How To Transform The Workplace With An Employee Leaderboard?

Want a high-performing culture where people are motivated to walk the extra mile? Well, introducing an employee leaderboard might just do the trick!

Employee leaderboards bring elements of gamification into the workplace, adding a little bit of fun to otherwise mundane workdays. As a bonus, you might get to see your employees being more productive and even going the extra mile.

Don't believe it? Look at these numbers-

A study shows that 86% of young job applicants find gamification at work enjoyable and fun. And if that's not enough to convince you, 89% of employees said that gamification makes them more productive, while a whopping 88% said it makes them feel happier in their workplace.

So, why not bring some of these magical effects of gamification to your own workplace with an employee leaderboard?

Not only will it add a little bit of friendly competition, but it can also facilitate social interaction. With a leaderboard, your employees can cheer each other on as they strive for excellence. And let’s be real, who doesn’t like to get publicly recognized for their achievements?

What Is An Employee Leaderboard?

An Employee leaderboard is a ranking system that visually depicts employee performance or achievements across your organization. It is one of the most frequently used organizational gaming mechanics.

Employee leaderboards can assist participants (your employees) in setting specific goals, unleashing their motivation, and presenting their growth visually.

Have you ever played video games before? If you have, you must have come across the leaderboard section where the top rankings of the participants and ongoing challenges are displayed.

Taking cues from the world of video game organizations has brought the concept of real-time rankings into the workplace, creating what we now know as employee leaderboards.

If you want to gamify your work processes and make it fun for your team, the employee leaderboard is the way to go! With an employee leaderboard, you can monitor your employees' individual and team progress on a single dashboard.

Plus, it offers you real-time data on employee performance based on certain pre-established criteria. And then presents the data in a way that’s as visually satisfying as a video game leaderboard.

Your employee dashboard can be a physical board displayed in a prominent location in the office. Or it can be an online dashboard accessible to every team and stakeholder.

In essence, the employee leaderboard can be a powerful tool for organizations seeking to enhance engagement and performance.

But how exactly can you achieve this? Let's delve deeper to find out.

Benefits Of Having An Employee Leaderboard

According to the Self-Determination Theory, humans want to feel efficient, be free to do their thing, and belong to a group. In other words, three things are necessary for humans to feel fulfilled:

• Competence
• Autonomy
• Social relatedness

And that's where employee leaderboards come in! They can check all these boxes and fulfill these needs for your team.

Let’s find out a few other ways in which an employee leaderboard can benefit your organization-

Boosts Employee Performance

The answer to “How can an employee leaderboard boost employee performance in the workplace?” comes down to these 5 elements-

Increased Drive:

First, employee leaderboards allow your people to see how they're doing in real-time. It creates a sense of urgency to do better each day. It's like they're trying to one-up themselves, which can multiply their drive to succeed.

Emotional Connection:

When employees see themselves moving up that leaderboard, it creates an emotional connection that sparks internal motivation. All these combined lead to your employees working harder, pushing their limits, and giving it 2x effort.

Collaboration:

It heightens collaboration as your employees can see their contribution to the overall team ranking. Your employees become more willing to work together to improve their team's performance.

Accountability:

It produces a sense of accountability among your employees. With visual and real-time performance metrics, leaderboards can encourage employees to take ownership of their work decisions and possible consequences.

Gamification:

Employee leaderboards add a touch of fun and gamification to the workplace.

And you don’t have to believe my words. Let the statistics talk-

By incorporating gamification, Autodesk raised its trial usage rate by 40% and conversion rates by 15%. While another organization named Kenco increased its bottom-line sales margin by 45%.

Source

In another research, 72% of respondents agreed that such gamification in the workplace incites motivation to work harder. Thus leading to better performance.

Motivation And Positive Reinforcement:

Did you know?

In a recent study, participants were asked to compete in an image-tagging game. And guess what?

The participants who were already at the top of the leaderboard focused more on playing it safe to keep their coveted position. But the lower-ranking players? They were all fired up to stick to the correct process and get better with each round.

These results say much about how leaderboard positions can shape our motivation.

Employee leaderboards set goals in clear, quantifiable terms for your employees. This visual tracking of goals can help your people focus more on achieving the specific objectives with an increased desire to excel.

And the best part?

Every time someone achieves a goal, they move up the leaderboard! It's like a video game but with real-life achievements. This visual progress tracking can motivate your people to keep pushing themselves, work harder, and climb a few more steps upward each day.

It's a win-win situation. Your team gets that feeling of accomplishment with every goal achieved, and you get a more productive workforce.

