Gamify your remote team

How gamification tools inspire and engage young reps, even when they are working from home.

Gen Z is the newest generation to enter the workforce, and call center supervisors need to ramp-up their performance management strategies to keep these young reps engaged.

Gen Z (born after 1996) are first true digital natives. They grew up on iPhones, YouTube, and Snapchat, and they have been playing video games since before they could read. This is not a generation who deals well with boredom, and they expect real-time feedback on their performance – ideally through digital channels.

Fortunately, most call center supervisors already use a tool that will help them connect with and incent these young workers – gamification.

Before you insist that you have never used gamification, answer this question: Have you ever created a leaderboard to rank your reps by performance, or offered incentives for meeting a performance quota? If you have, then you’ve gamified your workplace.

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How does gamification work?

At its core, gamification uses competitive gaming elements -- team rankings, ‘first to finish’ awards, accumulation of points -- to encourage desired behavior or outcomes. Supervisors have used these internal competitions for decades to engage teams and improve performance.

The difference now is that technology has replaced the whiteboard, giving supervisors more ways to generate exciting and competitive gamified experiences. Today’s gamified performance engagement tools create virtual arenas with sophisticated visuals, detailed characters, and real-time data streaming that automatically tracks every player’s performance against specific KPIs.

With these tools your reps aren’t just checking to see whose name moved to the top of the board each day. They are participating in fantasy sports leagues, heroic quests, and going on beach-themed adventures where their actions are all tied to improved workplace performance.

Along with making the competitions more fun, gamification technologies give supervisors and reps instant access to information about individual and team performance, which they can track throughout the day. By making the results transparent and immediate, gamified performance management tools create the same kind of unpredictability and social influence that makes video-gaming so addictive.

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Gamify your quarantine

Even if reps are working remotely they can see what their teammates are accomplishing in real-time and how they measure up. It makes the work day less boring, while creating more fanfare around the successful completion of tasks.

With most reps now working from home, gamification offers a compelling model to foster a connected team environment, and to weave motivation into day-to-day activities in order to encourage better performance. Our customers have achieved significant performance improvements through the use of gamification, including one BPO company that saw a 30% reduction in attrition and an almost 18% increase in dollars collected after deploying a football themed competition.

And it’s simple to use.

The best gamification tools offer pre-made environments and automated data tracking so supervisors can focus on outcomes – not monitoring data. They just have to input the names of the players, select the KPIs they want to track, and choose a timeframe and game theme, and the platform will do the rest. Within minutes you can set up the competition, and watch as team members rise to the challenge

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How to gamify performance

To get the most value out of gamification for performance management, our experts offer this advice:

1. Set clear performance goals.
   It’s tempting to rush into gamification just to experience the environment, but if you want to drive better performance, you have to link the gaming mechanics to KPIs that are tied to specific business results. These can range from number of closed deals or completed calls, to quality improvements, productivity goals, or even attendance.
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2. Talk-up the game.
   Performance improvement games are more successful when players see that leaders care about the outcomes. To do this, share daily results with the team and key company leaders, announce winners, and celebrate the outcomes with the rest of the company. Engaged leaders create engaged employees who do better work.
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3. Keep it short.
   Shorter games consistently drive more engagement and better outcomes, because people are focused on the end result. Our experts suggest limiting games to no more than a week or two, and to leave time between games. Otherwise people will get bored and results will suffer.
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4. Change it up.
   Choosing different game environments, scoring elements, and KPIs will make each game feel fresh, and give everyone a chance to excel.
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5. Give prizes.
   Winners ought to receive something for their success, but it doesn’t have to be huge. Prizes can range from cash awards or gift cards, to extra time-off, to symbolic gifts like a mug or a trophy. The key is to give them something to acknowledge the win and to celebrate their success with the team.