Based on a survey, we are in the midst of a global employee engagament crisis! Could gamification be the answer?

I read surprising news in Gallup’s newest survey on employee engagement. According to the survey, “worldwide, only 13% of employees working for an organization are engaged” (Gallup, 2016) This means only a little over 10 percent of employees are involved in their job, enthusiastic about it and committed to their workplace.

Could gamification, which takes “the essence of games — attributes such as fun, play, transparency, design, competition and yes, addiction— and applies these to a range of real-world processes inside a company from recruiting to learning and development” (Meister, 2015), be the answer to this significant problem?

According to Jeanne Meister, who write for Forbes, more and more companies are actually turning to this method. “To address this employee engagement crisis, the human resource departments of Fortune 500 companies are launching gamification pilots. In fact, Brian Burke Vice President of Gartner estimates ’employee focused gamification applications now exceed customer focused gamification applications’.” (Meister, 2015)

What do you think are the best ways to engage employees? Is it gamification or something else? Please, comment!

Sources:

Mann A., & and Harter, J., (2016) ‘The Worldwide Employee Engagement Crisis’, Gallup.com (7 Jan 2016), available: http://www.gallup.com/businessjournal/188033/worldwide-employee-engagement-crisis.aspx?g_source=EMPLOYEE_ENGAGEMENT&g_medium=topic &g_campaign=tiles (Accessed 21 Jan 2016)

Meister, J. (2015) ‘Future Of Work: Using Gamification For Human Resources’, Forbes.com (30 March 2015), available: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeannemeister/2015/03/30/future-of-work-using-gamification-for-human-resources/#2715e4857a0b549ec86132ba (Accessed 21 Jan 2016)

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