April 4, 2026
Headlines

employee loyalty

employee engagement

Partnering, Not Parenting, for Employee Engagement

Kevin Kruse06 mins

By now, most executives and HR professionals know that employee engagement is both important and woefully lacking. But despite all the time and money invested into engagement initiatives, many organizations still aren’t moving the needle. Why?

Whenever I ask business leaders, “Whose job is engagement?” I usually hear one of these answers:

  • The HR department owns it
  • We hold our managers accountable

Both good answers, but partial answers.

According to IDG Research 43% of engagement comes from intrinsic motivation, by definition factors that are completely outside the influence of company mangers.

What is missing from many efforts to increase employee engagement, are the individual employees themselves.

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game mechanics

Focus on the Game Mechanics, Not the Game

Kevin Shane23 mins

While games are an important and fun aspect of gamification, the main focus of gamification should not be the games, but rather the game mechanics. Game mechanics are what makes gamification so motivating and flexible; depending on the goal for implementing gamification, the games may vary considerably, but the most basic game mechanics will have the same purpose: to engage the user. Because of this, when companies evaluate the impact of gamification, they should not be focused on how many points the user achieved or whether or not they won the game, but rather on the increase or decrease in their productivity after the installment of game mechanics.

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employees accept gamification

6 Tips for Getting Employees to Accept Your Gamification System

Gal Rimon36 mins

Julie has recently been hired to a global sales team, she is eager to prove her worth. She keeps receiving countless emails letting everyone know her new co-workers are being awarded badges and accumulating points in some way. When she tries to find out why she is getting all these public notifications that are clogging up her inbox, her manager tells her it’s some gaming platform his boss made him use – “it’s a mandate from up high, I had nothing to do with it”.

During lunch, her cubicle mate tells her that three months ago the company decided to implement a gaming platform announced with great fanfare by the higher ups, but since then the only thing that’s different is that they have a desktop app that gives them “meaningless points for meaningless actions”. Once her lunch break is over, she marks all the emails as spam.

Could this have turned out differently?

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