The modern business world puts special emphasis on getting the best out of its employees while making them equally interested and productive in the tasks they perform. It has become essential for the business to make their employees more interactive with the tasks and meet the expectations without getting burned out. Various methodologies have emerged to meet this requirement. One of the best one is gamification.
What is Gamification
Gamification is essentially the application of thought process as well as dynamics of the game within a non-game environment like business operations. It requires increasing the engagement level of the employees (players) to actively participate in dealing and solving various business related issues and problems. It is achieved by completion of assigned tasks in a fun-filled and learning-based environment which accompanies the significant reduction of stress. Gamification has picked up its pace, and many companies around the world have introduced it in their business operations management.
It is actively possible use in various project management practice. Project management requires the effective involvement of the team member in completing the task in a timely manner. In order to attain the efficiency, gamification in project management can be introduced. The major reason behind is that the people love to play games. They allow them to feel a sense of achievement and sense of being a part of the community which comes from being part of a team. Games trigger the innate instincts of competition in an individual and bring positive emotions which comes with the excitement that comes from winning or accomplishing a task provides.
Why use Gamification
In modern business usage, gamification targets to increase the engagement level of the employees in their daily as well as project-based tasks by offering them rewards along with recognition through points, achievement levels as well as accomplishment badges. The rewards are granted based on various performance indicators and factors such as early or on-time completion of the task, completing more tasks in a time frame than planned, achieving results without raising any problems or issues and reductions in defect rates. Gamification allows the managers to keep their employees motivated as well as inspire them to strive and deliver better end results.
Games and projects are similar in many aspects. The games require setting goals for success, assigning roles, making rules, creating tasks and process, influencing creative problem solution ability, reward on success and progress and ultimately achieving the goal to win the game. Similarly, projects also require management of the set goals, dividing the work to achieve the goals, defining roles of the team members to complete the tasks and also establishing various metrics to understand the progress to achieve the end goal by setting milestones.
Project Management and Productivity
Project management has evolved over the years. With the introduction of gamification, the project managers are actively using games and reward mechanism to boost their employee productivity. The visual representation of gamified tasks serves as motivating factor of the employees. Only few project management applications have been able to inculcate this concept. Taskworld is one of them. It is a cloud-hosted visual task management as well as planning application which is designed to meet the requirements of small and large teams. This application aims to align different decentralized groups and then direct their efforts towards common goals. It makes sure that no important aspect of the business operation falls through the crack. It helps in achieving the maximum efficiency of the company’s human resources as well as their creativity. It acts as a collaboration hub for the team where they can efficiently exchange ideas and suggestions in an instant and make decisions by considering the different factors.
This feature is an essential aspect of gamification in a business environment. Making strategies to meet a certain objective as a team requires effective communication and collaborative planning. Taskworld helps the team to achieve that. It also helps the managers to create, organize as well as assign tasks in due time. They can plan the various quality project and also monitor each step of the progress made. It provides the utility to analyze the data to make better business decisions. This aspect of Taskworld coincides with gamification as the team managers act as a leader in the game with employees as fellow players to work together to achieve the desired goal. This application comes with beautiful templates and user-friendly text editor which makes sure that the team makes seamless transition to effective visual management. Gamifying tasks with visual representation helps the managers to present a better picture to the employees about their performance and efficiency. This application helps the team members to make changes in the workflows according to their requirements and turn them into more business-specific.
Motivation
When it comes to motivating the team members, rewarding them and appreciating them in front of the entire team plays a crucial role. With every task completed by the team member, the project manager can show the other team members about a particular member’s achievement level which boosts the morale and productivity of that member. It encourages the team members to compete in a positive manner as being competitive is a basic trait of human beings. It offers a strong bias towards action and increases the performance level.
The above picture provides details of various tasks assigned to the individual along with the status of the tasks and number of total tasks. It also shows the involved team members in particular task. The team managers can effectively add a member to particular tasks and monitor their progress. It also allows the team member to look at the tasks completed by the fellow team members. This helps in creating a sense of competition among them which propels them to work in an efficient way to outperform the other members while maintaining the quality of the product.
Competitive elements exist in any work environment, and by adding gamification, it can deliver positive results. The gamification increased the engagement level of the team members. As seen in the above picture, the team member can see and interact with other team members to complete the assigned tasks. He can also see the total number of tasks assigned to him and how many of them are overdue and completed. This enhances the motivation of the individual as he goes along completing the tasks. It also makes him more inclined towards making stronger collaboration with other team members to achieve the desired goals. It also improves his as well as his team’s performance. This visual representation of tasks assigned and their status motivates the individual to increase his efficiency and productivity. It also allows him to see the tasks completed by other team members which makes him compete with higher productivity.
