This is a guest post by Bryony Williamson, a sixth form student at St Philip Howard School who joined us for a week’s work experience. Here she shares her expectations of what a gamified working environment might be like.

Imagine a workplace environment where you can tally your scores against others and keep track of each others’ progress as if it’s a game.  A live leaderboard. Essentially, a sticker chart that motivates you to work hard.

Think how many times you trek up and down the stairs, or take the dog for a walk each week, with the FitBit you can count how many steps you walk or run each day and challenge your friends you know to beat your score.   

Like getting fit, motivation is key for any activity.  But, at work, instead of competing to obtain the most steps between you and your friends, you’re powering through your everyday work like there’s no tomorrow.

Rise can be used to create a Fitbit style activity tracking program.  Rise.global helps encourage you to not only find the enthusiasm to work, but uses gamification (the use of game design at work) to help you thrive. A Rise tracking program provides a language for productivity conversations with other work colleagues leading to self improvement.

So where do you start? 

While, to begin with, gamification might seem complicated, the key gaming elements can be explained with a few easy concepts.

As work may not always be fun, Rise encourages employers to use these gamification components to stay on top of their game and be more productive.

• Timely Guidance – Like a football coach encouraging his players,  Rise.Global gives feedback at a regular intervals so people can digest without being overwhelmed. Being told every second whether or not you are doing a good job stops you focusing on the job at hand.  Regular recognition of employees’ achievements can go a long way in terms of their happiness and development.

• Clear Goals – It’s not always easy to set a goal and stick to them with distractions like food, coffee breaks, more food, watch Wimbledon etc (true, isn’t it?).  But, with Rise.Global’s feedback reports setting  targets for the organisation, the team or each individual to achieve, goals are easy to track.  These goals allow each individual (both employer and employee) to triumph over their mistakes and learn from their improvements. The simple action of setting goals can lead to a faster growing business.

• Reactive Learning – Instead of compulsory training sessions that each employee is forced to undertake, gamification offers the opportunity for reactive learning.  This is where employees can elect to take part in eLearning after they’ve seen their feedback on their real world performance – learning while working rather than having the tedious task of reading papers.

As part of my week’s work experienced, I interviewed Toby Beresford, Rise.global CEO, on how he uses Rise himself:

Toby believes Rise is “an activity tracker for my professional metrics that lets me track my progress and compare with others.”  He goes on to explain, “I look at my own Rise profile at the beginning of each week.  I’m keen to improve my social media presence so I’m participating in different boards which all track different aspects of my social media performance including Twitter and blogging.” For instance, he uses the Twitter Activity Club to track how many tweets he averages a day.

In terms of its use,  Toby’s thoughts were that “as a player I find Rise easy to use – once I’ve joined a board and been accepted onto it, all I do is I just sit back and receive the notifications on my progress.”

Ultimately, it’s not an actual game.  It’s just using the elements of a game to further the progress of employers and employees.  It’s clear, gamification is as a way to use Fitbit style tracking at work.