Erika Blaney, Vice President, Marketing
@ErikaBlaney
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a whopping 75.3 million US workers are paid by the hour. That amounts to 59 percent of the American workforce –or nearly three out of every five wage and salary earners in the country.
Unfortunately, though, many employers find hourly workers difficult to engage, motivate and retain. Why? Because most wage earners don’t aspire to “climb the corporate ladder.” Many work only part-time. Few have opportunities for bonuses or promotions. As a result, companies are left struggling with less-than-optimized workforces and high turnover rates –which can drain resources, tarnish reputations and create a variety of other problems.
Is there anything that can help turn the tide? Is it possible to improve productivity, loyalty and overall job satisfaction among hourly workers? Absolutely! At Bunchball, we’ve seen again and again that integrating gamification into the work environment can enhance efficiencies, reduce churn and even drive innovation. For instance:
- After T-Mobile implemented gamification, participation within peer-to-peer collaboration tools skyrocketed 1,000 percent. Gamification helped T-Mobile’s customer service reps become more engaged with the company’s knowledge management portal while learning how to expediently manage customer concerns. Both resolution rates and customer satisfaction scores are improving month-over-month, and T-Mobile is seeing support costs decrease as the community self-governs, making it more resonant and valuable to its members.
- LiveOps says sales performance has increased up to 12 percent –thanks to the gamification of its online agent portal. The gamified environment allows LiveOps’ contractors to see where they stand and how they are performing against their peers. In addition to improved sales performance, the average time to handle a customer inquiry is down by about 15 percent and service levels have improved by nearly 10 percent.
As the market leader and visionary in gamification for the enterprise, Bunchball has worked with numerous Fortune 2000 companies like these, and over the years we’ve learned that if you want to successfully engage hourly workers, you need to answer three fundamental questions:
1. What are the core motivators of your workers? Keep in mind:Hourly employees and salaried professionals tend to be motivated by different factors. For example, while an hourly worker may appreciate additional income, bonuses may not be his/her primary driver.
2. How can you effectively communicate the skills you deem valuable? First, it’s essential to let hourly workers know what’s important to the company –that is, which skills and assets are valued and to what degree. Second, you need to provide workers with a mechanism to make each employee aware of where they stand in relation to others, as well as where they may have opportunities to improve.
3. What kind of program can you implement that responds to core motivations, assigns value and illustrates success? Solutions that incorporate and leverage key drivers –like purpose, mastery and autonomy –have been shown to produce positive results, like reduced turnover.
But answering these questionsis just the tip of the iceberg. To learn even more about how you can better engage the workforce at your company, please download our new white paper, The Secret to Motivating Hourly Employees.