Learn how to use gamification and behavioral economics to create a more engaging and productive workplace. Discover the principles, techniques, benefits, and challenges of using them.

Behavioral economics is fundamental to economics! When the fed raises rates and people react, it’s all about emotions and perceptions of the future. This also plays within companies. When leaders create a culture of trust and customer value employees feel energized to work together and improve productivity. This is why I often think macroeconomists miss many signals about what’s really going on in the economy.

Picking a job and staying around to develop a career is so much a choice about economics (compensation!) as it is about connections and emotional attachment (engagement!). Like in macroeconomics, creating the right framework for people to thrive is the art of leadership -- Societies prosper with open markets and healthy competition. Companies growth with collaboration, engagement and innovation agility.

Last updated on Jun 4, 2024

How do you use gamification and behavioral economics to enhance employee engagement and performance?

Gamification and behavioral economics are two powerful tools that can help you design a more engaging and productive workplace. They can help you create a positive feedback loop that motivates your employees to perform better, learn faster, and collaborate more effectively. In this article, you will learn how to apply some key principles and techniques from these fields to enhance your organizational design.

1 What is gamification?

Gamification is the use of game elements and mechanics in non-game contexts to increase motivation, participation, and enjoyment. It can involve elements such as points, badges, levels, leaderboards, challenges, rewards, and feedback. Gamification can tap into your employees' intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, such as curiosity, mastery, autonomy, recognition, and social influence. Gamification can also make your work processes more fun, meaningful, and interactive.

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André do Carmo

Top Compensation & Benefits Voice | Director at RH Senior |💰Compensation & Benefits | 📊Organizational Structure Design | 🏆Reward Systems | 📈Performance Management | 💵Salary Survey | 🔍Job Analysis & Evaluation
Uma vez implementei sistemas de pontos, medalhas e tabelas de classificação para reconhecer as conquistas dos funcionários em tempo real. Isso transformou tarefas rotineiras em experiências mais envolventes, incentivando a competição saudável e o reconhecimento entre colegas.

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Anya Lundy 🏠 Digital Spaces

Freelance Writer | Health Communications | Strategy and Business - designing new ways of building
How gamification and behavioral economics can be used together to enhance organizational performance: Gamification facilitates a culture of continuous learning and innovation, and behavioral economics can tackle cognitive biases and obstacles that hinder progress. Leverage challenges and quests to ignite curiosity and creativity, and employ framing and anchoring techniques to shape employees' perceptions of novel concepts and opportunities. This synthesis presents a dynamic approach to inspire, engage, and maximize employee potential, thus enhancing overall organizational performance.
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verena caetano da silveira, Ph.D.

Organization Architect & Design Scientist | Disability Manager | Curo i processi dell'organizzazione e li porto, con gentilezza e autorevolezza, a diventare più performanti e anche sostenibili. Credo nella fiducia.
Today we talk about using the gamification strategy to introduce gaming into organizational processes. The real innovation compared to the specific techniques used for decades in the largest (and most serious) organizations to stimulate productivity is that gamification now brings together in a real project approach all the methodologies and strategies for converting recurring activities, time consuming and "heavy" in simple, easy and even fun activities. Tasks to be carried out effortlessly, naturally, like children who build, learn and evolve simply by playing.
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2 What is behavioral economics?

Behavioral economics is the study of how human psychology and emotions affect economic decisions and outcomes. It challenges the assumption that people are rational and self-interested, and instead recognizes that people are often biased, irrational, and influenced by social and environmental factors. Behavioral economics can help you understand how your employees make choices, what drives their behavior, and how you can nudge them towards desired actions and goals.

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Josh Bersin

Global Industry Analyst, I study all aspects of HR, business leadership, corporate L&D, recruiting, and HR technology. ✨
Behavioral economics is fundamental to economics! When the fed raises rates and people react, it’s all about emotions and perceptions of the future. This also plays within companies. When leaders create a culture of trust and customer value employees feel energized to work together and improve productivity. This is why I often think macroeconomists miss many signals about what’s really going on in the economy.
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Guillermo Miranda

AI Adoption & Digital Transformation Leader
Picking a job and staying around to develop a career is so much a choice about economics (compensation!) as it is about connections and emotional attachment (engagement!). Like in macroeconomics, creating the right framework for people to thrive is the art of leadership -- Societies prosper with open markets and healthy competition. Companies growth with collaboration, engagement and innovation agility.
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André do Carmo

Top Compensation & Benefits Voice | Director at RH Senior |💰Compensation & Benefits | 📊Organizational Structure Design | 🏆Reward Systems | 📈Performance Management | 💵Salary Survey | 🔍Job Analysis & Evaluation
No ambiente de trabalho, utilizei princípios de economia comportamental para projetar incentivos e feedbacks que alinham comportamentos dos funcionários com os objetivos organizacionais. Por exemplo, pequenos incentivos foram oferecidos para encorajar a participação em programas de bem-estar, levando a uma maior adesão comparada às estratégias tradicionais.

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Naomi Pusch

Consultant at Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
After recently reading R. Dutt’s Radical Product Thinking and revisiting Daniel Pink’s work from a decade ago, I think that even more impactful to motivating employees is having a clear vision for your organization that is aligned with how you’ll improve your customers’ lives. When employees can see their part in that vision, that’s a motivator. No amount of gamification can sustain the kind of commitment that would generate.
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3 How to use gamification and behavioral economics together?

