One of the most significant components of an effective knowledge management program is its ability to support and promote a culture of group effort and information sharing. Processes, tools, and administrative policies are essential fundamentals. However, all these can only offer you limited success. Values and principals are the keystones that will decide the will of your staff to contribute in knowledge management.
How can you inspire employees or members of a group to accept productive actions around teamwork and knowledge sharing? The answer to this question can be found in a new thought called Gamification.
What is Gamification?
It’s a new and fast developing area, the application of which is currently being tried out across education, businesses, and even research. But the next explanation is a decent starting point: gamification is the use of game elements and game strategy skills in a non-game context.
To elaborate further, in the words of gamification expert Yu-Kai Chou, Gamification is design that places the most emphasis on human motivation in the process. In essence, it is Human-Focused Design (as opposed to “function-focused design”).
Let’s break that down. Gamification taps into human motivations and tries to replicate them to non-game environments, like learning, or productivity. For a workplace, this could mean answering questions like “How do I get my employees to engage within themselves, share ideas and work towards a common vision?” This could mean creating a physical or digital environment where employees are able to express their natural desires for socialising, learning, mastery, competition, achievement, status, self-expression, altruism, or closure and direct those towards fulfilling organisation’s goals.
Now onto structure. Essentially, gamification has three different components:
1. Game components
This is tied in with using the segments, plans, examples, and feedback systems that you would ordinarily discover in computer games; for example, badges, points, coins and leader-boards. It is often indicated as the building side of gamification.
2. Game structured systems
This is the masterful, experiential side of gamification. It incorporates feel, story, player, venture, movement, shock, and, obviously, fun. Games are not only a gathering of components; they are a mindset about and moving toward difficulties like a games creator.
3. Non-game context
Some regular areas in which gamification has gained popularity incorporates health & wellbeing, training, supportability, and cooperation and knowledge sharing in creativity.
Exploring gamification accepts that your organisation, as of now, has an existing learning program and mindset. A typical mistake among executives is expecting gamification to mysteriously create a knowledge management program where one did not exist originally. However, a thoroughly developed approach to gamification offers huge potential to make joint effort fun and valuable for both individual members as well as the group.
Here are some tips to use while approaching gamification at your workplace.
1. Try not to lose sight of your destination
Begin with your business destination. Make your business goals the long-term target of your exercises. Keep your eyes on those goals and approve them as you configure, create and objectify your knowledge management program into a game.
2. Concentrate on behaviours, not exercises
It is very easy to become involved with concentrating only on exercises and end up having individuals caught up with doing “stuff”. Like targets, maintain an emphasis on the practices you need your people to embrace in the long-term and recognise exercises that are signs of those practices.
3. Information is the best
You should catch, store and recover information at every opportunity you get. Put emphasis on the quality and credibility of the information shared in the process. Without an approach to evaluate and quantify it, you will be stuck in the initial step.
4. Spread the acknowledgement
Try not to constrain the number of individuals who can be recognised (and rewarded) through your program. Consider offering recognition individuals’ endeavours in an assortment of important ways. A few instances of acknowledgment are:
E-cards with 100 acknowledgments (money related estimation of $100)
Cards to say thanks from initiative
Identifications on workers’ profile pages
Feedback during the worker’s performance review procedure
5. People will try to game the framework
You should focus on individuals who need to “game” the framework. Such behaviour drains the excitement of the activity and also the value generated for the group, as a whole. Wherever possible, develop ways to limit the capacity of individuals to do so
6. Begin small and advance slow
Gamifying coordinated effort isn’t something you work at only once to expect immediate rewards. To arrive at a decent and feasible knowledge executives program, you should be iterative, not using regular forms and play-testing persistently.
7. There are no silver bullets
Gamification is certifiably not a silver bullet. However, all accessible proof suggests it can be a valuable effort to insert community oriented practises, which make up a significant culture of coordinated effort and knowledge sharing at any organization.
If you’re looking to implement gamification in your company’s learning journey, reach out to BHyve today. Our experts would love to work with you and maximise learning and knowledge management outcomes for you, and add a dose of fun to your workplace!
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