Attract and retain top talent through AI and gamification

Are you engaging your people as effectively as you could be? AI and gamification are the trends every business leader needs to be across now! This technology is revolutionising talent attraction and engagement through experiential employee engagement, which speaks to today’s hyper-digital employees in their language and on their platform.

Successful organisations are winning the war on talent by understanding the ingredients the millennial workforce craves, and they know how to serve it.

So, what are the ingredients?

• a collaborative, participative, and innovative culture
• employee connectedness and meaningful work
• continuous coaching and mentoring
• personal and professional development, and measurable progress
• proactive feedback, recognition, and rewards.
  

How can you serve this dish successfully?
You serve it with gamification “garnish”. Gamification streamlines engagement because it delivers monumental in-the-moment employee experiences that combine all of the above ingredients.

What is gamification?
It’s a mind-tantalising game-like interface integrated with adaptive machine-learning apps that generate intelligent decisions based on input analysis.

In a nutshell, it makes engagement… a game!

This “game”:

• spurs a sense of competition and incentivises collaboration
• motivates participation, engagement, and teamwork
• accelerates learning and personalises development
• increases information recall and retention
• is relevant now and sustainable for the future.

Worxogo, a pioneer in persuasive AI technology, developed a business gamification solution called Mia. Mia is a personal digital coach. Its self-learning AI engine that allows insights into employee behaviours and preferences (intrinsic, extrinsic motivations) and personality traits. Mia’s predictive algorithms align KPIs with behaviour preferences to assess and improve performance through visual game “nudges.”

Many leading organisations including PwC, Larsen & Toubro (leading construction company in Melbourne) and Wipro (global leader in technology consulting with clients throughout Australia) have turned to Mia AI to bolster their engagement strategy. In fact, Worxogo’s clients saw a 70% increase in participation.  

Worxogo Mia products have delivered significant business impact and employee engagement for retail sales, manufacturing, and financial services organisations.

Mia comes in three flavours. We’ll focus on two: gIM and Xogolign.

Give your people a voice
gIM was developed to build and sustain a participative, innovative workplace culture. Its competitive, point-based “accomplishment” feature and progress tracker increases participation and collaboration, while its “idea submissions” feature delivers sustainable impact and change programs.

How?

It gives users a voice through idea input and generation. Employees can track how many ideas they’ve submitted and how many people liked, followed, commented on, or integrated their ideas. This boosts morale, motivation and movement!

Today’s employees want to be important contributors to conversations and outcomes. gIM ensures those ideas and feedback are heard and given credit. One millennial at Google said, “Ideas come from conversations… ideas matter…” She feels that her “ideas matter” because she has been heard. A Google executive at her Switzerland branch said, “People give us a lot of feedback and we take that feedback very seriously and make significant changes based on that feedback.” While no one can match Google’s engaged culture, every organisation can work toward it using gamification.

Mia also brings a sense of meaning to work because it fosters employee connectedness and can tie into the organisation’s purpose and mission.

It offers the growth and development that employees seek. Employees are swiftly alerted and thus privy to different work opportunities and volunteer initiatives, allowing employers to offer millennials the à la carte choices they crave.

Employees can personalise their volunteer efforts, such as volunteering to be a project lead or participating in community give-back that match their goals and values. This not only makes their work meaningful but also accelerates their career by gaining exposure to new roles within the organisation.   

Make your learning and development programs memorable
Organisations invest millions each year in training and development. But it’s not sticking.

Why not?

Because people are either bored or distracted at training seminars. If leaders were retaining and putting into practice what they’ve been taught, we’d see more than 34% of the workforce engaged.

If we want the other 66% engaged we have to find ways to make it stick.

Gamification has been proven to increase learning completion, recall and retention.   
Worxogo Xogolign Mia is the glue. It is everything gIM is and more. It can identify skill gaps, and flag top performers and poor performers. Sales teams in the financial sector doubled their productivity and First-Time-Right (FTR) performance, improving sales by 25%. Some manufacturing suppliers saw a three-time increase in On-Time-in-Full (OTIF) performance.

Simply put: gamification elicits the democratisation of knowledge and ideas. And it offers real-time interactive updates and participative feedback, even in a decentralised organisation.

Boomers and Gen Xers will probably never agree that AI can take the place of face-to-face interaction but today’s employees thrive in the virtual space.

Gamification keeps employees focused and incentivises them to learn, participate, collaborate, and quickly engage and respond. Much of that incentive is driven by instant feedback and gratification through rewards and recognition for their work in the form of badges and points for being top contributors.  

Up your game. Use gamification as a garnish in your efforts to engage your people. It’s the immersive experience tool that satiates your employees’ hunger and wins the war for talent.

Christine Alexy is a professional writer focused on motivational psychology and leadership development. After 15 years of  IT network engineering, Christine re-invented her career when she graduated with honours from Penn State University with a BS in Business Leadership and IT/Security and Risk Analysis.

Dovetailing her professional leadership experience, she is a ghostwriter and researcher for top business leaders and a popular blogger. Christine has supplied extensive research and writing for Steve Van Valin, CEO of Culturology, helping him author a manuscript on purpose and meaning at work. She also ghostwrites high-level content for the HR industry related to ethics and organisational culture. A staunch proponent for meaningful and innovative leadership for today’s multi-generational workforce, Christine regularly shares her insights through her Thought Leadership Thursday blog posts on LinkedIn, @Serve2LeadLyceum on Twitter, and Leadership Lyceum on Google+.