August 4, 2025
Competitions, ice-breakers, and performance-based rewards have long been go-to tools for motivating employees. Today, companies use software to deliver these initiatives more effectively.
In this post, we’ll break down how our platform, Terryberry, can help you gamify employee engagement in a responsible and effective way.
It’s important to understand that gamified employee engagement can backfire if not planned properly. Poorly-designed initiatives frustrate or alienate employees, detract from company values, and distract from their core responsibilities. That’s why we start by examining use cases and common pitfalls before outlining smart strategies that help your team thrive.
We’ll show you how our software enables gamification of employee engagement initiatives—leading to increased staff retention and a stronger company culture.
6 Gamification Software Use Cases for Employee Engagement
When done right, gamification software for employee engagement drives performance and productivity, improves company culture, and reduces employee churn. It shapes positive behavior and helps you achieve broader company goals.
Here are six of the most common use cases:
1. Onboarding New Hires
The onboarding process can be made more engaging through milestone awards, points, and/or prizes for completing learning programs and courses.
2. Group Training
From safety to compliance—whether it’s an annual company-wide program or department-specific—game-like elements make learning and development more engaging and enjoyable.
For example, offering points or awards for completing certain modules motivates participation.
3. Motivating Teams Towards Goals
Breaking down big goals into smaller milestones is smart practice—and gamification can supercharge the process.
For example, celebrate on-time completion of project phases with rewards or recognition to keep momentum high.
4. Improving Team Performance Through Competitions
This one's tricky because too much competition can foster a toxic culture. But when it's friendly and aligned with company values, it becomes a powerful motivator.
For example, small, diverse teams can benefit from team-based scoring to reduce individual pressure and foster a more supportive environment. In a customer support setting, you might divide teams into smaller groups and run competitions for customer satisfaction scores, ticket resolution time, knowledge base contributions, and peer recognition.
Prizes could include a team lunch, a half-day off, or a shared experience. This can be paired with company-wide recognition, like a town-hall announcement.
5. Building a Strong Company Culture
Adding rewards or points to peer recognition initiatives can boost participation—especially among distributed or remote teams.
For example, Tidelands Health built a recognition wall where peers and managers can celebrate employees demonstrating company values. Similarly, Chelsea Groton Bank built a structured reward program to celebrate both daily wins and major milestones.
6. Preventing Burnout and Optimizing Productivity
Wellness programs are widely valued; however, building lasting habits can be tough. That’s where gamification comes in.
Step challenges are a popular way to encourage physical and mental wellbeing, but plenty of other wellness initiatives work too.
Terryberry’s platform helps you gamify employee engagement across all these scenarios.
We’ll explain how our software works later in this guide. But first, it’s vital to identify common pitfalls and outline our approach to gamification. Knowing this upfront is essential to avoid unintended negative consequences when setting up initiatives.
Pitfalls to Avoid When Gamifying Employee Engagement Programs
Gamification is often pitched as a “golden ticket” to solve all employee engagement issues and immediately boost company morale. But the reality is more complicated.
Without careful planning, gamification can actually hurt employee morale, engagement, and company culture instead of driving real results.
Here are some examples:
1. Misaligned Incentives
Leaderboard rankings are a classic way to gamify productivity and incentivize desired behaviors. But many companies overlook the risks of running competitions that are misaligned with what they’re actually trying to accomplish.
For example, IT teams might use leaderboards to track how many lines of code a developer writes each week—and reward the top performers.
But this can backfire: developers may sacrifice code quality and neglect crucial maintenance like fixing vulnerabilities because those tasks don’t boost their leaderboard rank.
HR teams and managers need to choose incentives wisely to avoid promoting metrics that conflict with company objectives.
2. Excessive Focus on Empty Metrics
Even when gamification initiatives are focused on KPIs aligned with business outcomes, there’s still a risk of tunnel vision that ignores other important metrics.
For example, customer support teams may be incentivized to reduce ticket resolution times. While balancing speed with great customer service should be a given, high-volume support centers often see customer satisfaction slip as agents rush conversations to boost their stats. What started as a productivity boost ends up dragging down customer satisfaction.
3. Creating a Toxic Environment Through Competitions
For some team members, competitions bring out their best qualities. However, for a small group, they can bring out the worst—especially when companies launch contests to push struggling teams to improve lagging productivity.
If managers play favorites or employees are already overworked, cheating and unhealthy competition become much more likely. To prevent a toxic environment, mix competitive gamification with group challenges and other incentives that promote teamwork.
4. Pushing Out Team Members with Different Preferences
One thing the “gamification works for any team” crowd misses is that some people just don’t want to play games at work. When gamification is pushed top-down, it risks alienating employees who simply want to focus on their work.
Sometimes resistance signals a poor employee environment—but other times, it just means a specific gamification approach doesn’t fit that group. After all, scavenger hunts aren’t for everyone.
The same goes for quizzes, trivia, and other activities that work great for some teams but not others. Understanding different team preferences is key to building effective gamification and a better employee experience.
And this is exactly what Terryberry’s platform can help you achieve—with the backing of a scientifically validated approach to employee engagement.
How We Define and Approach Gamification for Employee Engagement
Terryberry helps companies avoid gamification pitfalls and reap the benefits of gamification done right. Our software lets HR teams design and customize employee engagement programs with built-in gamification elements—aligned to key business goals like employee retention and performance KPIs.