So why not try to see what kind of champions your team can become with the addition of an accurate employee leaderboard?

Healthy Competition:

Have you ever heard about the theory of social learning?

Let me explain.

According to this theory, social comparison encourages people to understand their best abilities and worst attributes when looking at the people around them.

Employee leaderboards do the same for your employees. It gives everyone a frame of reference that stands as the basis for measuring their achievements and improvements.

Think about it. When your people work to climb the leaderboard, they get to identify areas for improvement. It allows employees to understand where they stand with their peers. Thus, it may ignite and foster a sense of healthy competition within the workplace.

This competitive environment encourages your employees to enhance their skills and knowledge accordingly. Thus, encouraging employees to strive to keep taking steps upwards the leaderboard to reach the top spot.

So why not add friendly competition to your office with an employee leaderboard and see what happens? Who knows, you might just unleash your team's inner champs!

Enhances Employee Engagement:

Employee Leaderboards can engage your people with social rewards and feedback.

Let me explain with an example.

Imagine Sam, an employee in your marketing team, has been putting his best foot forward during all these assigned tasks. But its efforts haven’t been bringing in the expected results. As a result, his efforts are also going unrecognized by the senior leaders and peers.

Now, say you have incorporated an employee leaderboard to track individual and team marketing performance. With this, Sam can now clearly see the aspects he has been doing well and the aspects he needs to improve. With this new learning opportunity, he makes the necessary shifts in his skills, and within a short span, his name appears at the top of the leaderboard for the first time.

His colleagues start congratulating him, prompting him to share his strategies and tips with his colleagues, who also begin to perform better as a result. The team morale improves, and everyone becomes more engaged and motivated to achieve their sales goals.

By bringing your team together in a fun, competitive, and interactive way, you're boosting engagement and building a sense of community. At the same time, your employee leaderboards can serve as a platform for social recognition among your team members.

Different Types of Employee Leaderboards

1. Performance Leaderboard

Performance leaderboards allow you to measure your employees' progress based on certain pre-established criteria like organizational goals, team dynamics, and priorities. This results in the transparency of performance data in your organization.

Although leaderboards are customizable as per your requirements, most performance-centric gamified leaderboards are loaded with components like objective, rank, learning and development, initiative, number of projects completed, and others.

Thus, you will get a bird’s eye view of the top-performing employees. In addition, these real-time metrics will help you check the consistency of employee performance and identify employees who need a little more push and those who are constantly underperforming.

Plus, you'll better understand which team members excel in certain areas and assign or delegate tasks accordingly.

2. Sales Leaderboard

A sales leaderboard is a ranking system that displays the performance of individual salespeople or teams within an organization based on their sales metrics, such as the number of deals closed or the total revenue generated.

It’s a type of performance leaderboard specifically made for your sales team. However, the prevalence, widespread usage, and scope of sales leaderboards across various industries sets them apart and justifies their separate discussion.

To get insight into your sales team’s growth, your sales leaderboard might include components like- monthly revenue, demo calls completed, customer retention, new customers acquired, improvement rate, and other sales metrics and KPIs.

To cut a long story short, a sales leaderboard enables you to track almost every aspect of your sales teams. It lets you see who's leading the pack, who's falling behind, and which underdog is slowly climbing up the ranks.

3. Wellness Leaderboard

Employee wellness has become a major concern for many organizations, with more and more employees living a sedentary lifestyle.

Studies suggest that only 21 % of adults engage in physical activities. And the health risks that come along with such an inactive lifestyle are alarming.

This is where wellness leaderboards can make a difference. Wellness leaderboards can help you healthify your workplace with healthy competition. It lets your people flex their healthy habits and outdo their colleagues.

Simply put, wellness leaderboards can help you track your team's healthy habits and motivate them to take care of their health.

Here’s an example of what a great team employee wellness leaderboard could look like-

Wellness leaderboards make your employee health programs fun and encourage all your employees to participate through various incentives and features. From daily challenges and time-tracking to trophies, badges, and points, it offers plenty of ways to keep your team engaged and motivated with gamification.

With corporate wellness platforms like VantageFit, you can also get access to comprehensive leaderboards with real-time analytics.

And the best part?

Apart from having a general leaderboard for the whole team, it offers employees individual leaderboards to track self-performance and goals.

Vantagefit also comes with wellness leaderboard features like step count and outdoor workout tracking (with GPS data). In addition, you get access to features like a mood tracker, heart rate monitor, meal and gym diaries, calorie tracker, BMI Calculator, calorie expenditure, and others.

4. Reward And Recognition Leaderboard

Before we dive deeper into the nitty gritty of a reward and recognition leaderboard, I want to ask you something.

