How Cloud Gamification with Big Data Can Transform Employee Engagement

According to a survey published by Gallup, just over 13 percent of employees globally are actually "involved in, enthusiastic about and committed to their work and workplace." The rest of the global workforce is not just indifferent - a good chunk of them are also "actively disengaged" or "potentially hostile." This is quite concerning given that nearly 71 percentage of employees regard engagement as critical to achieving organizational success.

Could cloud gamification be the answer? According to one study, nearly 78% of workers today use games based motivation techniques to motivate themselves while nearly 91% of those studied believe these gamification techniques actually helped them in increasing engagement, awareness and productivity.

While the impact of gamification on employee productivity is no longer questioned, there are still concerns about the metrics used to objectively measure its effectiveness. This is because the actual impact is extremely subjective and is impacted by external factors that impact the results. How do you measure motivation, for instance?

Gal Rimon, the founder and CEO of GamEffective, recommends breaking the task into two separate objectives in order to accurately measure the benefits from gamification - one, measure the effect of gamification on the target users' behavior, and two, measure the effect of the modified behavior on business results. For instance, having a progress bar at the bottom of a multi-window form could motivate a user to go through all the pages without quitting midway - but does this motivation to go through the entire form also have a negative impact on how detailed their responses are going to be? These are questions that must be asked and must be quantified while measuring the effects of cloud gamification.

One of the advantages of cloud gamification is its ability to bring together data points from multiple sources and help transform them into useful information. With present-day big data technologies, it is possible to aggregate gamification experiments across thousands of workers and process them to interpret valuable information.

Consider a typical gamification objective in a global customer service center - improve quality of service, customer satisfaction and productivity across multiple locations. Many times, the same gamification techniques may not work across all these various locations. For instance, if you pick a sports narrative, a customer service center in India would require Cricket related narratives while another center in the US would need Football narratives. This can often create silos that work independently and integrating them to generate useful information may become impossible.

With cloud gamification, it is possible to gather raw data points from these various independent centers that have unique front-end interfaces. The data points can be consolidated through a single server and using big data, it is possible to measure the impact comprehensively. Not only that - cloud gamification also gives you the opportunity to identify behavior patterns that do not align with the rest of the data points. For instance, if the user-behavior from the Indian customer service center is drastically different from those derived from the American or Israeli centers, then it can be instinctively derived that the narrative used in the gamification process has not been uniformly applied. Such pattern-detection is not possible in the absence of cloud.

Cloud gamification is quite the future and with big data, the system can be extremely sophisticated to help businesses derive extremely valuable information in the execution of their business strategies.

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