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Gaming the System: How to Incorporate Gamification to Improve Your Industrial Workplace

Kristin Manganello
8/7/2019 | 5 min read
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Gaming the System: How to Incorporate Gamification to Improve Your Industrial Workplace

All work and no play can make even the most capable individuals become disengaged employees.

While it would be nice if all jobs were equally as fun as a game, work typically requires a great degree of focus and productivity. For some occupations and personalities, this prompts high levels of stress and discontent.

From a manager’s perspective, it can be easy to get caught up in the endless stream of goal initiatives, production rates, and revenue generation.  Focusing shortsightedly on what employees need to learn and accomplish to achieve those goals without examining the impact this may have on the individual’s mindset or the company culture can have negative, long-term impacts. 

As people are thinking about recreation and leisure during the current summer months, it’s a good time to consider utilizing employee management ideas that not only increase efficiency and productivity but also engage employees in a fun, interesting way. This is especially true for high-stress industries such as manufacturing, which harbor a distinctly high rate of mental health issues.

What is Gamification?

Managers can positively engage employees through the use of gamification. Not to be confused with “games,” which could be distracting or hazardous on a factory floor or in an office setting, gamification is about the application of game theory and elements onto non-game scenarios, such as work or education.

Unlike other forms of entertainment, gaming interacts with the brain in a completely different way. “Without getting into a long discussion about game theory, effective games work with completely different sets of emotions than other forms of entertainment,” says Ruben Navarrete, founder and CEO of EmpowerPoints, an employee engagement platform.

For example, while movies will use storytelling to play on the audience’s capacity for empathy as a way of connecting them with the emotions of the characters, games will instead “make good use of the players’ fear of failure, competitive nature, pride, guilt, and teamwork,” Navarrete explains.

The idea is to apply behavioral psychology and capitalize on human nature to improve the work environment. Not only does this have the potential to improve the company atmosphere, but it can also improve productivity, increase employee satisfaction, and enhance training.

How Does Gamification Help an Industrial Workplace? 

Enhanced Training

One of the most obvious applications for gamification in the industrial workspace is in training. While there are many methods for learning in the workplace, gamification offers a unique approach where employees can interact with the real-life responsibilities of their job in a low-risk environment.

“Games, when used correctly, [are] a powerful tool that can prepare workers for today’s workplace issues,” says Sam Caucci, founder and CEO of 1Huddle, a workforce gamification platform. These issues include, “onboarding, upskilling, and even serious training like diversity, sexual harassment, and discrimination.”

According to Caucci, “these quick-burst games are proven to accelerate productivity and retention – therefore leading to employees learning workplace procedures and policies quicker and more efficiently.”

Increased Productivity and Positivity

Not only can gaming help employees retain information and procedures more efficiently, but it can also potentially improve professional relationships while increasing productivity.

“By gamifying and improving certain aspects of peer-to-peer and management relationships, an organization can see a huge lift in productivity,” Navarrete says. Ultimately, “this boost in productivity occurs because people feel more engaged in their work.”

Engaging Younger Generations

Some gamification professionals, including Caucci, believe that gamification is a good way to engage millennial employees. “Nearly 55% of our workforce will be millennials or Gen Z by 2020 and traditional training sessions are [part of] an outdated strategy that [doesn’t] work for today’s worker,” he points out.

Generally speaking, this new generation of the workforce tends to highly value positive company cultures, self-care, and a healthy life-work balance. Of all the generations in the current workforce, millennials grew up with the most leisure time, and gaming has played a significant role in how they perceive and interact with the world.

The oldest members of Gen Z are now starting to enter the workforce; like millennials, this generation grew up with rampant gaming. As such, gaming could be the key to engaging these employees in a profound way. “If business owners want to engage their workers, they must rethink how they connect with them,” says Caucci.

Filling in the Skills Gap

Gamification can also be used as a tool in outreach programs. As manufacturing continues to become an increasingly innovative industry, there are a growing number of open jobs that aren’t being filled. Not only does the manufacturing industry have to contend with a widening skills gap, but it’s also suffering from negative misperceptions from younger workers.

However, through utilizing gamification elements and theories, the industry can speak to these younger generations in a language they readily understand and introduce them to the industrial world through a trusted medium.

How can Industrial Companies Utilize Gamification?

Depending on a business’ specific goals, there are a variety of ways gamification can be implemented in an industrial setting.

Failure: A Gateway to Better Training

For training, upskilling, and experience-building, Navarrete recommends an unexpected approach. “Effective games should be designed to produce immediate failure,” he says.

While this might sound counterintuitive, Navarrete explains that “the idea of growing through repeated failure and improving as we go along is how we get better at games, parenting, marriage, work, and life in general. 

However when it comes to the workplace, employers attempt to minimize their exposure to risk by hiring only experienced workers,” he notes. "Experience is really just short for lots of skill learned from lots of failures.”

The manufacturing industry is particularly risk-averse since a small mistake can have massive ramifications. “Gamification in the industrial workplace has traditionally been rare because the culture of industrial environments does not typically lend itself well to failure of any kind,” he says. “Failure is costly in any work environment; however it can be exponential in manufacturing and similar environments.” 

But from Navarrete’s perspective, “effective gamification can reduce costly errors by subliminally teaching their workers better skills.”

When designing a gamification system for failure, it’s important to remember the objective of the planned failure. These games should be “clever enough so that the player is challenged to figure out how to do increasingly better with each try,” Navarrete explains. “Thereby the player acquires new skills through repeated failure, ultimately becoming a master of the game.”

In order to encourage an effective gamification-failure strategy, Navarrete recommends building “fun failure environments. Failure environments are where employees are encouraged to fail to get better and reward for achievements.”

Reaping the Rewards

For gamification applications outside of training, such as productivity boosts, industrial companies can design systems that utilize points and rewards systems to encourage employees as they accomplish certain goals and benchmarks.

One real-world example of gamification being used in an industrial setting is the program in use at CNCMachines, a company that buys and sells CNC machining, fabrication, and other manufacturing machines.

“Gamification plays a key role in helping teams stay focused on a goal, especially for goals that are time-sensitive,” founder and CEO Curt Doherty tells Thomas. “Meeting our Q4 goals was essential to our 2019 time table and we were able to meet that goal with a simple gamification of accomplishing the goal.”

Using gamification, CNCMachines project managers created a system that with “each step achieved, got the team closer to a company cruise for seven days.” With a promise of a cruise on the horizon, the team was able to work toward a concrete, enticing goal. “The team was so focused that we accomplished 80% of the steps within the first half of the quarter,” recalls Doherty.

The Endgame of Gamification

Gamification, when utilized correctly, can be a powerful tool for companies looking to improve their training operations and productivity rates. While it may seem paradoxical to add games to business, game theory can actually enhance the industrial workplace in a variety of ways. Furthermore, it can make work enjoyable for employees.

“We spend a lot of time in our workplace,” says Navarrete. “It should be fun!”

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