By Sweta Srivastava

 

Gamification though appeared in the form of computer software in 2008, it started gaining popularity in 2010 only, and since then, gamification concept has come a long way especially when it comes to its applications in various industries and segments.

According to the research by MarketsandMarkets, the global gamification market will grow to USD 11.10 billion by 2020, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 46.3 per cent.

In this article, I want to highlight how gamification can be implemented to your logistics business and can prepare your organisation to keep up with the trend and improve the overall business growth and employee experience and engagement strategies.

Challenges Faced in Motivating Employees

Logistics business involves managing the flow of materials and supplies for production and commerce. It also has a new domain of intralogistics which consists of handling the inventory within specific production sites or storage facilities.

Logistics companies are making efforts to automate the whole process of order picking. However, it still requires intensive manual labour which is usually performed by blue-collar employees. Employee motivation and engagement are a recurring problem in intralogistics. Moreover, the question is how to motivate them in both extrinsic (monetary) and intrinsic (emotional) way. Since usually, these employees are semi or unskilled who often work on daily wages. It is difficult to find out the way to keep them motivated throughout. Monetary rewards may seem to be the answer here but, for the long run, even monetary rewards cannot be a significant motivating factor. Therefore motivating them in a way that they feel happy and satisfied to work even when their tasks are mainly manual and repetitive is what can drive them to work or as we call them, by the intrinsic rewards.

Motivation and Gamification

Logistics companies have potential opportunities to leverage the concept of gamification to boost the effectiveness of employee engagement, motivation, learning and training. Gamification has the potential to shape employee behaviour into a more positive one and can help in boosting their overall skills while providing them with a more personalised experience.

Let me list down a few aspects of motivation which should be considered before planning a successful engagement and motivation strategy.

Identifying the Needs- Recognizing the needs, traits and motives of the staff are essential to determine what all factors can drive them and help them to be more engaged and happy at work.

Behavioural Aspect- It is essential to identify the kind of behaviour change, the organisation is trying to achieve in the future in its staff, helps in planning the right strategy.

Identifying Individual Preferences- Individual interests affect the motivation factor significantly. When a person is performing a task which interests them, they will always deliver better results and will be fully engaged in the activity.

Benefits of Implementing Gamification

There is no doubt that gamification has a vast spectrum and usage. We have described various gamification elements and their application in our previous blogs. In case you have missed them you can read here.

Management

From management perspective adding gamification to logistics business helps in assessing performance and they do not have to rely on bulky tools. Gamification also helps in adding transparency, and it is easy to point out the productivity issues. It adds accountability and competitiveness. Supervisors can have access to all the data, and it is easier to determine the benchmarks to be met, throughout the day. It simplifies to check the attendance and measure the productivity of staff members.

Let me further explain this with a small example, if you want to measure the productivity rate of your ground staff, it is easy to do that by tracking the rate of overtime for each staff member and can compare it with the amount of work they are completing everyday. If they are completing more work by doing lesser overtime or taking lesser leaves, means they are highly productive.

Employees

When it comes to employees, gamification elements like badges, rewards and points can add excitement to their work while at the same time encourage them to increase their productivity at work even more. It can act as a self-motivation factor because their effort and work is recognised by higher management. They can also track their own performance and know where they stand on leadership boards. It will make repetitive tasks more fun, and when they will receive appreciation as well, it will further drive them to perform even better and enhance their knowledge and skills.

Simplify Training and Learning

Gamification can also facilitate training and learning for these employees. Through simple quizzes and daily trivia facts, they can be encouraged to learn and improve their skills in a fun way without even feeling overburdened by the traditional concept of training and learning. For managers and supervisors also it will be easier to teach them new skills which will eventually lead to saving not just the cost of training programmes but also the time involved.

 

I believe that gamification can prove to be a revolutionary addition to your engagement and motivation strategy and you will be surprised to see the benefits. However, since most of the staff members are involved in manual labour and are not so skilled, they may not feel comfortable using a complex solution every day, it may even make them stop using it altogether in the long run instead of engaging them. Therefore, organisations need to be careful in choosing and implementing a gamified solution and ensure that it is simple and easy to understand.

Are you looking for the perfect gamified solution for your logistics business? We can help you with that! Simply drop us an email to learn more about it!