for the best employee engagement software online, we’re right here! Head to our page to know more.