GiftCard Partners Blog

If you are immersed in the world of employee motivation, recognition and rewards; you’ve been hearing a lot about gamification: a business tool to integrate key techniques and mechanics into the workplace via “games”. Simply put, integrating interactive games as a tool within training or incentive programs improves employee engagement, motivation and productivity. GCP’s gift cards are well engrained in such programs as game points can be accumulated to select a really useful “prize”, like lunches at
SUBWAY, Health and Beauty items at
CVS/pharmacy, high quality, trend forward, and professional fashions from
The Limited…GCP’s gift cards are carefully selected for B2B programs like employee rewards. GCP’s recent blogs lead to gobs of the evidence that gamification should be looked at seriously within incentive programs,
Incentive Experts Point to Gamification as Top Incentive Trend,
Snowfly’s 16 Key Findings for Success white paper,
IRF’s 12 Trends in Rewards and Recognition for 2012,
Gamification Keeps Employees Engaged and Brand Image Strong…but this blog offers you a deep dive into the mechanics of gamification, data on participation levels, performance and reward successes, and what you can expect long term. Take a deep dive into gamification with “
Snowfly’s Gamification in the Workplace: 15 Key Discoveries”, by Dr. Brooks Mitchell. His work has been published and referred to in hundreds of publications, including Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Fortune, and the New York Times.

The Incentive Research Foundation released an executive briefing entitled 
2012 Trends in Rewards and Recognition, which shows emerging trends for 2012. Some of the top trends include:

According to Gartner Inc., of Stamford, CT 70% of the top 2,000 publicly held companies will use game-like applications to engage and reward their employees by 2014. Gamification is changing the employee engagement and rewards landscape. Gamifying employee rewards falls in line with social media and the concept of social sharing to create brand awareness and positive brand image. Whether applications are used internally, based on employee performance or externally, rewarding employees for promoting the company and bringing in referral traffic, the trend is growing. Gamification can reward employees in a number of ways. Some applications are designed for employees to accrue points for larger rewards, but others reward employees more frequently with smaller rewards such as gift cards to a choice of retialers, allowing the employee to essentially choose their own gift. The combination of the social component of game-like applications and the rewards employees work toward through the use of the applications makes gamifying employee engagement productive for both the employer and employee.  
For more information on gamification and to check out some existing examples check out this article in "Entrepreneur."

For many employers, making the connection between “games” at work and increased productivity can be a tough leap to make. But evidence of the success of gamification increasingly piles up and now there are many corporate success trends we can point to. Yet, the term “gamification” and the motivation technique is becoming a cornerstone of corporate and employee incentive programs. Snowfly, an employee recognition and incentive company reports over 2,700,000 hits on Google for the term, over 150 million of their corporate performance games have been played, and they expect gamification to be a 2.8 billion dollar business by 2015.1 In
Snowfly’s 16 Key Findings for Success white paper, they tout that their workplace games have a 93% participant approval rate within incentive and employee performance programs, yet the national approval average for traditional programs hovers around 45%.2 Many more key discoveries and lessons learned can be found in the
white paper. In
Incentive Research Foundation’s (IRF) recent top trends webinar, they list gamification as #4 out of their
12 Trends in Rewards and Recognition for 2012. IRF white paper outlines Gartner Group’s prediction “that by 2015, half of all managed innovation processes will include game mechanics, and that by 2014, 70% of all the Global 2000 organizations will have at least one “gamified application” in place.3 The future seems quite bright for this innovative interactive method of motivating, incenting, and rewarding. Are you using such techniques yet? Sources: 1 & 2:
Gamification after Twelve Years and 150 Million Games: 16 Key Findings for Success 3:
IRF Trends &
Gartner’s report: Gartner Says By 2015, More Than 50 Percent of Organizations That Manage Innovation Processes Will Gamify Those Processes

Rewarding employees can become trite and lose its meaning. Sometimes coming up with interesting ways to recognize exceptional employees like presenting a public reward or giving an innovative gift such as a gift card, instead of cash can make the reward more meaningful. Here are a few quick criteria for keeping meaning in your employee rewards program.