Where’s your next dopamine hit coming from?
Beating your friend at tennis? Smashing your PB on your next run? Or being praised on a good job by your boss?
When used in the right way, dopamine can be a powerful motivator – both on the sports field and at work.
But I’ve been wondering recently if we’re missing a trick when it comes to employee experience…
There has been a bit of a trend for gamification in the internal communications industry for several years now – but I’m not sure we’re getting it quite right.
I remember a conference where we heard about a company who had turned the launch of their corporate strategy into a “game”. The game was mandatory and no one could actually win which, in my mind, isn’t really a game at all.
As I chatted to others in business and communication about the use of games to engage employees, it became clear that others were also struggling. In theory, it’s a great idea but, in practice, many were unsure of how best to make it work.
Simplifying the game
It wasn’t until a conversation with my husband, an avid gamer who also happens to make video games for a living, that I saw where we’ve been going wrong.
One Sunday afternoon he was playing a video game he often comes back to again and again. I asked him what it was about that particular game that kept him returning for more.
His answer was a lightbulb moment for me, as I saw how it could also apply to organisations and the employee experience:
“As I play it – second to second – I enjoy the tools in the game, they feel good in the controls, and they all work well for the purposes of the game.
“Minute to minute there’s new stuff to explore and challenges to accomplish or overcome.
“Hour to hour, my progress is visible as points, progress bars and accolades. I can compare these globally against other players in terms of what worlds I have visited, enemy bosses vanquished or what level my unique tools and belongings are at. I’m hit with dopamine at regular intervals for different reasons and that makes me keep playing.”
Second to second, minute to minute, hour to hour.
What if we looked at the employee experience and broke it down into chunks of time like this?
Ok, seconds might be a bit ambitious, but what if we looked at where the dopamine hits are inside an organisation on a daily, weekly and monthly basis?
What is dopamine and why is it so powerful?
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter connected to motivation, pleasure, excitement, learning, concentration and goals. It’s that satisfying hit you get when you’ve ticked off something on your to-do list or completed a big piece of work.
It can play a huge role in motivating people to work harder. However, if we have low dopamine we tend to procrastinate and feel demotivated.
In the early days of our evolution dopamine helped us stay alive – we needed a brain chemical that motivated us to hunt, build shelters and protect our family. Fast forward to today and we’ve messed with this chemistry; creating ways to get the dopamine hit without much effort. High levels of dopamine are caused by things like excessive drinking, drugs, gambling, playing video games, or scrolling social media.
So how do we create stand-out moments at work that give us the true satisfaction of a genuine dopamine hit?
Applying a gaming approach to employee experience
Mimicking the minute to minute, hour by hour dopamine hits of gaming in the workplace requires looking at the touchpoints in place for employees throughout their working day, week and month.
What are the regular experiences that could be made more of in order to increase enjoyment, engagement and motivation at work?
This is the advice we give to our clients who are looking to make a difference to their workplace and their employees’ experiences.
To help them do this use our employee experience model, which aligns the employee experience to the employee lifecycle. The colours in each stage relate to the percentage importance they have at that stage:
The table below shows how you could map some of this gaming thinking for each area of the employee experience:
Creating a great employee experience rarely needs to be about reinventing the wheel. I have no doubt there is a place for games, and the introduction of more play, to help make strategy more appealing and accessible, but often the biggest improvements can come from simple tweaks to what you’re already doing.
What could you introduce in your organisation that would make the most of the touchpoints you already have in place?
If you’d like some help with introducing gamification in employee experience or to know more about our employee experience model, drop our team a message at contact our team at info@redefiningcomms.com
