Implementing sustainability objectives can greatly contribute to a company’s success. Therefore, achieving sustainability KPIs have become increasingly important. Becoming a sustainable business not only helps to protect the future of the environment and society, it also looks to protect the company’s own business interests.
What are some of the benefits from promoting sustainable business?
Companies who dedicate time and effort to driving environmental and social initiatives are increasingly seen as more attractive to investors, prospects, consumers, and employees. This is because sustainable businesses benefit from:
1 – Improved brand image
2 – Reduced waste
3 – Lower costs
4 – Improved competitive advantage
5 – Attracting new talent
6 – Improved employee engagement, increased productivity and reduced staff turnover
To achieve any KPI a business needs to effectively communicate with and train their employees. However, employees are increasingly fatigued with traditional approaches to training, and, as e-learning grows in popularity (with many still working from home), the employee training process needs to work harder to be engaging and effective. One of the most effective ways to engage is to make the process fun, entertaining, and stimulating; gamification is an incredibly powerful tool to help achieve this.
By incorporating a gamified experiences employees are motivated to complete training, with a cycle of challenge, achievement and reward. This tried-and-tested methodology creates a value exchange, which incentivizes the completion of activities, delivering a positive outcome for both employees and employers.
Here are some ways applying gamification to your employee communication and training activities can help you meet your business’ sustainability objectives:
Gamification learning is interactive, rewarding, and innovative
Adding gaming elements to training and communication creates an interactive and engaging environment that increases motivation to learn, engage, and collaborate towards a company’s sustainable goals. Bite-sized content consisting of collaborative sustainability resources, sustainability quizzes, and awards/achievements help to capture and retain employee attention, as well as encourage them to become sustainability advocates.
Gamification encourages employee feedback
To ensure employees are getting the most out of training and are finding it effective, gamification can be used to give and receive feedback as their sustainability targets are achieved in real-time.
Gamified surveys, polls, and feedback are proven to be more engaging and interesting. By making the feedback process more enjoyable the employee’s motivation to participate and engage increases. By opening this line of communication, employees will be encouraged to share their own ideas, and be more willing to go the extra mile to understand and meet your sustainability objectives.
Gamification encourages healthy competition among employees
Humans are naturally very competitive; and employees want to feel motivated to complete tasks. Gamification works well at achieving this is through extrinsic motivation, which is when gamified mechanics are used to encourage employees to reinforce sustainable habits, or a specific behavior, that will help a company reach their sustainability goals by offering them a reward.
Intrinsically, employees get the satisfaction of taking part in a fun process. Extrinsically, they’ll be driven by positive rewards for their activity. In other words, they’ll actually want to take part in and complete their training.
Gamified quizzes are an excellent tool to encourage healthy competition. A points system can be adopted throughout the learning and development process to motivate employees to complete sustainability training modules. These points can then be displayed on an office leaderboard to create healthy competition and encourage more employees to follow-suit. Doing this benefits both staff and the business as it shows their progression, as well as the importance of personal development, meaning they’re more inclined to want to learn.
Want to learn more?
Ultimately a business that is committed to sustainability will be more attractive to potential investors, new talent, and customers. Your employees are your greatest advocate, and by implementing gamification into the employee engagement process is a guaranteed way of creating a more sustainable business.
If you would like to discuss how gamification can help your business meet sustainability goals, and to take a look at our bespoke approach to gamification in training and development get in touch. Our team aims to understand your requirements, challenges, and preferences needed to develop a gamified training solution tailored to your organization and your employees.