Employee recognition. Stepping up the game in rewards

You perform well, get rewarded by your organisation and can pick and choose your gift. But hold on. Now the way you pick your reward has been transformed into a surreal, social experience, thanks to Virtual Reality.

Welcome to Warehouse Windfall, a virtual reality-enabled game where the rewarded employee dons a headset that transports her into a gigantic shopping aisle. The employee gets a shopping cart and has to race against the clock, running down the aisle and zapping anything she wants with a gun.

Global Engagement agency BI Worldwide is stepping up the game when it comes to delivering incentives and rewards. One of its popular incentive tools for employees in the US is the physical version of Warehouse Windfall, where employees would run down an aisle picking all they could within a minute. The entire organisation as well as invited friends and family would stand by the sidelines, cheering.

“The dopamine that shoots up is incredible,” says Siddharth Reddy, Managing Director, BI Worldwide India, describing how the game was conceived in order to make the recognition a big social and memorable event. People would be given a video recording and it became aspirational for employees to earn a chance to play the game. The challenge was how BI Worldwide could replicate this game in other countries where setting up such warehouses was not that practical. The answer was to gamify it with virtual reality. “Once she wears the VR headset, the person thinks she is in warehouse. You can see yourself running and even get motion sickness,” describes Reddy. Through VR, the whole experience of the warehouse game was amplified, the recordings of the game shared widely. “We are now customising and enhancing this game for India,” says Reddy, describing how companies like Medtronics have used it.

Onboarding fun

Incentives and rewards are not the only things getting gamified. Earlier this year, BI Worldwide acquired Silicon Valley company Bunchball, which combines behavioural economics, big data and gamification. “They were literally the inventors of enterprise gamification,” says Reddy, pointing to how the company, set up in 2007, was one of the first to come up with a technology platform, Nitro, to integrate game mechanics with non-game digital experiences. Since then, millions of people have completed more than five billion challenges powered by Bunchball. BI Worldwide is now in the process of launching Bunchball services in India, especially in the space of recruiting and onboarding

Typically, when a new employee joins, there is a lot of paperwork. What the Onboarding Advisor does is to gamify the whole experience. Instead of filling forms, the new employee is given a series of missions. It could be stuff like, make a buddy, find a friend, have lunch with your boss. When you complete the mission, you unlock level two and find a gift. “In the first 60 days, if a new employee is recognised, their time to proficiency is shorter and their intent to stay is longer,” reasons Reddy. Also, the idea is to make the whole onboarding experience fun and motivate the person to do certain things, he says, pointing out how people achieve much faster onboarding than normal.

The next frontier

Reddy says tech is really changing employee engagement and describes how BI Worldwide is now using machine learning and AI to do so. “Machine learning is the first layer and AI sits on top of that. We are not there yet when it comes to AI, it’s still weak, but we are doing the first layer — collecting data, both structured and unstructured, from behaviour, identifying patterns and then predicting,” he says.

For instance, Recognition Advisor is a machine learning-based tool that delivers nudges to managers. Often employees are rewarded for achieving big goals but it’s the small things that fail to get acknowledged. “As a manager I might forget,” he says. That’s where Recognition Advisor, which is like an assistant in an app, comes in — it notices if certain employees in a department are getting recognised a lot, if some are getting left out, and prompts the manager to take action.

Gamification is certainly changing the game when it comes to motivating employees.

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