Engage your restaurant staff with gamification

Many restaurants struggle with unmotivated, disengaged employees. If we’re being honest, we acknowledge that the work can be hard, repetitive, and even thankless. Restaurants can make the work more fun and fulfilling – through gamification.

What is gamification and why should restaurants use it on their employees?

Gamification is taking something routine and mundane, such as cleaning or prepping, and turning it into a game. That means assigning points, hitting milestones, and earning rewards or badges for achievements. Sometimes it also means friendly competition between individuals and stores.

In a restaurant setting, gamifying everyday tasks can engage employees and motivate them to achieve more. This can lead to a happier workforce, higher productivity, and even increased profits. Best of all, it can make work fun.

What games can restaurant employees play?

You can split restaurant work gamification between individual engagement, team engagement, and competitions.

Individual engagement: Gamification can engage individuals more deeply with their work. Examples include points for daily tasks, badges for the amount of time on the job, or setting milestones for skills development.

Team engagement: This is a collective game or challenge that the team works together on as a whole. It can include things like ‘increase milkshake sales by 10%’ or ‘complete 100% of daily checklist items for the week’. If the team completes the goal they all receive a reward such as a company party, gift cards, or digital badge.  

Competition: Friendly competition motivates teams to work together, creating a fun and cohesive environment. Store-to-store sales competitions can unite stores to do work harder and have more fun. Individual (but friendly) competitions help employees have fun with routine tasks and perform better.

How do I get my employees to participate in gamification?

A recent article from On The Line, ‘How Gamification Can Motivate Restaurant Staff,’ lays out three essential elements for employee gamification.

1. Get your staff invested: If staff don’t participate, or don’t care, gamification won’t achieve anything. To get everyone involved, prizes need to be attractive enough that people get excited about them. Organizations should put the winners on display so everyone sees what they can achieve.
2. Clear and concise goals: Everyone needs to understand the game. You’ll need to define specific goals and lay out exactly how to achieve them. Regular communication and progress updates keep your staff engaged with achieving clear goals.
3. Provide feedback along the way: Frequent feedback keeps employees engaged in the game and helps them perform better. Keep them updated, but also get feedback from staff about how they feel about the program. You’ll get insight on how your staff feels about and how to make it better.

Without buy-in, the game falls flat. These three essentials help you achieve the positive results from gamification: motivation, engagement, teamwork, and increased sales.

Blanket makes engagement possible – out of the box

The out of the box tools in Blanket make gamification easy to implement and deploy across your entire organization. With everything accessible on a mobile app, staff can play, track, and keep score anywhere.

In Blanket, you can assign points for completed tasks and create leaderboards and performance badges. With POS integration, Blanket allows you to set sales goals and competitions for individuals or between stores. Cloud-based record keeping and instant communication makes it simple to create, track, and approve your team’s performance.

Blanket also makes rewarding your staff easy and fast. You can create digital badges or coins that can be redeemed for real-life rewards like gift cards or cash bonuses.

If executed well (especially with the help of an app like Blanket), gamification can boost team morale and create an engaged team culture. For restaurants struggling with disengaged employees, gamification transforms daily routines into fun games with awesome rewards. After all, work should be about more than just a paycheck.

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