Great Realization – Gamify Engagement to Future Proof your Experiences

There are uneasy conversations about the recession causing behaviours to revert from the growth and innovations we’ve experienced during the great digital transformation to hesitancy and stagnation.

In these waves of disruption that we’ve experienced through the pandemic and the creeping rise of the recession, we are experiencing continued uncertainty, adversity, discomfort, and lack of security. In these times, we need to have high emotional agility to understand our behaviours and look for hope to help us be brave, creative, strategic, and innovative to find the silver lining in better opportunities.

There is a call for the great realization of our operational excellence on a personal level, as leaders and as communities, and within organizations that are forging through the impacts of continued change.

Let’s level-set our goals and look at how we can gamify engagement and operational excellence to future-proof our careers and workplaces. This is an opportunity to rise above uncertainty and design engaging events intentionally.

Let’s start with a gamified Performance Challenge Program by Caitlin Johnson, Master Certified Performance Coach who has coached over 70K global leaders on how to supercharge their professional development.

Caitlin leverages gamification design when coaching individuals on how to develop a purpose-driven career strategy:

1. Build a Career Map and Mission with Purpose Mapping
2. Create your Career Avatar and Identify Your Super Powers
3. Level Up your Career Avatar and Elevate Your Marketability
4. Network with Teammates and Differentiate from Opponents
5. Accomplish the Side Quests to Achieve Success

BUILD A CAREER MAP USING PURPOSE MAPPING

Every game has an objective – an epic meaning or reason to play. The world is about to end, and only you can save it! Think of it as ‘Your Why,’ your mission.

When it comes to your career, invest the time to consider what the epic meaning is for you.

Our ‘reason for playing’ within our career is to figure out how to use our natural talents and strengths to make us feel purposeful and get paid. To help identify what purpose-driven work looks like for you, Caitlin coaches her clients to develop a career map using purpose mapping to uncover their epic meaning.

CREATE YOUR CAREER AVATAR AND IDENTIFY YOUR SUPERPOWERS

When you think of video games, you can create an Avatar for yourself and select or custom-create different skills or abilities that Avatar has. To identify your natural talents and strengths, use tools such as Gallup’s CliftonStrenghts to gain a foundational understanding of your strengths.

Using our natural talents and strengths fuels and energizes us. We feel exhausted and drained when we work on tasks or projects that pull on talents that are not our natural strengths.

To reflect on how you use your strengths, consider a proud moment or event within your career. What went into it? What were you doing? What environment where you in? Who were you with? Write it out. Through this exercise, you’ll see your actions when using your natural strengths. These are your superpowers.

LEVEL UP YOUR CAREER AVATAR AND ELEVATE YOUR MARKETABILITY

When you think of how you show up at work, how do you communicate? How do you differentiate yourself from your competition? Are you clearly and concisely communicating your value? When you are ready to advance your career and ‘level up,’ make sure your marketing materials are up to date. Think of your Resume and LinkedIn profile.

Review resume writing tips and how to optimize your LinkedIn profile. Consider tools such as Job Scan, which reviews your resume or LinkedIn profile and can compare job descriptions you are applying for to see how aligned your marketing material is.

NETWORK WITH TEAMMATES AND DIFFERENTIATE FROM OPPONENTS

Within games, other people are generally involved, whether you are playing a single-player game or a multi-player game. In many games, you need help or support from other players to accomplish certain goals. Perhaps you prefer to play social games for the collaborative nature vs playing a game by yourself.

When it comes to your career strategy – Who are you playing with? How are you leveraging your support network? Conversely, how are you differentiating yourself from your competition?

Build a networking strategy to support your career advancement. Your secret weapon to identify your teammates and beat out your competition is networking. As you are networking, have your “Me in 30 Seconds” elevator pitch ready to share your value and strengths with others and differentiate yourself from your competition.

Also, consider seeking a mentor or coach to support you. A mentor is a trusted advisor, while a coach is someone who helps you unleash your potential.

ACCOMPLISH THE SIDE QUESTS TO ACHIEVE SUCCESS

As you play certain games, there are mini-quests or goals that you can choose to accomplish. As you develop your career strategy, what key actions or ‘side quests’ can you do to achieve your desired meaning and impact? Consistent and consecutive actions will gain the traction you need. A gamification concept called streaking can help keep you focused and motivated. Make a list of simple tasks you can do to elevate your career.

