Earning Daily Treasure-Chests at Work

Reading time: 4 min 38 sec

Have you ever found yourself reaching for your phone after being notified by some game you were casually playing to come back and collect your daily reward? If so, you’re not alone.

Daily loyalty rewards are a staple of mobile gaming. It is one of the mechanisms game designers regularly employ in their undying effort to keep us engaged. Whether it’s getting extra coins for every consecutive day you log in to Candy Crush, or a reward of growing sequential value for completing mission after mission on Clash of Clans, this mechanism of influence is incredibly efficient.

If such a mechanism can be so effective at keeping us, or more notably – our kids – glued to their screens on mobile games, couldn’t we potentially employ it towards more positive ends? Why not, for argument’s sake, use it to drive our employees to continuously come back to their learning modules and develop skills? What about using it to drive them to check their performance-status on a daily basis? That’s exactly what we thought at Gameffective when we decided to set up the Treasure Box mechanism.

Here’s how it works:

Daily Loyalty Rewards: The Secret-Sauce of Engagement Experts

Daily loyalty-rewards take on a variety of shapes and sizes. Each type is focused on motivating players to do different things. Some mobile games feature a daily treasure box which requires you to explore the game environment in order to collect your prize; others offer increasing rewards for consecutive daily log-ins. There are even games that encourage users to complete a streak of short missions to collect a special bonus-prize. As evident by its popularity in the gaming industry, we can safely assume this mechanism is considered highly effective by game developers.

In fact, nearly half of all games in the iOS US Top Grossing 100 have adopted a daily reward-system with progression elements. When claiming the rewards, users associate the positive results of rewards with their behavior, and tend to connect this positive feeling with the game as a whole. Many rewards are accumulative by nature, leaving players even more motivated to check in daily, motivated to maintain what they have worked so consistently to build up.

This creates a vicious cycle; as users log in to the game more frequently they end up playing it more often, thus creating even more options for rewards and higher-engagement.

How Daily Loyalty Rewards Spark Engagement

This mechanism proves so successful due to the behavioral-science principle of conditioning through a reinforcement schedule, which entails rewarding behaviors at periodic intervals over time. For example, an employee might be offered a weekly reward for completing a certain task. At that moment three things occur:

First, the employee will start associating the positive feeling elicited by the reward with the activity. Second, and most importantly, that employee will begin to turn the activity into a behavioral habit, thanks to his expectation of regular rewards. Lastly, in order to avoid loss, the employee will continue this habit so as not to let the progress he has already made go to waste.

Using this type of mechanism with extrinsic rewards might backfire. Regularly rewarding employees for a certain behavior might prove increasingly costly, and the removal of this reward may be interpreted as negative feedback. However, with intrinsic, intangible rewards, such as game-points or raffle-tickets, employers do not run that high a risk.

In this more casual game environment, managers can offer their employees sequentially-growing rewards with no additional cost. Additionally, they can continuously change the types of rewards and their frequency in order to keep them relevant and interesting.

How Gameffective employs this to drive employee behavior

Gameffective’s Treasure Box feature-set employs the exact same principle described above. In order to get employees hooked on personal improvement, it allows admins to define the behavior they want to turn into habit and sequentially reward.

These behaviors may include:

Regularly checking the status of a certain KPI you would like employees to prioritize
Completing a daily set of learning activities or practice sessions in order to build up skills

Regularly posting best practices from experience to the company’s social network platforms

Then, admins can proceed to decide on the cadence of rewards employees will be receiving for consecutively complying. Admins can reward game-points, coins or even rare items. They can then set the intervals and the increments in which these rewards will be administered.

Lastly, admins can turn on the mechanism, kick back and bask in the glory of having instilled good behaviors in their workforce, driving changes in attitude and improving business results.

By regularly reviewing performance data through Gameffective’s analytics dashboard, admins can continuously tweak and optimize the mechanism to maximize its impact.

Conclusion

Daily loyalty rewards have the power to encourage employees to check in on their personal performance, engage them in learning or drive them to religiously comply with processes and best practices. Rewards keep us interested by providing an incentive that associates desired behaviors with positive emotions, and, when done well, turns them into habit. Wouldn’t you want to get a reward for repeatedly doing good work?