By Andy Low

When organisations of all size and types start to embrace gamification and game mechanics, they will be able to engage their employees, cut through the noise of day to day activities, drive innovations, improve employees’ engagement and motivation and ultimately improve the company’s revenues.

The process of presenting employees with challenges, guide and encourage them along the way and get them emotionally engaged to do their best, this is what we defined as gamification.

Gamified solutions leverage on game design, loyalty program design and behavioural change to solve personal and business problems.

In this article, we will discuss the importance of a well-designed point system and how it can drive employee engagement.

Points System

Game mechanics are the basic building blocks of a game. They include points, badges, levels, leaderboards and rewards. Points are a system that we use to track the desired behaviour or grind, keep scores and to provide feedback to users.

Point system serves a different purpose and is usually divided into five different categories:

Experience Points; they are used to track user experience over time.
Reputation Points; these points accumulated based on your activities will contribute to establishing a user reputation.
Redeemable Points; these are virtual currency points that user can earn and redeem for rewards.
Skill Points; these points denote a user’s ability in a specific area.
Karma Points; these points are earned when a user help other users. They are usually non-redeemable.

As players of games or users of loyalty programs, we are familiar with how a points system drive us to exhibit the desired behaviour that a game wants or an application wants us to present. In the same way, the various types of points when designed well will help organisations to drive the desired behaviour.

However, point system by itself cannot drive long-term sustainable behaviour, it needs to be combined with other strategies to make your gamify solution effective and sustainable.

Stay tuned as we next talk more about other elements of game mechanics.