Abstract:

Motivation has an important effect on learning and achievement. Motivation has been described as a power that moves the individual for a specific purpose and also increases the desire to work. In large IT work groups, employees do not willing to take placement tests because of their lack of of motivation. However, studies show that placement tests can help the IT department managers to detect a lack of knowledge and training in specific areas. Nowadays, there are many tools that help enhance motivation in people. One of popular motivation tools is called gamification. Gamification is a powerful motivation tool which can be used in different disciplines such as education, marketing, management etc. Gamification can help to increase motivation of people who are attempting to learn something. With gamification, boring and relatively difficult tasks such as tests, can be done more quickly and in a way that is fun. Gamification is described as the application of typical elements of game playing to other areas of activity to promote engagement with a product or service. The purpose of this paper is to understand the general knowledge of gamification in business life.

We are working in IT department of a bank in Turkey. IT department has 340+ employees within 6 different sub departments. There is a classical web based education system in our bank. However, it is not very effective or attractive to make employees as it is very cut and dry. After all, we aimed to find a more effective and attractive method based on gamification. We wanted to investigate the effects of gamifying on the employees to see how it affected their motivation level and engagement in the workplace. We organized a knowledge competition called BOA* Olympics. To do this, we used Kahoot as gamification tool. We asked the employees who work at IT Department, to prepare and send back questions to us based on their work areas. We received 145 questions of total and then separated questions into 3 difficulty levels where each level had 15 questions. All responses were collected using Kahoot. After the competition, we shared a short satisfaction survey with the employees which included 34 questions. Our results showed that 65 responders filled out the survey. Based on these results, we can conclude that the motivation level of the IT employees is 91%, the satisfaction level is high and %97 of employees are willing to the next olympics. Moreover, analysis of the Kahoot results shows which sub department is lacking knowledge compared to other sub departments. This study may serve as suggestion for future research that will use gamification in business life.

*BOA (Business Oriented Architecture) is Kuwait Turkish Participation Bank’s main banking application name.

Keywords:

Gamification, bank, motivation, employeee, enhance learning.