At eBillity, we created a time and billing solution to reduce mundane administrative tasks like tracking time. These tasks are important, but not always enjoyable, so people tend to put time tracking off or forget all together. Time Tracker by eBillity streamlines essential time tracking tasks so you can avoid manually inputting time for payroll or projects. However, we still find that some people need constant reminders and notifications to get their time tracking complete. Therefore, we are excited to share our latest new feature – gamification for Time Tracker!
This transformational new feature is based on psychology, making it a powerful tool for businesses and a complete game changer for time tracking. Keep reading as we explain what gamification is, how it encourages time tracking, and how it can benefit your business.
What is Gamification?
Gamification is the process of introducing game mechanics into other areas, like education and business. Gamification uses the same tactics that make games fun to encourage doing other, non-game-related tasks and processes. Some of these tactics can include competition, earning points, achievements, and rewards.
The psychology behind gamification is why it’s so successful. When you’re playing a video game and you get an achievement, your brain releases dopamine the same way it does in response to your real-life achievements. Tapping into this, among other core psychological processes, is how gamification works.
The problem with a lot of jobs is that they require many repetitive tasks over long periods of time to achieve the goal. Many jobs break up tasks into parts, meaning no one person ever completes the job. Think of an assembly line. People repeat the same action hundreds of times, never seeing the fruits of their labor realized. Gamification allows you to see your work making a difference via points and other game design elements for immediate positive feedback. Earning points, leveling up, and getting rewards are tangible effects of the work you’re doing. Your brain sees that progress and releases dopamine, giving you a rush and making you feel like you’re accomplishing something in the moment.
How Gamification Encourages Time Tracking
Time tracking is one of those tasks that needs to be done every day over long periods of time for which workers don’t see any immediate result. It can be easy to forget to do it in the moment. However, that’s where gamification comes into play — pun intended.
Gamification can encourage time tracking in many ways. Let’s go over some of the top ways gamification can help encourage your team to track their time.
Increase Motivation
The reason our brains release dopamine — a “feel-good” chemical — when we do certain things is to motivate us to do those things more often. This process is what allowed early humans to survive. When they found food, they’d get a hit of dopamine to motivate them to find more.
Humans in hunter-gatherer times had no idea what things they needed to do to survive. They just knew what things felt good and which didn’t. We all know how good it can feel to sit around doing nothing. If humans didn’t have a mechanism for making finding food and water feel good, they might have just sat around all day and starved.
Modern-day humans still like sitting and relaxing, as the concept of binging a Netflix series can attest to. However, the work we tend to do today doesn’t have the same kind of immediately obvious benefits that finding some delicious berries had for our ancestors.
Making phone calls, answering emails, and time tracking aren’t exactly exciting dopamine-releasing activities. However, game mechanics create methods of seeing immediate progress and getting regular dopamine hits while moving toward bigger goals. Earning points for every minute of time you track creates an immediate result for an otherwise mundane activity to help motivate workers to do it. The result: 72% of workers were motivated to work harder and do more tasks.
Enhanced Encouragement
When you introduce rewards for time tracking, you encourage workers to keep going. If they can cash in their points for something they want or gain some kind of recognition for a certain amount of time tracking, they’ll be encouraged to work towards those larger goals.
Having a points system shows them the direct and immediate results of their time-tracking efforts. That provides a dopamine hit to make time tracking feel good. However, also working toward something larger with a specific quota to achieve helps encourage them to put in more time and track every minute of it!
Goal Setting
Goals are important to human flourishing. People have intrinsic motivations based on internal needs we all have. We all want to have autonomy (the need to control ourselves and our lives), mastery (the need to prove we are competent and have valuable skills), and relatedness (the need to connect with other people).
Gamification provides a system of measurement, like points and achievements. Allowing employees to set their own goals gives them a sense of autonomy and self-determination. This can include goals like which reward they want to get enough points for or striving to have more points than the rest of the team.
Achievement and Social Interaction
Achievement and social interaction take care of the other two needs. Having gamification features like points or rewards can give workers a tangible achievement for their efforts. This, in turn, fuels a sense of mastery. It gives them something to show for their work and makes them feel like their skills are valued.
Humans are social animals. We need connections with other people. Gamification tactics like leaderboards or the ability to compare their achievements to share their accomplishments with their peers can create a sense of comradery. It can also foster healthy competition.
Key Reasons to Use Gamification in Time Tracker
All those things are very worker focused. So, what does your business get out of all this? Well, these results for workers feed into their basic psychological needs to feel fulfilled and complete. This leads to happier and harder-working employees. That, in turn, results in better outcomes for your business.