Gamification and behavioral economics can be used together to enhance organizational design. By creating a clear goal with gamification and aligning incentives and rewards with behavioral economics, you can measure and reward performance while creating a sense of urgency and competition. Frequent and immediate feedback can be provided with gamification, while making it more effective and personalized with behavioral economics. Gamification can also foster a culture of learning and innovation, while behavioral economics can help overcome cognitive biases and barriers. Challenges and quests can stimulate curiosity and creativity, while framing and anchoring can influence how employees perceive new ideas and opportunities.

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André do Carmo

Top Compensation & Benefits Voice | Director at RH Senior |💰Compensation & Benefits | 📊Organizational Structure Design | 🏆Reward Systems | 📈Performance Management | 💵Salary Survey | 🔍Job Analysis & Evaluation
Implementei um programa de gamificação onde os funcionários ganhavam pontos não apenas por completar tarefas, mas também por demonstrar comportamentos alinhados com os valores da empresa, como colaboração e inovação. Este sistema utilizou insights da economia comportamental, reconhecendo que a motivação intrínseca, impulsionada pelo reconhecimento e pela sensação de realização, pode ser mais poderosa do que recompensas extrínsecas.

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Rodrigo Ferro Ruiz

Founder of the think-and-do tank A New Common Sense and founder of the men's care brand Papichulo Style. Strategist. Insights Detector. Systemic Gamificator.
I would say both are intimately related to each other. Systemic gamification acts in behavioral economics and produces solutions for the different market actors.
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4 What are the benefits of using gamification and behavioral economics?

Using gamification and behavioral economics can bring many benefits to your organizational design, such as increasing employee engagement and satisfaction, improving performance and productivity, enhancing learning and development, strengthening collaboration and communication, and supporting well-being and retention. By making work more fun, rewarding, and meaningful, employees are motivated to achieve higher standards and goals. Additionally, this approach provides them with opportunities to acquire new skills and knowledge while creating a sense of community and shared purpose. Ultimately, it reduces stress, burnout, and increases loyalty and trust.

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André do Carmo

Top Compensation & Benefits Voice | Director at RH Senior |💰Compensation & Benefits | 📊Organizational Structure Design | 🏆Reward Systems | 📈Performance Management | 💵Salary Survey | 🔍Job Analysis & Evaluation
No meu caso, observei uma melhoria tangível na moral da equipe e uma maior disposição para participar em atividades de desenvolvimento profissional.

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Jessica Lena Blanchette

Learning & Development Specialist. Career Consultant. Instructional Designer. eLearning Developer. LMS Administrator. Views are my own.
Enhancing learning and developing through gamification is a great way to internally motivate behaviour. I suggest using an LMS with built in tools that you can customize to suit your needs. We use Docebo but still haven’t implemented any badges, contests or leaderboards. I’m looking forward to seeing how this works in practice.
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Rodrigo Ferro Ruiz

Founder of the think-and-do tank A New Common Sense and founder of the men's care brand Papichulo Style. Strategist. Insights Detector. Systemic Gamificator.
The main benefit is to solve complex problems. Human-centered design usually works with one motivator and a few goals. Using systemic gamification allows you to work with many motivators and multiple goals. Depending on your own goals, systemic gamification boosts them and creates a new system where the outcomes should be better than those without s.g.
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5 What are the challenges of using gamification and behavioral economics?

Using gamification and behavioral economics can also present some challenges to your organizational design, such as balancing extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, designing ethical and transparent interventions, evaluating the impact of the interventions, managing costs and resources, and ensuring their sustainability. It is essential to consider these issues when implementing gamification and behavioral economics in order to avoid any unintended consequences or undermining of intrinsic motivation.

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André do Carmo

Top Compensation & Benefits Voice | Director at RH Senior |💰Compensation & Benefits | 📊Organizational Structure Design | 🏆Reward Systems | 📈Performance Management | 💵Salary Survey | 🔍Job Analysis & Evaluation
Um dos principais desafios é garantir que o sistema de gamificação seja percebido como justo e que as recompensas sejam significativas para todos os funcionários. É muito importante equilibrar incentivos de curto prazo com objetivos de longo prazo para evitar que o engajamento seja apenas temporário.

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Rodrigo Ferro Ruiz

Founder of the think-and-do tank A New Common Sense and founder of the men's care brand Papichulo Style. Strategist. Insights Detector. Systemic Gamificator.
Some people try gamification elements and think they're gamifying their system. That's a mistake. The main challenge working with systemic gamification is that you need experts. Think about an airplane. You may think the AI flies it, but in the end, you will need the pilot.
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6 How to get started with using gamification and behavioral economics?

If you are interested in using gamification and behavioral economics to enhance your organizational design, there are several steps you can take. First, define your organizational goal and identify the behaviors and outcomes you want to influence or change among your employees. Then, analyze their motivations, preferences, challenges, and barriers to understand their decision-making processes and biases. After that, choose the appropriate gamification and behavioral economics elements and techniques that suit your goal, employees, and context. Design a coherent and engaging intervention, test it with a small group of employees, collect feedback and data to measure its impact and effectiveness. Finally, implement your intervention with your entire organization and monitor its results. Review and refine your intervention based on your findings and feedback, making adjustments as needed.

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7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?

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How do you use gamification and behavioral economics to enhance employee engagement and performance?

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1 What is gamification?

2 What is behavioral economics?

3 How to use gamification and behavioral economics together?

4 What are the benefits of using gamification and behavioral economics?

5 What are the challenges of using gamification and behavioral economics?

6 How to get started with using gamification and behavioral economics?

7 Here’s what else to consider

Organizational Design

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