Gamification.  Game Mechanics.  Buzz phrases of the day?  Perhaps.  Yet more and more, you’re likely hearing about them in the context of health. And how employers are using them to create healthier workforces.

A recent Towers Watson survey reports 26 percent of employers support or are considering supporting employee health management with the use of online games (up from just 9 percent in 2010).

And earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal featured an article on the topic: “Pitting Employees Against Each Other … for Health.” The author, Anna Wilde Mathews, talks about how employers are leveraging game techniques to help employees improve their health.  Here’s a quick video, which provides a nice summary of the article.

So what do game mechanics have to do with health?

Game mechanics are a powerful tool. They’re a great way to engage your employees in good health – both in the employee health programs you’ve put in place, and in those all-important offline behaviors you want them to engage in – like getting enough physical activity, eating healthy, avoiding smoking, and more.

Game mechanics help ensure employees can easily learn how to participate, what they need to do to make healthy behavior changes, and better understand their progress against goals.  They make things fun and spark competitive spirit.  What’s more, they offer short-term reinforcement cycles and help keep momentum going over the long-term – which is crucial for sustained engagement and behavior change.

Earlier this year, Tom Abshire, SVP Products and Marketing here at Virgin HealthMiles presented a webinar about the role of game mechanics in employee health programs.  You can check out the recording here.  In the webinar, Tom shared four keys to effectively use game design techniques and game mechanics to engage your employees in your workplace health improvement efforts:

1. Break long tasks down into small, achievable short-term goals that reward achievement.
   Achieving health goals is a long process. Even with a sizable personal or financial goal or incentive at the end, it’s hard for many individual to take those daily steps towards better health.  With game mechanics, you can break down these long paths into small steps that make the long-term goal achievable. Game mechanics can help create small victories that support developing habits.  And things like incentives and levels can reinforce achievement.
2. Turn tasks into paths. Actions into habits. And effort into play.
   Conversely, at times we need our employees to focus on a number of related, but disconnected tasks. Employers usually have a range of programs you want employees to take part in.  Game mechanics can be an important tool to help employees make sense of the range of programs you offer by creating paths to follow and certainty on where they should start.  Points and incentives can help them understand what’s most important or where they need to focus next, based on their specific needs or the plan design for their segment.
3. Convert users into players.
   Game mechanics can convert users into players.  This speaks to the shift in motivation.  As users, we’re externally motivated to achieve a task – to get the job done.  By converting users into players, motivation shifts internally. With internal motivation, we’re more likely to pursue the next step in the program, discover what other tasks or challenges that are available that can help us advance or achieve. We’re more open to collaborating, not just competing. Game mechanics can open up another dimension of motivational possibilities.
   
4. Create a unifying experience around a changing array of tasks.
   Gamification can be important in creating an overall unifying theme, tying together the disconnected incentives and game mechanics that individual programs attempt to employ.  This is critical when you’re changing partners or your overall plan design.  Employees can more easily adapt to and understand the changes when the changes happen within the familiar context of the overarching game.  A unifying game also allows for better cross-promotion of programs – increasing the awareness and perceived value of your overall health and wellness strategy.

If you’re considering using game mechanics in your employee health initiatives, be sure to keep this in mind: if you’re asking your employees to engage and change their behaviors, you need to support them with things they want to do.

Your gamification strategies shouldn’t be too complex. Otherwise, you’ll lose your employees’ interest and they won’t participate. And low participation won’t lead to very much impact for your business or improvements in workforce health.  To see success with your gamification strategy, keep things simple and interesting.  Use game mechanics everyone understands – points, levels, rewards, badges, leaderboards, etc. – to drive adoption of healthy behaviors and ongoing engagement.

Buzz phrase, sure.  But game mechanics aren’t all hype. Since the very beginning, we’ve incorporated them as a key component of our engagement mix. And we’ve seen them help employers and thousands of their employees reap significant benefits – like participation rates nearly three times the industry average and significant workforce health improvements and cost savings.

Learn more about how game mechanics can drive employee engagement and better health in your organization in this free white paper.

It’s the start of a new year. Your employees are geared up to make healthy changes, so why not seize the opportunity? It’s the perfect time to help them make those changes really stick. How? By adding some game mechanics to your health and wellness initiatives.

Health is serious business, but it can – and should – be fun, challenging, exhilarating.  Just like a good game. So how can you turn your employees from users of your health and wellness programs into players? Consider the following:

• Give your employees the opportunity to compete with one another to change health behaviors. Run some healthy contests company-wide, like seeing who can rack up the most activity in a month, and provide ways for employees to create and run their own challenges.  Nothing says “game on” like a little healthy competition.
• Use simple game mechanics that everyone understands – points, levels, rewards – to drive adoption of healthy behaviors and ongoing engagement.  No unlocking of secret keys necessary; keep it easy and achievable.
• Good games keep people coming back to hone their skills and up the ante, so provide your employees with fun and easy tools to use, ways to track their progress against their goals, and new milestones to reach. The challenge of getting better at the game creates healthy habits in the process.
• When it comes to health gaming, the more the merrier. Make it social by providing ways for employees to share their scores, exchange tips and tricks, even brag a little. Getting healthy is more fun, and more effective, when everybody’s playing.

