What Happens When You Combine Healthy Living and Gamification?

We all have good and bad habits. Creating a routine for yourself and encouraging healthy habits can help you accomplish your health goals.

There’s no downside to being healthy; it can boost your energy level, improve mental performance, help you reduce your risk of chronic diseases and lead to a happier, more productive lifestyle.
 
So, what happens when you combine healthy habit tracking and gamification?

It turns your boring to-do list, mundane chores, or in this case healthy habits, into a game where you can earn points and collect rewards.
 
Gamification is the application of game-playing elements to non-game environments, and small business owners who offer one of our Funding Advantage health benefit plans have the opportunity to use gamification to engage their employees through an app called Member Connection.
 
Member Connection is an interactive online portal that engages members by displaying content and activities based on their interests and health needs. The portal rewards them with gifts cards to places like Amazon.com or Target for completing certain tasks
 
According to a Wall Street Journal article, a study of a small sample of workers at commercial laundry plants in the Midwest found employees who participated in an employer-sponsored health program increased their productivity by about 4% on average during the subsequent year. The greatest productivity change was in sick workers whose health noticeably improved from one annual screening to the next. They saw a 10.8% change in their output.
 
“We forget that many people come to work not feeling their greatest,” said Ian Larkin, a management professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who wrote the paper with Timothy Gubler of University of California, Riverside and Lamar Pierce of Washington University in St. Louis. “Showing up feeling better means people work harder on a day-to-day basis.”
 
If you’re a small business owner looking for other ways to keep your employees engaged and productive, gamification is key to ongoing engagement.
 
Gamification already has caught on with consumers. For instance, wearables, like those from FitBit, turn fitness into a game where you collect badges and earn rewards for your activity and health.
 
The concept of gamification operates under the same science as video games, which are specifically designed to activate human reward centers.
 
Research supports the idea that gamification is effective in work environments; a study published in the Interaction Design and Architecture Journal by Hense, Mandl and Klevers, looked at the link between gamification and developing career skills.

Researchers not only found that gamification increased motivation, which made it easier for people to retain knowledge, they found that "gamification can be implemented in existing technical infrastructures without changing the basic workflow itself."
 
In 2015, the gamification industry was worth $2 billion in the U.S. By 2021, the estimated global market value of gamification will be $11.94 billion.

Gamification is the future of education and business strategies all over the world, as statistics show. People enjoy different activities and hobbies. 

But one thing unites us – we all love to play!

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Allied National

Founded in 1970, Allied is one of the nation's oldest and most experienced third-party administrators. Allied National is a 90 Degree Benefits Company, a subsidiary of Blue Cross Blue Shield Alabama. As the small group benefit experts, Allied works with small business employers to provide unique and affordable group health benefits.