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
with us, I’m very excited about this project, so if you are thinking of
trying gamification in your workplace, we’d love to hear from you to
see if we can work together to improve the results of your workforce.