Here at Virgin HealthMiles, our very first members got in the game back in 2005, and many have joined them since. HealthMiles members are earning points, hitting levels, winning prizes, earning rewards, spending cash – all while getting more active and healthy.  Game mechanics is just one of the multiple proven engagement and behavior change strategies we use in our solutions – one that’s helped to drive participation rates nearly three times the industry average and helped employers realize significant workforce health improvements and cost savings.

Want to get in the game? Get started by playing “Match Your Move” on our website!

Innovative Approach to Workplace Wellness Delivers Industry-Leading Engagement Rates, Measurable Results for Employers

BOSTON, Mass., August 23, 2011 – “Health gaming” may be the buzz phrase of the day, but every day’s a chance to ‘get in the game’ for the more than 700,000 employees represented by Virgin HealthMiles, a pioneer in applying game mechanics to driving sustained, healthy behaviors. Virgin developed its award-winning HealthMiles program in 2005, which incorporates proven game mechanics as one of several behavior change strategies that motivate employees to make the healthy lifestyle choices that help organizations control healthcare costs.

“Game mechanics are a powerful tool in driving engagement in the workplace, for both wellness programs and bridging to all-important offline behaviors,” said Tom Abshire, senior vice president of marketing and member engagement for Virgin HealthMiles.  “Game mechanics are just one of the engagement strategies Virgin HealthMiles employs with our programs to ensure members can easily learn how to participate, what they need to do to make healthy behavior changes, and better understand their progress against goals. All of these factors are critical for long-term employee engagement.  Over the years, our approach has driven participation rates nearly three times the industry average and helped employers realize significant workforce health improvements and cost savings.”

Health Gamification Benefits: Healthier Workforces, More Engaged Employees, Lower Healthcare Costs
The Virgin HealthMiles program was developed, analyzed and tested by fitness experts and technology leaders to create an effective, engaging, and proven approach to help employees improve their long-term health. The company uses a points system; challenges and quests; and levels of achievement and incentives where employees ‘win’ for healthy behavior change.  Virgin HealthMiles has demonstrated that health gamification is one of several effective elements in creating healthier workforces. For example:

• Motivated by game-like challenges and program levels to increase their physical activity, the cornerstone of a healthy lifestyle, HealthMiles members have earned more than five billion HealthMiles (points) since the program’s inception and have taken more than 550 billion collective steps – that’s like walking around the world more than 11,000 times.
• Challenges are one of several tools that help drive employee engagement. Members not only participate in challenges, they add to the game themselves.  In the past few years, HealthMiles members have challenged their peers to over 150,000 competitions for prizes, lunches or sheer bragging rights.  At any one time, more than 1,000 member-created challenges are in progress.
• The most effective games keep players coming back time and again to hone their skills and up the ante.  Virgin HealthMiles members regularly use a variety of tools such as activity trackers, computerized biometric measurement stations and individualized, user-friendly online portals to play the game, track their progress against goals, learn about new challenges and keep up on their points status – all while forming healthy habits in the process.  In fact, 80 percent of HealthMiles members use their GoZone® pedometers daily; they’ve taken more than 18 million biometrics measurements since 2005; and HealthMiles members visit the website twice per week on average. 
• But getting employees to play the game itself isn’t the end goal. Rather it’s one strategy that helps employers create a workplace culture of health and drive sustained offline behavior shifts.  Thanks to Virgin HealthMiles’ fun, innovative approach to employee wellness, a recent 18-month study of 11,000 HealthMiles members showed 50 percent of participants who were inactive at the start are now active; HealthMiles members are 2.5 times more active than the average US adult; and, in 2010, nearly 200,000 HealthMiles members reached Level 3 or higher – the benchmark for continually achieving the recommended amount of daily physical activity. 

Virgin HealthMiles: Gamifying Health Since 2005
Game mechanics, along with other key motivators, are driving industry leading participation rates and business impact for Virgin HealthMiles clients. With Virgin HealthMiles’ programs, members get in the game by using tools to track their progress both on- and offline. Employers and employees alike can create personal and community challenges to motivate each other to increase their daily physical activity and check leaderboards throughout the challenge to see rankings. The social connections members form help reinforce healthy habits and personal accountability, and the program’s social tools let members share success stories and virtually cheer one another on to improved health.

For example, at Ochsner Health System, a large Louisiana-based healthcare system with seven hospitals and 35 clinics, more than 85 percent of the company’s 10,000 benefits eligible employees are playing the HealthMiles game.  Of those employees participating, more than 50 percent earned enough points to achieve Level 3 in the game, and received a substantial health insurance premium discount for 2010. Ochsner’s internal studies are showing actual cost savings from this approach. In 2010, Ochsner held the growth in its cost of healthcare to nearly one-third the national average.  To learn more about Ochsner Health System’s results and other workplace wellness success stories, visit:  http://us.virginhealthmiles.com/theproof/Pages/TheProof.aspx.