One of the hardest things for any manager to do is to motivate his or her employees. Of course, new hires are always enthusiastic, but as the job goes from new and unfamiliar to practiced and mundane, it’s hard to maintain that level of motivation and drive for long, except in your very top (and rare) self-motivated individuals.

As the cycle goes on, employees get bored over time, and eventually move on to newer opportunities, thus creating turnover. Expensive for any business, turnover can cripple a small, single retail or service business, or even a modest chain of them. So how do you stop this cycle in its tracks? Is there any way to keep motivation high, and to create a culture of excellence and continuous improvement rather than stagnation and decay?

GAMIFICATION IS MORE THAN JUST GAMES

Incorporating games into your business, such as my popular titles available in my Playing for Profits courses, can make a big difference. Having fun at work goes a long way toward short-circuiting that cycle of boredom and stagnation and turnover. Yet, properly applied, gamification goes way beyond just fun, and yields a surprisingly deep array of strategic options to motivate your employees not just in a general sense, but toward very specific, targeted goals.

MOTIVATION TARGETING SPECIFIC INVENTORY

From time to time, every retail business experiences overstock issues, or issues with aging inventory that just isn’t moving. With gamification, you can target those items, and blow them out the door with ease, and your employees will have fun doing it! For example, one of my games, Sales Olympics, lets you target not only specific items, but specific combinations of items that you want your team to move. It’s designed to be played in teams, and over the course of several days or a week, to encourage your sales team to communicate with each other, to share methods that are working to sell the items in question, and to motivate each other.

MOTIVATION TARGETING NON-SALES TASKS

Sometimes there will be things your business needs to get done, that it’s difficult or even impossible to motivate employees to do consistently. Gamification can solve this! One common example is giving out, and encouraging customers to complete, customer satisfaction surveys. For that matter, it’s easy for a sales team paid on commission or spiffs to lose sight of the long-term benefits to the business that comes with high customer satisfaction, and instead focus on the short-term gains of high-pressure sales tactics.

With gamification, you can solve both of those and more! By making high-scoring customer satisfaction surveys one of the qualifying events to participate in the day or week’s game, you can motivate your employees not only to ask their clients to submit their surveys, but to treat them well so those survey results will be positive. The best part is, since you only have to pay out a reward to the winner of the game – and even better, can still make the “pot” for the game based on sales of spiffed items – you can create powerful motivation to follow the best long-term business practices for your businesses, while adding little or even nothing to the cost of running your business. Powerful stuff!

Click here and see how to put gamification to work for you…