In the age of digital transformation, it is essential to exhibit the right skill for the given situation and learn new skills to meaningfully contribute to the workplace. To be future-ready, organizations should upskill their employees to embrace new challenges and dynamic working conditions. Well, that’s where agility and adaptability play a crucial role.
Agility is about taking quick actions in response to unexpected events, and adaptation is about aligning the workforce to continuous changes productively and positively.
Being agile and adaptable is no longer a choice, but they are the key factors for organizational growth in the ever-competitive and dynamic work environment.
This especially holds true when the pandemic put organizations across the world to the ultimate test of survival. How did some organizations manage to navigate change they had never expected, while others failed to thrive?
What was the secret of agile and adaptable organizations?
Factors That Drive Agility and Adaptability
The factors that drive agility and adaptability are closely connected with an organization’s culture. Measuring performance against these factors enables organizations to track their overall progress.
The Agility Advantage
According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, agile organizations grow 37% faster and generate 30% higher profits than non-agile organizations.
In addition, an Accenture Transformation GPS study reveals that truly agile firms show a 55% likelihood of achieving top-quarterly financial growth as compared to traditional firms that show only a 25% likelihood of financial growth.
Accelerating Agility and Adaptability Using Gamification
The most important skill in the modern workforce is to learn, unlearn, and relearn to remain sustainable and confidently respond to economic uncertainty.
Fortunately, digital learning helps to develop this skill through effective learning strategies. One approach that has shown continuous success is Gamification.
“Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners.”- John Holt
Holt’s quote represents the essence of gamified learning.
The current business scenario increasingly demands that employees possess competencies that are specific to their role and flexible enough to adapt to changing circumstances.
So, how does Gamification help you in building Agility and Adaptability in the workplace?
Sense of Realism
Gamification enables us to create more realistic and experiential learning environments. They are a promising learning intervention to make learners feel emotionally or physically present in the environment.
This approach creates the feeling of immersion, which allows learners to feel like they are an integral part of the overall learning process. The sense of realism helps learners not only develop new skills faster but also makes them more productive at work, thus contributing to workplace agility.
Social Collaboration
Gamification is one of the best ways to interact with the system, peers, and other competitive groups. Gamified elements such as leaderboards and messaging features provide learners an opportunity to share their ideas, consider alternate viewpoints, and learn from each other’s mistakes.
Acknowledgment among peers and elevated status on leaderboards improve the learner experience and encourage them to perform better. A collaborative learning environment makes it easy for learners to align to rapid organizational changes and adapt to new skills efficiently.
Decision-Making Capability
A scenario-based gamified approach makes learners analyze real work-life situations, respond under various circumstances, and consider all aspects before making any decisions. This helps them build problem-solving, critical thinking, and decision-making capabilities.
They are encouraged to analyze situations and address important business decisions, such as:
- How can you beat the competition?
- How successful are you compared to your peers?
- What will be the consequences of your decisions?
This approach helps learners adapt to different situations, respond to market threats, and increase the speed of decision-making, all of which together elevate agility and adaptability in the workplace.
Mistake-Driven Learning
Gamification helps learners to build desired expertise without any risk to the company. They can experiment with different strategies to analyze different outcomes, understand the implications of the decisions they make, and apply the winning strategy in a practical environment.
Allowing people to fail is also an important aspect of building agility in the workplace. If employees are judged or punished for failing, they will not accept new challenges and rather stick to what they have been doing. To make them feel confident, learners should be allowed to accept the consequences of their actions in a safe environment.
Competition = Motivation
Gamification offers a high degree of learning by letting the learners see instant feedback in the form of scores, points, badges, rewards, etc. This in turn motivates the learners to build a healthy competitive spirit and work harder to beat their own personal best, and to be the best as compared to their peers.
Being competitive drives learners to set new standards and make every effort under all circumstances. With this approach, they are open to taking up new challenges and adapting to new information quickly.
Top 3 Gamification Strategies Adopted by Organizations
Research indicates that gamification is increasingly being used by businesses as a mechanism to drive agility and adaptability within organizations.
Three common strategies that organizations typically consider while developing the game mechanics:
- Use game mechanics that drive mindset changes: Game mechanics should be aligned with the business goals and initiatives to achieve the required behavioral change. A person who can show flexibility and openness to accept new changes cultivates an agile mindset.
- Ensure engagement: Infusing elements such as real-life scenarios, relatable characters, and immersive environments not only improve learner engagement but also helps in aligning the game activity with the business objectives. This approach in turn creates a more skilled and adaptive workforce.
- Keep it simple: Ensure that the game mechanics are simple to understand and easy to follow. Complex game mechanics will lead to learners losing interest and eventually giving up in frustration. Simple game mechanics targeting a specific learning outcome allow the learners to develop new skills and apply them in a real work environment.
In a nutshell
A well-equipped workforce can deal with the shifting work expectations seamlessly.
Agility and adaptability are essential skills to stay relevant in today’s work scenario. They help employees build a growth mindset and drive continuous development, resulting in a competitive advantage.
Gamification is one of the key learning strategies that drive agility and adaptability in the workplace. Gamified learning empowers employees to develop proficiency to excel in their roles and be future-ready.
About Encora
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