Gamification – the application of game-design elements and game principles in non-game contexts – has been a growing movement in corporations. Many organizations are trying to find a way to motivate their employees and found that gamification and competition works, creating a point of pride for employees.
Even in day-to-day life, we experience gamification. If you’re a parent, you likely use gamification to get your children to do their chores, or see your children’s teachers use gamification with gold stars. And let’s not ignore that many of us are either casual or hardcore gamers who already see gamification in action everyday. To reference a current casual game, no one wants to be the sus but to be the winner.
Gamification takes what we enjoy in gaming and applies fun competition and more to real-world business processes. Analysts predict massive growth of gamification over the next few years, but is there any substance to the benefits being touted?
In Safety Programs Are Broken; Here’s How to Fix It, we highlighted the value of knowing your best drivers as well as or better than your worst. With positive recognition baked-in to fleet safety programs, drivers are recognized for their good work, and are shown appreciation. This helps with employee retention and can increase a company’s bottom line.
But let’s be real, it’s also about competition. We all like to win, we all like to see our name at the top of a leaderboard. Whether it’s casual or serious gaming, football championship box pools, flag football, company softball teams … we are all competing and we want to be the best.
The same principles apply to fleet management. Fleet drivers are human and have a competitive side: they love winning, hate losing. By gamifying fleet management, you reward positive behavior and begin to bring out the fun side of work.
Gamification helps by making the tasks more engaging, giving drivers immediate feedback on their action and achievements, and helps the greater, larger work team create social bonds and connections. All of that together – happier drivers, positive driving behavior – leads to higher productivity.
Gamification for Fleet Management
So how do you build in gamification into fleet management? Netradyne’s DriverStars® is a gamification platform in Driveri. DriverStars increases engagement and driving compliance, where drivers will want to not “follow too close” or “speed” to gain points. It also creates a standard performance score – the GreenZone® score – and drivers can get updated scores throughout the day (when not driving, of course) on the mobile app.
To help you start brainstorming your own programs, here are a few ideas on building a safety program around gamification and reward top drivers with incentives.
- We all already have March Madness brackets for the tourney, but what about building in a monthly tourney at work? Build a bracket around GreenZone scores, and award prizes for the Sweet 16, Elite 8, Final Four and Champ.
- Royal Rumble/Battle Royale as an annual event. Who didn’t love wrestling as a kid? Well, recreate that at work but without any real body slams. Aggregate GreenZone scores for the whole year, and for the final week of the year have tag teams compete to see who comes out as the top of the fleet.
Gamification for the future
In our downtime, many of us play games on our smartphones or on our computers or have a next-gen gaming system in our home. Why do we play games? For the fun, the escape and for the competition.
In our uptime, the gamification of fleet management will be a big part of the future of transportation. While we are already using AI for fleet management, gamification will help the management of fleet drivers and improve efficiency and theoretically improve the overall work happiness and mental health of the drivers.
Earning points will turn those happy drivers into better drivers by seeing that the company rewards and acknowledges their good work. Those who earn prizes and bonuses will develop a deeper bond and loyalty to the company helping improve driver retention.
Live Webinar on April 11
