The manufacturing industry has faced increasing global competition over the past decade, and the vote for Brexit has only exacerbated the need for British manufacturing to work even harder to maintain or grow their share of the market. But how to achieve this? In today’s brutal economic climate, increasing employee pay is not always an option. A more feasible retention strategy focuses on increasing employee engagement. According to a recent study, engaged employees are 70% more productive and have a 78% higher safety record, with businesses experiencing 70% lower employee turnover and 44% greater profitability.
So how can companies achieve employee engagement within the manufacturing industry? The answer might be found in gamification - the concept of applying game mechanics and design techniques to enhance user experience – which promises increased productivity and employee morale for any organisation clever enough to find a way to gamify their work. Whilst assembly line production may not seem the ideal candidate for gamification, in environments where people are already sharing and linking to each other, such as engineering and manufacturing, it’s a natural fit.
Workers on a production line have strong social bonds and have a greater performance boost when a team incentive is offered – but only when performance information is available in a transparent way. After all, how do we know that others are working well if there is no way for us to see them work or for them to see us work?
Dashboard technology lends itself to gamification because it is used to process different data streams and simplifies it into more manageable chunks of visual information that allows you to see what you are doing right and where you need to improve. For example, this could be shown as horses on a race track which proceed towards a jump each time a task is completed, driving a positive business outcome. A team’s status is clearly visible, so even when users are not competing against each other, there is still incentive to further motivate staff.
Dashboards can show you exactly where your trouble areas are and arm you with the information you need to improve. Also by making the dashboards visible throughout the company, it holds different departments directly accountable for their productivity.
All the evidence shows that, when employed correctly, gamification is able to motivate employees, create healthy competition among teams and generate a ‘buzz’ at work. We’re increasingly talking to our customers about gamification and the response has been very positive. As a result, we are building gamification into the next version of our dashboards, available early 2017.
Robert Dagge is Managing Director of Dynistics