How did you feel the last time someone complimented you publicly on your effort or accomplishments?

Great, right?

A reward and recognition leaderboard offers your people a similar sense of validation and fulfillment.

The recognition of their hard work can inspire your people to greater heights. And ignite a spark of inspiration for the one being appreciated. At the same time, it sets examples for the rest of the team and reinforces positive behaviors.

The end goal of every employee leaderboard is to incentivize your people in some way or another. But if appreciation is a big part of your culture, actively tracking how your teams recognize each other can be a fun (and eye-opening) addition to your workplace.

You might already have an appreciation system in place. But without an employee leaderboard, understanding the metrics behind it becomes pretty difficult.

For instance, our recognition platform, Vantage Circle, can offer you and your employees a feed score. You can monitor this score to understand which employees are recognized most and who are not recognized in a while.

Vantage Circle also allows your employees to see what their peers have been appreciated for. This feed score might further encourage employees to participate in the culture of social recognition.

To top it off, you can access a comprehensive view of the functioning recognition program and identify potential loopholes. You also get a comprehensive view of people who are getting recognized and employees who haven’t been recognized in a few months. Plus, you get to see the top values employees are getting recognized for.

5. Project Management Leaderboard

As the name suggests, a project management leaderboard is a tool organization uses for displaying project performance metrics in a visible and transparent way. It generally has components like project success rate, scores, rank, budget adherence, revenue, and other key performance indicators (KPIs).

A project management leaderboard allows your teams to drill down into the data(historical and real-time). Thus, it gives intensive insights into the performance of each project- team or individual.

It also presents data in a visual and simple form like charts, graphs, and heat maps. This will make it easy for your teams to understand and analyze the data and identify areas where improvement is needed.

How To Create an Effective Employee Leaderboard?

Would you like to play a game with unfair rules and biased results? That sounds pretty unappealing, don't you think?

Similarly, employee leaderboards that are unfair and biased can aren’t fun for anyone involved! When your employees are ranked based on some arbitrary criteria, it can create a host of negative effects - from demotivation to resentment.

And let's not forget about the bigger picture. A toxic competitive environment and lack of transparency can harm the entire workplace culture.

You need to know the best practices to keep your employees motivated and engaged while safeguarding your organization from the negative effects of an employee leaderboard. And I am here to help you.

Here are a few actionable tips to make your employee leaderboards effective-

A. Set Clear and Achievable Targets

The principles of goal-setting theory should be used to maximize the impact of leaderboards.
– Richard N Landers

According to the Goal-Setting Theory of Motivation, setting specific, realistic, and clear goals boost performance. When goals are specific and achievable, it makes people feel like they're crushing it - and who doesn't love that feeling., It gives your people a major confidence boost, which can fuel even more victories.

So, if you want your team to feel like champions, be real. Choose achievable targets for your people. You can’t ask a penguin to fly, can you?

Such targets, which are borderline impossible, will only lead to frustration, disappointment, and resentment among your people.

When you set goals that are within reach, things start to sizzle! And suddenly, you get a team full of fierce competitors who are motivated to bring their A-game.

B. Choose The Right Metrics To Measure

To make sure that employee goals align with business objectives, you need to choose the right metrics. The right metrics or criteria on the leaderboard will help you measure what matters the most. It also gives employees clear insights into the areas they must work on to lead their team to success.

C. Make The Leaderboard Accessible And Visible

A leaderboard to which only leaders have access can lead to frustration and suspicion among your people. It also robs the entire idea of transparency from the concept of an employee leaderboard.
Instead, make the scores, ranks, and criteria on which the ranks or rewards are given crystal clear to everyone participating.

D. Incentivize

Leaderboards with just numbers, scores, and ranks can only motivate your employees for the short term. To get the most out of leaderboards, incentivize them. Add milestones and offer attractive rewards, badges, and perks after achieving each milestone.

You can also recognize the high-performing employees with points. Employees can accumulate these points and buy something they value with it. Also, make sure to monitor the activities on your employee leaderboard to avert any issues before they escalate.

To Conclude

With an employee leaderboard, you are not just keeping a score of employee growth. But you are also creating an environment where everyone has the chance to shine.

So what are you waiting for? Add employee leaderboards into your organizational processes and transform the daily workplace grind into a thrilling and fun experience.

This article is written by Sweta, a content marketer at Vantage Circle. Sweta loves and savors every second of communicating with the audience through her writing. Besides writing, she is also a certified teacher who loves learning new things and applying them in her life. For any related queries, contact editor@vantagecircle.com.