A productive team is essential if we want to have any success at work. Engaged teams lead to successful endeavors, while a dysfunctional team may force us back to the drawing board, cause layoffs, and high turnover. Unfortunately, building a good team isn’t easy, and the hybrid/remote work culture can make communication and engagement even more difficult. 

At the same time, entry-level to executive employees are wondering how they can better connect with others at work. Gallup shows that $1 trillion is lost due to voluntary turnover. This illustrates that there are still too many employees who are disengaged and unfulfilled at work. The majority say their organizations could have done more to keep them.

Our Guest: Lauren Fitzpatrick Shanks

Lauren Shanks is an entrepreneur, award-winning engineer, tech leader, mother of two, founder and CEO of KeepWOL, and much more. She is the first black woman to graduate from the University of Kansas’ Aerospace Engineering Department, a recipient of the Women in Technology Rising Star Award, and more fabulous accomplishments. 

So, what is gamification, and how important is it for companies to gamify their training and engagement initiatives? Lauren explains: 

So the importance is high, but it’s also important to understand what it all means and make sure that we use the terminology in the right way. With gamification and simulation in games, there’s a continuum. They cross over, but there are still bits of nuances. With gamification, we can think about it as game elements and mechanics of things from games being added to situations that weren’t meant to be a game.

Boost Morale, Gauge Productivity and Development

As humans, we want to win. Some people are not competitive, but they still don’t want to lose or fail. Games hack the human brain and tap into its reward center. Games typically require quick thinking that can disarm individuals and get more into a competitive mindset. It is important to be mindful before implementing gamification, but the possibilities are big:

We’ve worked with teams of all different complexities. That’s what’s really amazing about games and gamification because they can be used to bring people from different generations and different cultures together. We’ve all played games before in our life. We all have that innate desire to not fail. So we’ve worked with matrix-based teams, C suite teams, and multidisciplinary teams. Teams of all makes and molds are utilizing KeepWOL’s game suite to develop exceptional teams.

Future of Gamification

Gamification is not exactly new, but it certainly holds potential for workplaces in the future. Lauren shares a story from the KeepWOL team’s recent booth at the world’s largest conference for talent development:

…on our banner, we had the words, game-centric, and play. People were flocking to our booth because their companies had sent them there on a mission of how do you incorporate some of these new trends, these new things that are going on. Gamification is not new. But it takes a little more time to get things into the enterprise space. And so they’re coming to us, they’re flocking. And they’re like, how do we incorporate this into our talent development initiatives? And just for the future of work, if we’re thinking about this, KeepWOL, we’re using games to bridge that gap between learning and doing.

I hope you found this episode of #WorkTrends helpful and inspirational. To learn more about Lauren Fitzpatrick Shanks and game-centric talent development, please visit https://www.keepwol.com.

Subscribe to the #WorkTrends podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. Be sure to follow our #WorkTrends hashtag on LinkedIn and Facebook, too, for more great conversations!