With your career plan in place, your actions need to align to gain traction with your strategy. This is when you will need to learn to say no to good things to stay focused on great things. Prioritize your actions to ensure they are impacting your strategy. Stay focused on what side quests you are selecting to tackle.

Organizations and Leaders within the Organizations – future proof yourself in this way: To take it to the next level – corporate – align to the company’s vision – apply the same methodology to your organization to help your associates align to meaningful work.

Leaders within an organization can follow the same format.

1. Mission- being clear on what’s the most important and living the mission/values
2. Actions – expectations and validating how to excel
3. Communication – provide feedback and keep alive
4. Recognition – celebrate efforts
   
   

Change is an opportunity to realign and focus on personal and professional operational excellence. Finding the silver lining and inspiring hope in the community.

ACTIONS make MOVEMENTS.

As we gamify our professional development and your leadership in organizations, keep a mindful and strategic approach that events are actionable engagements to help align individuals to the mission and directions of the organization.

According to  https://visme.co/blog/event-statistics/, 95% of marketers believe in-person events can help achieve business goals, and more than 81% of virtual event marketers use event planning tools to improve audience engagement.

Event Experiences can get complicated with the vast array of different design and execution strategies. Stay focused on the fundamental purpose of the “WHY” participants will register and engage with your events will help you from other distractions.

The three core reasons why attendees go to events include content, networking opportunities, and experiential experiences.

Content is KING, as most people may say. Still, more importantly – meaningful content that can enrich or improve an individual’s knowledge and professional development will be the anchor to why they choose to engage at your events. Make sure the contents you curate through keynote speakers, educational sessions, and sponsored sessions all have the intention to meet your attendees’ needs.

Content focus events can leverage virtual, hybrid or in-person formats as a form of access. As event planners and stakeholders, your challenge is the delivery and schedule sequence in how you offer the content and how accessible it is to your audience. Over 82% of B2B marketers report attendee engagement as an important KPI for determining an event’s success.

Consider gamified motivations where leaderboards, points, badges, and interactive content like trivia and break-out sessions as essential elements of an experience to help participants absorb and retain content better. Otherwise, the content received will be in and out as fast as you push the tight schedule with overwhelming content. In addition, overloading content design with a high download and low interactive engagement will also be a disadvantage to your engagement goals.

Networking Opportunities enable attendees to find like-minded individuals with shared experiences or interests. According to https://techjury.net/blog/networking-statistics/#gref, 80% of professionals believe that professional networking can elevate career success. 84% of people say they still prefer in-person meetings in 2022, while 40% of people say they network more online than in person.

The keynote is that networking opportunities are critical to an Event Schedule and engagement success. Plan to create these experiences that enable organic conversations about event content, further enriching content retention while building a sense of belonging to a community.

If you’re looking to amplify the value of your event, make sure you have multiply interactive engagement opportunities that allow people the opportunities to discover and explore who is attending the event and include the feature to have permission to connect so that connections are made before, during and even after the event. As suggested solution is using Engamio’s Interactive Map that enables this experience. When people find a meaningful relationship associated with an individual, event, or organization, they are more likely to return and see value in their invested time at the event.

For networking – the best are those in-person experiences where the power of #IRL is real. However, networking events can work well in small group virtual sessions. Please do not attempt to create a hybrid networking experience. People at in-person events will not be interested in stopping their in-person engagement to jump into a boxed conversation. Enable connections between the participants, but focus the live event conversations separately with your in-person vs. virtual attendees.

Experiential Events – These events are best experienced in person, where all our human senses are immersed in this escape from all the distractions surrounding us in the virtual plugin environments. Experiential events are seeing, touching, smelling and tasting the experience we can not virtually duplicate with the same success. Event designs for experiential experiences must be more than a schedule full of content to download. It’s creating moments that make lasting impressions that only physical attendance can gain, this can include a spa experience under the waterfalls of a destination for an incentive travel event, or it could be wine, dine, and network at an exclusive venue where our social walls are dropped for more meaningful conversations.

We will continue to navigate in the movement of change. Our control is about how we react, future-proof ourselves, plan event experiences, and motivate others to align to a common goal. Don’t be fearful, but rather inspire hope through the strategic actions you can take as the MOVEMENT that makes challenges into your silver lining and positive opportunities.