Human Resource Management

How
Employee Gamification
Engagement Can Boost
by Adrian R. Camilleri and Ananta Neelim
March 28, 2024

MirageC/Getty Images

Summary. Employee disengagement is a persistent problem, and attempts to

inject excitement often fall flat. However, gamification — using elements of games
to motivate — has serious potential when thoughtfully executed. This article
explores the psychology behind... more

A core responsibility of every manager is to motivate and engage

their employees. This is because disengaged employees show
lower productivity and exhibit higher absenteeism. Traditional
approaches to increasing employee engagement include giving
workers more autonomy, a higher sense of belonging and
purpose, and additional growth opportunities. Nevertheless,
employee disengagement in the workplace hit a nine-year high in
2022 in the U.S., with approximately three-fourths of employees
reporting being disengaged.

In light of difficulties maintaining employee engagement, some

companies have begun to explore alternative approaches
designed to generate excitement. For example, in 2018, United
Airlines replaced a program that gave small quarterly bonuses to
all employees with one that that entered every employee with
perfect quarterly attendance into a lottery with huge prizes on
offer. However, employees immediately rebelled and the lottery
program was quickly removed.

Was the introduction of “gamification” at United Airlines an

inherently flawed idea or was the backlash due to the poor
execution? We believe it is the latter.

In this article, our aim is to highlight cutting-edge research from

behavioral science to help managers effectively incorporate
gamification elements in their workplace. We focus on employee
reward programs because compensation and benefits is the top
factor people consider when pursuing new jobs and also because
we believe it is an underutilized way to boost employee
engagement.

Unleashing the Power of Gamification

Gamification takes the essence of games — fun, play, rules,
uncertainty, and challenge — and applies it to non-game
contexts. There are numerous gamification mechanics that can be
drawn upon: goals relating what needs to be done, points that
track progress, feedback on how actions have affected
progress, badges signaling accomplishments, and
leaderboards revealing relative standing versus competitors.

Gamification can enhance engagement because its mechanics

activate three core elements of our motivational system. First, we
need to feel autonomous; the desire to direct our own life. Games
allow us the ability to choose a path. Second, we need to
feel competent; the desire to be demonstrably effective. Games
allow us to experience progress towards mastery. Third, we need
to feel relatedness; the desire to be connected with others. Games
allow us to work with and against others and builds a community
around a shared interest.

Gamification is already starting to find its way into organizations

to motivate employees, particularly in the context of training. The
gamification market size is expected to grow annually by 27.4%
between 2020 and 2025. Although still relatively uncommon,
there are some excellent examples of successful implementations
of gamified compensation programs. At insurance agency Ansay
& Associates, top performers receive a spin on the “Wheel of
Wow” and each employee walks away with a special prize. In
2019, Uber allowed drivers with platinum or better status to earn
tickets for each trip completed into lottery offering a $5,000 prize.
At Southwest Airlines, employees can reward other employees
with “Kick Tails”, which become tickets into a monthly lottery.

Performance-based compensation is another avenue where

gamification can be utilized. If employees are motivated to work
due to their incentive program, they may be less likely to be
disengaged and look for newer jobs. If implemented well,
gamification can address the two major limitations of traditional
incentive programs. First, traditional programs — for example,
sell a certain number of widgets in a month to earn a bonus — are
boring. Most employees can predict the outcome. Second, lower-
performing employees are less likely to be motivated by such
programs because they do not expect to earn much performance-
based pay. According to the 2019 Gamification at Work Survey,
89% of employees said that they would be more productive if their
work was more gamified. We decided to put this finding to the
test.

Probabilistic Rewards Increase Motivation

In recent research, we formulated a “single lottery” probabilistic
bonus program by combining gamified elements of goal pursuit
and uncertainty resolution, each of which have been shown to
positively influence motivation and performance in prior
research, albeit very different contexts. Under this program,
worker performance was tied to the accumulation of lottery
tickets in the worker’s own personal lottery that yielded a
moderate jackpot as a bonus. For example, they could play a
lottery with an additional 20% chance of winning $100 for every
10 widgets created. Rather than creating widgets, in our studies,
however, workers were awarded tickets for solving math problems
while under time pressure. A key feature of this program was that
workers could potentially accumulate all the available lottery
tickets and were thus guarantee winning the jackpot. Some high
performers actually did this by successfully completing 24 out of
30 math problems.

Across a set of seven studies conducted with a total of 455

university student participants in England and Australia and 1,431
U.S. workers recruited from an online crowdsourcing labor
market, we compared this single lottery program against
traditional reward programs and other probabilistic rewards
programs. These other programs included lump sum (e.g., receive
$500 if 50 widgets are created), piece-rate (e.g., receive an
additional $20 for every 10 widgets created), and multiple-lottery
(e.g., play a new lottery, each with a 20% chance of winning $100,
for every 10 widgets created). We found that the single lottery
program increased worker motivation and performance relative
to the other programs, and was particularly effective for lower-
performing workers.

Harnessing the Potential of Probabilistic Rewards

Managers looking to engage employees and drive performance
should seriously consider incorporating probabilistic rewards
within a performance-related pay incentive program. To avoid the
disaster at United Airlines and more closely mimic the success at
Southwest Airlines, the program must be carefully designed to
manage expectations and avoid violating trust. We recommend
the following guidelines to consider when designing and
implementing your own gamification strategy:

First, a probabilistic reward program that cannot accurately

measure employee performance is doomed to fail. The program is
most appropriate when employee output is independent, easy to
divide into sub-goals, and both cheap and easy to measure
objectively.

Second, a probabilistic reward program that is interpreted as a

loss will cause an uprising. The program should not replace an
existing bonus program, particularly one that is so predicable that
employees already expect it, but be entirely new or build on top of
an existing program.

Third, a probabilistic reward program that is deemed unfair will

ultimately backfire. The program should offer frequent, modest
individual rewards and management should be transparent, even
to the point of publicly exhibiting the strong connection between
better performance and more rewards over the long-term.
Effectively leveraging gamification in the workplace, potentially
by incorporating a well-designed probabilistic reward program,
can boost employee engagement. This approach, which provides
autonomy, facilitates competence, and fosters community,
addresses the critical need for more dynamic and inclusive
engagement strategies in modern management.

AC
Adrian Camilleri is an associate professor of
marketing at the University of Technology
Sydney (UTS) Business School. He uses
experimental and survey research methods to
understand, explain, and predict the cognitive
processes underlying judgment and decision-
making, and the application of this knowledge
to environmental, financial, managerial, and
consumption contexts.

AN
Ananta Neelim is a senior lecturer in
economics at the University of Tasmania. His
research specializes in employing behavioral
economics to understand and tackle issues of
diversity, discrimination, and workplace
productivity.
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