COVID-19 has changed everything overnight. The pandemic has led to a forced popularisation of the concept of work from home and social distancing has become the new norm. virtual meetings have taken over physical ones to an extent where everybody today is staying connected with friends, family and even colleagues over video calls. Over 3 billion people, excluding those in essential services like defence and healthcare, have been pushed to work from home.

There is no cure for the virus yet, all that everyone can do is maintain social distance and take good care of one's health by strengthening the immune system. Many companies have decided to let most of their employees work from home to stay ahead of the curve. It is one of the biggest changes that the world has ever witnessed. 

Since work from home is fast emerging to be a new normal concept, gamification is the most important part of corporates in terms of employee incentives because Gamification is a process of integrating the mechanics of the game into something that motivates engagement, and participation in work. It features game design elements to a non-game application to create a fun and engaging environment. It uses points, competition, achievements, status, and self-expression to encourage employees through positive feedback.

The concept of gamification is to take business-focused ideas and make them fun & entertaining and driving better engagement with employees. The components used in gamification are called game mechanics which help engage and motivate users.

Here are some advantages of Gamification to the organization in current pandemic:

Increase Learner Engagement

Games can transform dull content into engaging and interesting experiences, can encourage friendly competition among colleagues, and can give learners a sense of pride in completing a course after a series of gamified challenges and tasks. It also helps in physical and mental activity making it a more meaningful experience than passively scrolling, clicking next, and listening to long lectures, and this activity correlates to more engagement and higher productivity on the job.

Encourages creativity

If he or she is good at work and if they are interested in some creative work, some creativity and commitment drastically improves with the workers’ participation in these kinds of programs in the companies where they will enjoy their work time along with such activities.

Develops specific skills

Companies can now focus on improving or developing specific skills of their teams. Gamifying training programs will be useful to make employees improve those essential aspects to progress in several areas: leadership, stress management, communication skills, negotiation skills, etc. With the help of gamification, the employee can learn skills in various forms.

Onboard new employees

Successfully onboarding new employees is always a challenge, and overdependence on dry, boring onboarding documents, videos and training sessions means that organizations lose the opportunity to engage employees from day one. By using gamification in training, an organization will avoid these issues.

Improves productivity

Productivity is more important in the organization. More motivated and productive the employee will be, the company will automatically grow accordingly. Using game dynamics of gamification to increase the skills of employees leads to an increase in productivity of their work, as a result of generating a relaxed and collaborative environment.

Provide Instant Feedback

The main feature of games is to get feedback; positive or either negative. There are different games like educational games, which help to boost one's mind. By getting instant feedback in terms of gameplay and even tying this feedback to the game’s outcome, learners can monitor their progress throughout the game and may even feel intrinsically motivated to complete the game successfully.

Transmits corporate DNA

Gamification helps in many ways but by far the most important one is that it lets transmission of the corporate DNA across lines and categories of employees. Once imbibed, the DNA of an organisation if uniform among all its employees, helps in progressing according to the set mission and work towards the vision of the company. 

There are many companies that have decided to implement game-based learning methodologies guided by Gamelearn, leading developer of serious games for corporate training. The use of game dynamics to learn management skills has proven to be successful for many HR departments. As a tool gamification is probably the newest and most important one that HR possesses today.