UniFocus Unveils Gamification Capabilities
UniFocus, a provider of Workforce Management Systems, announced the launch of advanced gamification abilities for its solutions, providing hospitality businesses with a powerful tool leading to enhanced productivity and the increase in labor management expertise across the breadth of an organization. With the new functionality, businesses can now ensure that managers are recognized for their ongoing efforts in learning how to maximize the use of technology to streamline and improve labor management processes, resulting in higher service quality, employee loyalty and increased business revenues.
“Many regional and general managers provided valuable feedback that they would like a way to encourage operational managers to use the labor management system to its fullest potential,” said Christopher McNutt, Product Manager at UniFocus. “Our gamification feature encourages scheduling managers to schedule to standard, and reduce the risk of cost and quality issues, by allowing them to earn badges when these scenarios are met. It also presents a badge to managers responsible for forecasting each time they identify outliers, making system generated forecasts even smarter. With badges able to be earned by all managers for accessing the dashboard, this has encouraged all leadership personnel to dig deeper into the tools already available to analyze the business and ensure their ability to stay on track.”
Via the new My Dashboard feature, a portal serving as a personal space to customize individual software needs, UniFocus provides each manager with the ability to earn badges recognizing their completing of specific tasks. This can include earning badges for meeting weekly expense targets, learning a new labor management/scheduling process, ensuring that department attendance stays within acceptable levels and more. Personnel can notably use My Dashboard to review the badges they have earned as well as identify ones that have yet to be awarded. If a business recognizes that a specific software feature is not being utilized or if an organizational goal is not being met, additional badges can be created to drive behavior towards using the feature or meeting target thresholds.
“This latest enhancement to our labor management technology is truly game-changing in that it provides businesses with the ability to actively play an influential role in promoting engagement while creating shareable expertise throughout an organization,” said Mark Heymann, CEO of UniFocus. “Using our gamification feature, team members can readily identify who within their company has relevant knowledge over a specific process such as shift scheduling or forecasting service demand. By identifying such experts, employees can easily gain access to knowledge over processes that they themselves may be unfamiliar with, minimizing learning curves and boosting overall business productivity and performance as a result. This can also lead to a cross-pollination of ideas where subject experts can share best practices with one another, potentially uncovering new and improved ways of accomplishing tasks that can now be put to use in benefitting the entire organization.”
UniFocus achievement badges come in three levels- silver, gold and platinum. This feature further incentivizes team members to continue improving their knowledge and performance by allowing them to receive recognition with the levelling-up of badges. To maximize engagement, businesses can utilize UniFocus badges to recognize team member accomplishments in employee newsletters, on business social media channels, or by using the system to identify an employee of the month to name a few examples.
“From the perspective of a scheduling or forecasting manager, many will feel a sense of pride in the badges they obtain each week,” continued McNutt. “Each badge can stack into achievements and comes with a number of points that add to a manager’s running total. Managers and their peers can be very competitive, so this can often lead to the comparing of trophy cases located in the profile screen which ultimately results in much higher engagement and more effective use of the labor management system.”