Turning work into play: gamifying your comms
With a recent Gartner report suggesting that by 2012, the vast majority of the top global Fortune 500 organizations will be using serious gaming in training, communicators should understand the benefits. Nishwa Ashraf explains how gamification can build engagement and encourage innovation.
Key Notes:
- Gamification, or "serious gaming", is most often defined as the use of game play mechanics for non-game applications, including professional training. It has recently been put forward as an innovative channel for increasing engagement, building loyalty, encouraging participation and ultimately driving revenue.
- Gaming can be used to discover what employees are saying about topics that matter to them and brings an opportunity to immediately respond to and connect with your audience. It encourages collaboration and offers an interactive environment where people are used to having to learn new skills in order to progress.
- Communicators will see the most benefit when used in conjunction with other channels.
Upon returning home one day, she discovered that her apartment had been ransacked, and her father's journal stolen. Her father, Ferdinand, had traveled the world as a cartographer before his death and kept a journal of his adventures, which he shared with her when she was a child. Curious about why anyone would want such a private journal, she went through his papers and realized there was more to his writings and drawings than she had noticed as a child. Being very familiar with the book, she is able to recreate some of it from memory, but some portions - like the pictures from the places Ferdinand visited - are beyond her ability to recall. However, as she pieces her memories together, she realizes the journal is filled with puzzles and clues. Her name is Isabel Travada and she needs your help, as she retraces her father's steps and comes closer to solving the mystery of the journal, the man who stole it, and why.
Serious gaming is clearly something many companies are very eager to leverage internally.
No, you've not just stumbled on the synopsis for the fourth installment of Stieg Larsson's Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series, but instead the introduction to an internal "game" successfully used at Cisco Systems to encourage collaboration and provide product education among its geographically dispersed global sales force.
Gamification - also known as "serious gaming" - is most often defined as the use of game play mechanics for non-game applications. Or, in other words, "turning work into play". It's been around a while, with the military, medical and IT professionals having used serious gaming in their training processes. But more recently, the phrase has been lobbed around as the next frontier in increasing engagement, building loyalty, encouraging participation and ultimately driving revenue.
A Gartner report earlier this year suggests as much. The analysts predicted that by 2012, 100 of the top 135 global Fortune 500 companies will have used serious gaming in training, by 2014 more than 70 percent of the global 2,000 organizations will have at least one gamified application, and by 2015, more than 50 percent of organizations will gamify their innovation processes.
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This article was originally published in Strategic Communication Management.
Have your say
Is gaming a channel your organization has levered internally and/or externally? How are you using gaming within your organization? Do you think it's a fad or here to stay? share your thoughts?
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