In other words, it’s about making work more enjoyable and purposeful without distracting teams from their values and business-critical goals.
Getting Gamification Right with Our Employee Engagement Platform
You might be wondering: how can this approach help me determine which gamification approaches will work—and which will backfire?
In short, focus on building a detailed understanding of your employees—what drives them and what they want from their work.
Important Reading: The Company Culture Model
The success or failure of employee engagement programs—including gamified experiences—doesn’t depend solely on execution. More often, it comes down to the context of your company culture and work environment.
How employees feel about their workplace—which will vary widely across teams, cohorts, and individuals—shapes how they’ll react to any program designed to influence their behavior. That’s why HR needs a clear understanding of how different groups perceive their work environment.
To address this, Terryberry uses a scientifically validated engagement model to match employee needs with the right types of engagement programs.
This model takes into account the following factors:
- Belonging: Do employees feel safe, accepted, and connected to their teammates?
- Leadership: Do they trust managers to make good decisions and share relevant information with them? Do they feel supported?
- Equity: Do team members feel that they get resources based on their needs, like coaching or workplace accommodations?
- Purpose: Do employees feel that their work has purpose?
- Empowerment: Do they feel valued and respected? Do they have enough autonomy to take ownership of their work?
- Wellbeing: Do team members feel they can maintain a reasonable—or better yet, healthy—work-life balance?
Depending on the answers to these questions, employees will react differently to incentives like gamification.
For example, frontline employees who feel overworked won’t have the energy to deliver great customer service until they recharge, so prioritizing a wellness program over a friendly competition makes sense.
If team members feel underappreciated and excluded, they’re less likely to celebrate others without extra motivation—this is where gamification can support peer recognition programs.
In most cases, you’ll want to build several employee engagement programs that work together to drive real change in employee behavior.
Our team has helped over 40,000 businesses design employee engagement programs that deliver tangible ROI.
Here’s how we do this:
Our Approach to Impactful Employee Engagement Programs (with Gamification)
1. Find Out What Your Employees Really Need
Inside the Terryberry employee engagement platform, HR teams can collect and analyze insightful survey responses to understand if—and why—employees feel overworked, underappreciated, or unmotivated.
Then, they can configure gamified programs to tackle specific issues like:
- Lagging engagement
- Low productivity
- Insufficiently high customer satisfaction scores
- High employee churn, and more
The key is to find a way to meet employees where they are, rather than imposing gamified initiatives on your team on the basis of assumptions.
The goal is ultimately to make people feel more positively about their workplace, which will translate into higher productivity, lower staff church, and a greater sense of long-term wellbeing.
Gamification can be used as a tactic within the broader strategy, but the strategy needs to be informed by the reality on the ground. You can only get this by hearing directly from staff.
2. Design Programs to Match the Unique Needs of Staff (and the Company)
Our specialists will help you find the right combination of programs, and the right gamification levers, to help you work towards company goals for employee engagement programs.
And our software powers the delivery and optimization of those programs.
Here are the common types of employee engagement programs you can implement with Terryberry:
I. Peer Recognition & Rewards Programs
These programs encourage employees to celebrate each other and feel more connected to their team. Many of our customers use peer recognition programs to reinforce company culture values by giving employees reward points they can turn into gift cards, products, experiences, or charitable contributions.
II. Employee Awards Programs
Whether as a way to recognize outstanding achievements, from sales competitions to sustainability programs, employee awards (when done right) can increase productivity and boost employee engagement. Employee awards can also be tied to specific achievements of milestones outside of competitions.
III. Health and Wellness Programs
It’s more fun to work on your step challenge if you’re doing it with your team (or if you know you’ll get a prize if you win). In this case, gamification helps employees stay healthy and prevent burnout.
Any of those programs can be (and, we believe, should be) fully configured to work for your business goals, company culture, and teams.
For example, remote workers are less likely to feel a strong sense of belonging compared to teams working together in the office.
But would a weekly trivia game make them feel connected to each other?
Not necessarily.
For example, if they’re also overworked and feel like they don’t have a healthy work-life balance, you may get much better results (in terms of productivity and company culture growth) if you launch a team wellness challenge instead. This way, remote employees get to work together towards a fun team goal, and don’t feel chained to their laptop.
3. Track Program Effectiveness and Measure Impact
It’s likely that over time your employees' needs, and company goals, will change.
Terryberry’s platform allows leadership to track a program’s impact and continue optimizing and adapting employee engagement initiatives in line with these organizational changes. In addition to capturing team participation for each program, you can also see how they impact key business metrics, from employee churn to employee satisfaction—and to measure the ROI.
This way, HR teams can adopt a data-driven approach to employee gamification and create engaging experiences that drive results.
Boost Employee Engagement with Gamification Tailored to Your Needs
When implemented strategically, gamification boosts employee engagement and drives key business goals—whether it's higher sales, better customer satisfaction, or reduced turnover.
With Terryberry’s platform, you can uncover company culture weaknesses and fix them through targeted, custom-designed employee engagement programs.
Reach out today to schedule your demo and see how you can use Terryberry to design employee engagement programs that offer tangible return on investment.
