Engaging employees through games

Mumbai: Subhankar Datta is a senior manager-transmission business with KEC International Ltd, an engineering and design subsidiary of Mumbai-headquartered RPG Group. He never enjoyed coordinating projects with colleagues across countries, but things changed when the company introduced an “HR Online” programme.

add_main_image“Last year during KPL (KEC’s own cricket premier league), one of the most enthusiastic teams was from Afghanistan. We got to interact with them, which we otherwise would not have had a chance,” said Datta.

KPL is just an example. KEC International, with a workforce across 45 countries, has programmes such as KIFA (KEC Internal Football Association) and E-Olympics, too—all of which “help in engaging employees positively”, said Yugesh Goutam, human resources (HR) executive director.NextMAds

But such interaction too has its limitations, and so KEC created an “interactive channel” called HR Online that uses gamification—a concept that applies the way people think and act to foster teamwork and solve coordination issues when playing a game in a non-game environment such as a company setting.

Many organizations in India use gamification as a platform to engage, train, hire and improve the productivity of their employees.

“In India, it is still majorly being used as a marketing tool. But globally, for companies like SAP AG, Microsoft Corp. (Project Communicate Hope) and Siemens AG (Project Plantville), gamification is a known tactic for employee recruitment, training and productivity,” said Chaitanya Prabhu, business head, India, Zapak Digital Entertainment.

L’Oreal India Pvt. Ltd and HCL Technologies Ltd use gamifaction for recruitment. “Games are a very important part of the recruitment strategy,” said Mohit James, director, HR, L’Oreal. The games reflect the company’s innovative approach to business and attract students from a wide variety of disciplines, including L’Oréal Brandstorm for marketing, “R U HR” for human resources and Reveal by L’Oréal , a business game.

“A successful gaming platform should have the concept of win and lose points and some kind of peer-to-peer interaction,” said Naveen Narayanan, global head, talent acquisition, HCL Technologies.

The Deloitte Leadership Academy (DLA) training programme embeds badges and leaderboards into a platform alongside video lectures, in-depth courses, tests and quizzes to engage users, and make it more likely for them to complete the online training programmes.sixthMAds

According to a January Harvard Business Review paper, DLA has seen more people use its programme “since the integration of gamification”. “There has been a 37% increase in the number of users returning to the DLA site each week,” the paper said.

Nvidia India, a visual computing technology company, uses gamification to stay “connected and engaged with our campus hires under the New College Grads programme”, said Amit Verma, head, HR, Nvidia South Asia.

To be sure, games have been used for years in schools and organizations. What is new, though, is the technology overlay that helps connect people across geographies and allows for scale, say experts.

Wanda Meloni, principal analyst with M2 Research, a marketing and consulting firm, predicts the global gamification market will rise to $2.8 billion in 2016 from about $100 million in 2011.

Research firm Gartner Inc. in 2011 predicted that more than 50% of organizations that manage innovation processes will “gamify those processes”. Brian Burke, research vice-president at Gartner, said in a phone interaction on 8 August that his prediction is “reasonably well on track”.

However, poor game design could be the undoing of these companies. In November, Gartner forecast that by 2014, 80% of existing gamified applications would fail to meet business objectives due to poor design.