Taskworld allows the manager to track the progress of the tasks and provide necessary feedback on the basis of the results generated. This makes the team members to work efficiently. It also influences them to engage with other team members too.
Gamification can be tricky some times. It can cause a sense of isolation and tension among the competing teams. It can lead to lack of motivation if the individual is not properly rewarded or appreciated. Taskworld manages to overcome this obstacle with its chat and file sharing feature. It has an inbuilt chat features which as both public channels for the entire company to view, as well as, the individual ones to choose the member to get connected. The public channel allows the team manager to appreciate the team member in front of his team members which creates an emotion of pride and achievement. It essentially motivates him to deliver better performance to receive the same adulation. It also influences the other chat viewers to improve themselves to get similar rewards. This visual representation boosts the productivity of the team members.
Collaboration
The individual chat feature allows the team member to communicate others to complete his tasks. He can seek support, advice, suggestions, and ideas from others to perform better and deliver the project on time. Collaborative efforts is an essential aspect of gamification in business as it collectively boosts the productivity of the entire team and helps them to achieve the goal by working in conjunction. The file sharing feature of Taskworld helps the individual to share necessary resources with others to complete his tasks. This application allows the individual to receive a notification every time an important update is made. All this communication is made in a secure fashion, so there is no leakage of information. This notification feature plays a key role in the strategy of an individual to complete a task.
Most of the project managers understand the importance of active engagement as well as the motivation of the team members for successful delivery of the project. Since gamification of tasks with visual representation improves both engagement as well as motivation, it combines the benefits of the both which delivers a better result. The gamification in project management is used to inspire and influence the team members to best utilize the defined process, meet deadlines on a timely basis and improve the productivity and delivery metrics of the project. The gamification provides fun, engaging as well as exciting work climate to the team members. This visual representation allows the team members to interact in seamless manner to work together. It also boosts their personal relationships to achieve the desired result in collaborative manner without getting bored. This also increases the cohesiveness among them. Taskworld provides a great user interface for the team members to achieve the same. They can communicate and exchange ideas and strategies to compete for a goal. Gamification also improves individual as well team productivity. Gamifying the tasks with visual representation allows the team members to work together in coherence to achieve the desired goal. Taskworld helps in achieving the same.
Using this application, the individual can set a certain point value to indicate the difficulty or even utilize the relative scores in order to understand how different tasks are connected and performed. This point awarding system in visual representation provides an overview to the team members to work together on the projects on the basis of priority as well as difficulty level. Using collaboration suite of this application, the team members can make comments as well as suggest ideas and also read more about the progress of the project. This cohesive team effort leads to better execution of tasks and timely completion of the project.
Performance Indication
One should understand that gamifying the tasks along with its visual representation gives an overview of the performance of the individual team members. It shows the actual work done and efforts made by an individual in the completion of the particular task. This act as great performance indicator which allows the managers to know which team member is performing better than the others.
Another important issue of project management is managing workflows as well as preferences. Using Taskworld, the team manager can easily add, assign as well as edit tasks. It reduces the time required to navigate the schedule and have an overview about which team member which perform which tasks. It also allows the team make comments, take notes and follow-ups on the same dashboard. This provides him an overview of all the people involved in a particular project and their contribution to the project. It acts as great measurement scale to gauge the productivity as well as the efficiency of the team members. By gamifying the tasks in such visual manner, the managers get the comprehensive status and progress of the project and performance of each team member.
Gamification of tasks requires to define the end goal. Before embarking on gamification of the projects or tasks, the manager has to clearly define the objectives. This allows him to set milestones to measure the project progress status and work performed by the team members in achieving those milestones. Gamification helps in maintaining high-quality work by means of tracking project as well as problem areas and other issues. It also requires timely recording and status reporting of the project. It improves the accuracy of task estimation by comparing it with estimated effort.
Tracking Progress
Taskworld provides essential tools to track the progress of the project. It also offers analytics tools to measure the various performance metrics of each individual. The visual representation available in this application gives a better picture to the team managers. It also allows the managers to make sure that there are no delays or missed deadlines.
Gamifying the tasks with visual representation provides deeper insights into team performance and individual’s efficiency and productivity. It helps the managers to allocate best human resources for a particular task to achieve the overall objective and complete the project. It helps the managers to quantify the efforts of the team members. It gives a holistic view of the effectiveness of individual and teams. It acts as great performance indicator which allows the managers to improve their management and resource allocation for timely completion of the projects.
Conclusion
This visual representation of gamified tasks reflects the performance of the team members and helps the managers to effectively quantify it and influence as well as motivate the team members by interacting and rewarding them. This enhances the morale and motivation of the team members and also develops positive competitiveness which results in an efficient as well as timely completion of the project, in an overall sense.