There are several ways that these employee benefits lead to employer benefits. For example, companies that use gamification elements make seven times the profits of those that don’t. Here are some of the most obvious positives that using gamification in time tracker can provide for your business’s bottom line.
Boost Productivity
When workers are motivated to do more and accomplish more, they’re more productive for the business. In fact, almost all (90%) of employees report gamification increasing their productivity. Gamification engages employees and helps to keep them engaged in their work.
Workers say their engagement went up by 60% when gamification was introduced to their work experience. Companies with engaged employees have increased profitability (22%), productivity (21%), and customer satisfaction (10%). Gamification clearly results in huge benefits for business productivity.
Improves Retention
Let’s start with why employee retention is so vital for the success and financial health of your business. Every time you lose an employee, their position is empty while you find a replacement. That means work isn’t being done. This can also negatively impact the productivity of the rest of your team if they’re picking up the slack.
You must pay to find a new employee by posting on a job site or hiring a recruiter. Then, you have to go through a long hiring process with several interviews which costs time and money. Even once you find a suitable replacement, they must go through the onboarding process and get trained, which means more time and money out of your pocket.
For a while, they’ll be less productive than the person they replaced as well. This means they’re making less money for the company until they get to the level of their predecessor. All these financial costs add up to a large sum of money. That’s why replacing an employee can cost as much as twice the annual salary of that employee. Retention is crucial for your business’s bottom line.
Workers reported that gamification in the workplace would convince many of them (69%) to stay with the company for more than three years. More engaged and motivated employees who enjoy their work are much more likely to stay at their current jobs.
Enhanced Accountability
Having a gamification system puts employees’ work into measurable numbers. Not only does time tracking show them how much time they put into their work, but points, achievements, and rewards give them a tangible way to measure what they got out of it as well.
Plus, employees are more likely to set goals and work toward specific outcomes. Goal setting and work effort measurements will increase accountability. First and foremost, they’ll be accountable to themselves. Did they reach the goals they had in mind?
Then, they’ll be accountable to each other. How did they stack up next to the rest of the team? Finally, they’ll be accountable to you and your business. Did they do the amount of work expected of them? This will encourage them to be accountable for their work and do what it takes to meet all expectations.
Supports Personal Development
People need a sense of progress and mastery to feel fulfilled. When employees feel like their job provides them with that, they’re more dedicated to their employer. They also stay at the job longer and work harder. That means more productivity and profits for your business.
On top of that, personal development in their role makes them better at their job. It means they’re striving to improve, facing new challenges, and developing new skills. All of this is good for the employer and the employee. It also means you don’t have to hire another person to get those skills because you’re supporting your employees in their personal development journey to acquire them.
In the fast-paced business landscape we exist in today where things are always changing and new technologies shake up entire industries regularly, having employees who are always learning and growing is a must. Your business needs to be agile and dynamic to survive. That means your employees can’t remain stagnant either.
Time Tracker Gamification Features
With eBillity’s brand new gamification features for Time Tracker, you can encourage your employees to be at their best and help them grow into their roles over the long term. Time Tracker’s gamification features include the ability to give employees awards for things like taking on projects, logging their time, and submitting their tracked time.
We’ve created a reward system that allows managers to choose to reward employees with extra time off and even gift cards for their efforts. This is a great way to encourage workers to give their all. It also shows that you appreciate them.
Workers have been frustrated lately as evidenced by trends like quiet quitting. When they talk about their frustrations, they often mention things like employers thinking buying them pizza counts as giving them a bonus for their hard work. Allowing them to earn gift cards is a great way to show that you hear their complaints and you’re listening.
You’ll also often hear quiet quitters say that they don’t work as fast or as hard as possible because they’re only ever rewarded for their work with more work. Allowing employees to get time off as a reward for doing their best can show that they’re valued as people.
By making it clear that hard workers deserve some time off to rest and recharge, you honor their personhood and their efforts. Workers who have more downtime are also more productive, so it’s still a win for the company.
eBillity’s Time Tracker gamification features also allow you to create custom rewards for points earned, so you can tailor your rewards to the needs of your team.
Try eBillity’s Time Tracker with Gamification
Gamification is an amazing tool for businesses to motivate their workers. It’s the perfect way to create a more productive workplace and foster an environment where everyone is happy and hard work is rewarded. Take advantage of our 14-day Time Tracker free trial to test it out and see if it’s right for your team.