A Comprehensive Guide to Warehouse Gamification

Gamification is the process of using a sense of reward and achievement to encourage someone to take the desired action.

Gamification is a process of creating game-like situations in real life where the participants are rewarded with incentives every time they perform a desired task or achieve a target. It is used by companies to subtly make someone perform an action that is beneficial to them, without explicitly asking them to do it. Its applications are far-reaching and have especially shot up over the past few years with the help of lightning-fast internet and realistic AI.

Warehouse gamification refers to the process of designing a reward system for the employees working at the warehouse where they’re rewarded if they perform better than the rest against the metrics set by the management. It has proven to be a powerful way of increasing employee engagement and improving the overall productivity of the facility.

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Gamification can revolutionize how performance tracking is usually done in warehouses. Employees no longer have to rely on their manager to keep track of their work. They can see their work getting acknowledged in real-time and it motivates them to put in more effort. It also helps the management get rid of any human bias from the accounting process and makes the organization much more transparent.

All of these factors make warehouse gamification an obvious choice for effective warehouse management. And there are multiple ways in which a company can decide to gamify their warehouse.

Dynamic Scoreboards

One of the best ways to game a warehouse is by installing a giant scoreboard that keeps track of every time moved, loaded and scanned by an employee or a team. The score gets updated periodically and is visible to everyone.

These scoreboards provide a sense of meaning to every item moved and gamify the entire employee experience.

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Annual Team Championships

An organization can host annual championships where they award the teams and individuals that have performed the best in that year. These can be held during the yearly offsites or town halls.

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1) Set a Level Playing Field

While gamifying your warehouse, always make sure that you only compare the metrics which are comparable, and don’t end up comparing apples with oranges. For example, if you’re trying to gamify transportation of your products into and out of your warehouse, only compare the transportation of the same product or at least products of size and dimensions. If you keep products of different dimensions in the same category, people transporting smaller or lighter items will obviously have an edge over those doing the heavy lifting.

2) Incentivize Team Work

A very common gamifying mistake is when companies end up pitting one employee against the other. This creates personal animosity among the team members due to individual aspirations. To avoid such unnecessary and counterproductive competition, always game your warehouse in a way where teams compete against each other instead of individuals. This instills a sense of togetherness among the members of the same teams and promotes a culture of healthy competition. Warehouses that are gamed to promote teamwork end up functioning much better than those where individuals are given goals and targets.

3) Keep the rewards non-addictive

Gamification is just a part of an overall strategy to make warehouses more efficient. However, a lot of companies reward their employees with junkets and other extravagant incentives when they achieve their goals. While this sounds like a great idea to boost the morale of the employees, it proves to be fatal in the long term. This is because winning the game takes center stage and is now the primary motivation for everyone, even though very few employees actually get it. The rest of them become extremely demotivated and are likely to underperform severely just as soon as they realize that the rewards aren’t going to come their way.

4) Ensure a bias-free framework

While setting up the gamification framework, you should keep human interference to the minimum. Make sure that all the metrics are set impartially and without any prejudice against anybody. Once the warehouse is gamed, keep an eye on the winner trends and watch out for any suspicious repetitions. If there are any, the gamification is most likely biased in favor of a group either by accident or on purpose. If you come across such trends, tweak the system to make it unbiased and equal.

Increases Productivity

Gamification activates the part of the brain of the employee that’s responsible for releasing dopamine. This makes them naturally motivated and inspired to perform to the best of their abilities so that they can collect rewards for their toil. And when the employees are indeed awarded incentives, it works as an example among the entire workforce and inspires them to outperform themselves as well.

Helps with Recruitment

As more companies want to recruit young blood into their workforce, they’re increasingly shifting to gamifying their operations. The primary reason for this is that this generation is the most exposed to gamification in their day to day life. From social media to food delivery apps and even eCommerce stores, all businesses today use gamification to entice the customers. It’s therefore natural that the youth would find an organization that gamifies it’s operations much more exciting to work for.

Eases Performance Tracking

A well-defined gamification framework gives management access to a variety of extremely useful insights about the efficiency and effectiveness of the organization. Managers can track, in real-time, the performance of individuals and teams and stack it up against one another with relative ease. They can identify inefficiencies and address them before they snowball into bigger problems with real consequences for the company.

Gamifying your warehouse can do wonders to your organization’s productivity and boost its overall efficiency. If implemented correctly, gamification proves to be a great morale booster for your workforce and a powerful tracking system for the management. Due to its multifaceted applications that will only become more advanced with newer technologies, gamification today is one of the most sought after techniques globally.

• https://www.manh.com/sites/default/files/sys/documents/2020/05/manh-gamification-in-warehouse-en.pdf
• https://www.scanforce.com/2018/02/using-gamification-to-increase-warehouse-productivity/
• https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/05/21/missionracer-how-amazon-turned-tedium-warehouse-work-into-game/
• https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/476052/Distribution/Infographic/Gamification_Kenco_Infographic.pdf
• https://blog.kencogroup.com/employee-engagement-gamification-in-warehouse
• https://www.manh.com/resources/articles/2015/04/27/bringing-gamification-warehouse
• https://www.logisticsmatter.com/2020/09/17/how-to-increase-engagement-and-efficiency-in-the-warehouse-game-on/