Employee engagement is one of the most costly issues that a business can face. A disengaged workforce will not produce the results that the business strives for, in fact a recent report by Gallup found that 65% of the US workforce were disengaged with their jobs, estimated to cost the country around $500 billion each year.
As ServiceNow expands into the working lives of more and more people around the world with the likes of their ITSM, CSM, HR and FSM applications to name a few, the platform provides an opportunity to help reverse this disengagement crisis. This is where my Employee Engagement project at UP3, aims to change the future of employee engagement with ServiceNow platform gamification.
Gamification, what is it? Put simply, it is the practice of drawing on elements of game playing culture and applying them to activities outside of the gaming world. Think leader boards, achievements, medals and competition. There’s a reason why Pokemon Go, Candy Crush and the like are so popular, they appeal to the inner gamer in everyone, even those who would not consider themselves ‘gamers’ are drawn in by these popular and addicting games, this is down to the fundamental human desire to win. The act of winning releases dopamine into the brain which causes the person to feel like they are on top of the world, the winner effect.
How can the ServiceNow platform provide this experience in a work environment? and how can it do it without causing so much of a distraction that it creates a less productive environment? Careful evaluation and thought must be made before introducing gamification to a workforce, or the results could be disastrous, the workforce must buy into the gamification, or it will be useless and the employees will just see it as another way of being monitored.
The ServiceNow platform out of the box would allow a user to run simple reports to find out information such as ‘resolver of the day’ or ‘quickest average resolver’, but what do these statistics (and that’s what they are, statistics) really tell you about your workforce? What if an agent received points every time they resolve a record and that they get a certain amount of points depending on how quickly it was resolved, or every time they update the customer visible comments of a record they get some points. These are just two simple examples that the out of box platform cannot handle right now. What if by completing these ‘simple’ tasks that make up their job, they could earn achievement levels and/or badges? This is what our Employee Engagement project aims to provide, a gamification engine on the ServiceNow platform, that any company can setup and define the rules that make up their ‘game’. No dificult code to write, no complicated setup, just a system of rules that make up the game they want their employees to play, and a leader board portal that their employees can visit to see their progress, achievement and how they stack up against their friends and colleagues.
These are just a few of the planned features of the gamification engine I’m building. If you’re reading this and want to know more, please get in contact, I’m very excited about this project, so if you are thinking of trying gamification in your workplace, I’d love to hear from you to see if we can work together to improve the results of your workforce.