Gamification as an innovative instrument for employee engagement

Abstract

Society 5.0, industry 4.0, globalization, digitalization, and even pandemic have changed the whole labor market. Thus, the market expands, and the need for employees is very high. Nowadays, employers face with huge lack of qualified and even unqualified workforce. On the contrary, employees are unwilling to change their workplace, return to normal contract work, or even start work. They become less engaged in all organizational processes and performance. Organizations are forced to think about employee attraction, retention, and engagement by applying various modern instruments and methods. Employee engagement is a trending topic among human resource managers because it directly correlates with organizational performance, customer satisfaction, and even its financial results. It helps to retain employees, explode their competencies, and improve organizational results. In this paper, employee engagement could be defined as individual, job, and organization engagement. Gamification is a powerful tool that increases employee engagement because it allows transforming boring and routine tasks into interesting and meaningful activities and engaging employees. Gamification motivates employees, providing the mean or satisfying internal or external needs. Regular engagement methods already could not achieve key purpose indicators, so gamification could be one of the new ways of work. Although organizations are highly interested in gamification application possibilities, there is a relative lack of research concerning gamification in employee engagement growth. This paper aims to identify how gamification affects employee engagement – individual, job, and organizational. The quantitative empirical research evaluated the theoretically grounded framework of gamification and employee engagement. The results showed that gamification has the strongest impact on individual and job engagement. In the process of assessing the engagement factors and gamification relationship, gamification makes the most substantial impact on reward and recognition, procedural justice, feedback, distributive justice, perceived supervisor support, career, knowledge, learning, and development opportunities.