Picture this: What if someone told you that applying game mechanics to mundane tasks at work can actually improve your bottom-line. That’s true.
Every workplace becomes more exciting and interesting, should there be a gaming element to it. Besides who wouldn’t want to end up feeling victorious at the end of the day. A feeling of having long term goals replaced by short term tasks, that rewards instantly and leads to instant gratification.
And especially when you are a millennial, the rungs of the corporate ladder feel like an escalator to greatness — isn’t that how it should be?
Why emphasise millennials, you may ask. The answer is right there — it’s 2017 and millennials make up 60 per cent of the workforce in the Gulf. Born between 1980 and 2000, the generation has quickly become a priority for HR departments to understand and develop workforce management solutions to drive performance management at their organisations.
Younger millennials are still engaged in full-time education or just entering the workforce, and older ones in their early 30s have a few years of experience under their belt. Many are now entering the next phase of their life, which may be staring a family and focusing more on trying to build a balance between their professional and personal aspirations.
Either way, the one thing they have in common is that they were all brought up in a technology-driven culture, and spent most of their life exposed to computers, mobile technology and the internet.
Like the generations that preceded them, the social, economic and technological environment that they were raised in has shaped their behaviour. This is a generation that didn’t have to be among the top 5 per cent of the world to get access to the best of education. A generation where technology catapulted iconic figures like Mark Zuckerberg to the heights of global business in relatively short periods of time.
They were told that they could achieve anything they set their sights on, with no limits to their aspirations.
Millennial employees are used to achieving results quickly and being instantly gratified. This is resulting in them rapidly reaching frustration within a traditionally designed role. Businesses have been unsuccessful in keeping up with their expectations and are grappling with high levels of staff turnover.
Unfulfilled aspirations has led to millennials breaking away from traditional career paths and many are turning towards entrepreneurship to realise their goals. Established legacy HR frameworks and practices are not having the same impact as they did a decade ago. And consulting houses are now pouring resources into surveys to understand this generation, and counter the high level of employee disengagement and attrition that their clients are facing.
As the crisis gains momentum, more companies turn to consultants to tackle the problem of finding the right millennial candidate and keeping his attention for longer than it takes to play a match on “Mortal Kombat”. The gaming industry has been growing rapidly with growth rates of over 11 per cent in the Gulf region and revenues exceeding $2.6 billion per annum.
There is a need to introduce a reward system akin to gaming that allows one to access gratification frequently, but with an engaging, challenging system.
Using gamification as a technique to add game-like features into business scenarios may trigger the same stimulus that has helped online games achieve such tremendous success. For this, the use of short-term goals and quickly achievable milestones, continuous feedback and guidance, collaborations and new challenges need to be implemented, to keep the millennial employee firmly on his toes.
Re-engineering business processes in a manner that allows for individuals and teams to continuously monitor their performance and frequently reward achievements combined with a milestone-based appraisal can create an engaging ecosystem in which a millennial can thrive.
Initial research where this strategy has been deployed by human resources developers has shown that satisfying these intrinsic motivators can make the workplace more appealing to millennials, and results in increased employee engagement levels and higher retention rates.
Online and social gaming already stands as a testimony endorsing the concept. The future of the workplace just became a lot more exciting.
Going by the saying “All work and no play makes for a dull boy”, gamification of work may turn out to be the solution that businesses have been looking for to manage a millennial workforce.
The writer is Managing Partner of Nathan & Nathan Human Resources.
