16 Tips To Help Tech Leaders Effectively Leverage Gamification

While the work of a tech professional is often creative and engaging, it isn’t always—there are plenty of repetitive day-to-day tasks as well as essential work that can feel sometimes tedious and sometimes intimidating. By judiciously adding elements of gamification, tech leaders can make difficult or “boring” work rewarding, thereby encouraging team members to always bring their best efforts to every task.

There are plenty of creative, impactful ways tech leaders can introduce a healthy measure of fun and competition to their team members’ work. Here, 16 members of Forbes Technology Council share tips for introducing effective gamification to everything from training to tracking down bugs—and beyond.

1. Foster A Growth Mindset

Gamification fosters a growth mindset, keeping tech workers engaged and interested by making tasks enjoyable and rewarding them for successful completion. It offers a low-stakes environment where the emphasis is on letting team members make mistakes, develop their skills, obtain tools and knowledge, and collaborate to persevere and deconstruct problems. – Dipesh Ranjan, Mavenir

2. Set A Collective Goal

Ensure your team has a collective goal so they can work together toward it. This way, gamification becomes a group-incentivized effort, not undue competition within your team. – Wendy Johansson, MiSalud Health

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3. Balance Collaboration And Competition

There are two aspects to gamification: collaboration and competition. Balancing both is important, because too much competition between individuals can erode the culture. Simultaneously, I tend to emphasize competition against oneself. In other words, rewards are tied to how well someone outperforms relative to their baseline—this utilizes more of a growth mindset. – Greg Soh, RoadFlex

4. Consider Some Real-Life Stakes

Playing a game with real-life stakes seems to be the most exciting and motivating form of gamification I’ve seen. Introducing an employee stock ownership plan has transformed how our team members perceive product development. Instead of looking for tasks to deliver, they started caring about the business context and customer success. Working for a software as a service startup clearly has some upsides. – Mike Faber, Vendo

5. Tap Into NFTs

Leveraging blockchain technology, nonfungible tokens are a fun and memorable way to create reward experiences. Team members can obtain an NFT by accomplishing specific tasks. It is an interesting way to encourage team progress and distinguish member contributions. As an option, NFTs could be exchanged for physical gifts. – Norelle Ng, CLV (previously Clover Finance)

6. Give Kudos For Going Above And Beyond

We use gamification to bring a sense of community to our team, no matter where they sit. Virtual “tacos” are used to give kudos for going above and beyond, supporting others or doing anything we would consider “taco worthy.” Each month, we declare a “Taco Champion” and award that person a gift that meshes their personal interests and tacos. It’s a badge of honor to receive a Taco Champion award. – Rohana Meade, Synergy Technical

7. Improve Training Retention

Employing gamification is one of the most effective ways to improve retention from training. As part of a human risk-management approach, we recommend engaging and educational options for employee groups based on their actual risk factors. Gamification allows you to turn security education into a fun and healthy competition while making training more memorable—and thus, engaging. – Ashley Rose, Living Security

8. Leverage KPIs

Tech leaders implementing gamification can leverage KPIs to incentivize team members. For example, a team of developers may gamify aspects of the quality of the software solution, such as the performance of a Web experience, the scale of transaction throughput or the conversion of e-commerce orders. This improves the efficiency and quality of systems, builds community and drives business results. – Mihaela Mazzenga, Valtech

9. Create A Bug Bounty

Create an internal bug bounty program to gamify and enliven a process that simultaneously enhances your software quality assurance. Implement a point system for bug discoveries, assigning more points for bugs found in preproduction or for those discovered proactively in production before others identify them. This program can save time and money while encouraging friendly competition. – Matt Dickson, Stericycle Communication Solutions

10. Encourage A Collaborative Culture

Gamification can be used to encourage a collaborative environment where staff members feel empowered to share their ideas without repercussions. Recently, we went on a company retreat and kept the entire event secret. This not only helped with team building among the staff but also created healthy challenges for them to work through and solve together. – Nicole Janssen, AltaML

11. Amplify Company Values

We use a rewards platform called Bonusly to gamify employee recognition, tying it to our company’s core values. The points that every employee receives can be converted into different rewards, such as shopping or food vouchers. What’s commendable here is it’s both influencing and motivating a culture of gratitude toward anyone who has achieved anything—whether big or small. – Renee Welsh, Embed

12. Promote Healthy Competition

Gamification within an organization promotes healthy competition. Setting milestones and assigning achievement badges upon reaching them is an efficient way to informally motivate team members to compete and motivate each other. For example, whoever finishes the development sprint first gets a “Coder of the Month” badge, and the best business development manager gets a “Close of the Month” award. – Alex Gudilko, AJProTech LLC

13. Establish Solid Workplace Bonds

We can find out-of-the-box solutions to complex challenges when adding an element of fun into the workplace. Virtual “Fun Fridays” connect my teams and foster healthy competition. In the age of remote work, gamification is excellent for establishing solid workplace bonds; I love that phrase, “You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” – Anand Narayan, ITTDigital

14. Add Motivation To Difficult Processes

Onboarding and training are two of the best areas for gamification. Through learning opportunities and courses for easier digestion of information, gamification invites friendly competition and allows a company to award fun badges, motivating rewards or recognition during an otherwise tough process. Overall, it has a positive impact and makes other workplace gamification tactics feel natural. – Romeo Durscher, Auterion

15. Promote Knowledge Sharing

There is nothing like a leaderboard to get people engaged! Gamification has spread like wildfire recently at Dixa, primarily for knowledge sharing and training. Our sales, marketing and BI teams are using tools such as Kahoot, Elevio and Menti to get key information embedded into people’s minds in a fun and engaging way. Gamifying knowledge really makes an impact and makes us feel more like one team. – Mads Fosselius, Dixa

16. Build A Library Of Employee-Generated Content

I love it when work is fun. So when there’s a way to leverage gamification in a competitive, but enjoyable, way, I try to implement it. For example, I’ve seen teams create cool internal competitions that have employees within all departments sending their best photos on a topic as a way to generate digital assets for the social media team, and the winner gets a prize. – Alexis Normand, Greenly