How Gamification Powers Up the Future Robotic Process Automation

Imagine gaming, the friendly battle that we often love to get ourselves into, becomes a part of your workplace? Sounds fun? Well, that is happening in today's corporate world with the automation culture.

Automation has become a part of our lives. There's not even a single day without it. From the gadgets we use, vehicles we travel to our workplace, we are surrounded by it and pretty much can’t do without it. Now you may ask workplace automation?

Robotic Process Automation, known as RPA, is no less than a revolution. Governed by business logic and structured inputs, RPA, which is a combination of both hardware and software, networking and automation, has transformed the way of doing things in business. In short, RPA is like having a digital workforce recruited to minimize operating costs and maximize productivity.

About half of the time, money, and resources in business gets wasted behind repetitive tasks like solving queries or errors or on monotonous jobs like maintaining records and other day-to-day business activities. Putting an end to it, the software BOT of RPA in business is freeing humans from the high-volume and unnecessary laborious tasks by mimicking human actions on a computer, and the result is - accuracy, productivity, improved employee morale, reliability, compliance, consistency, non-invasive technology, low technical barrier, and much more.

Surprisingly, there’s one more entrant into RPA which will spice the business process like never before i.e. gamification. It is nothing unknown as we all are familiar with the game mechanics but, the implementation of it into RPA is no less than a surprise. The question arises, why is there a need for it and what magic will it do to RPA? Let’s unlock the answers.

Adapting Gamification into RPA

Gamification in RPA means applying game mechanics into non-game contexts. It is more of like game-based learning for the people. Adaption of gamification into the business process will help organizations optimize their workflows, improve their productivity, educate, motivate and engage their employees, crowdsourcing, and more.

So, what exactly does gamification mean here? Does it mean you get to play Pokémon Go or PUBG while the software bot carries out the job on your behalf? Absolutely no. Gamifying here means making the learning effective, engaging, and enjoyable. The cocktail of work and games not only helps in achieving organizational goals but can also create an impact on individuals, making them efficient in perceiving digital content and understanding a certain area of study.

By creating an RPA game, you can teach your staff to automate their time-consuming business processes and work together to fulfil other important tasks instead. To make it more engaging, a positive competition, rewards, badges, levels like in a game can be added which will make it more interesting or best, you can even go for real prizes than the virtual ones if affordable. In short, an RPA game will boost the productivity of not just the individuals but the organization as a whole as each will take interest and work as a team to reach the ultimate goal.

How gamification will benefit?

The reason game-based learning will turn out to be beneficial is the fact that it will give a taste of the issues and difficulties we may face in the real world, thereby making us capable to solve them and prepare us for such situations. It will also instil the value of collaboration and will make us understand the importance of shared goals. The gaming experiences will also test an individual's or a team's ability to implement new and innovative concepts as well as strategies and reach the end-goal most cost-effectively.

What’s the roadblock then?

The fear that RPA will replace humans is still there. People are yet to accept the fact that RPA is just to free humans from the unnecessary mundane and repetitive tasks which take up a lot of precious hours in a day of humans. Other than that, gamification is not peanuts. It needs efforts and investments to make it work. A company and its staff have to come in terms with both the roadblocks to taking the complete advantage of Gamification+RPA.

Wrapping up

Gamification in RPA is not some current trend or hack that won't yield results in the long run. It is going to stay and may even do more in future than we expect right now. The world is changing and so does the learning; hence we have to keep up ourselves updated all the time. Therefore, adopting gamification with a hope that the imagination of the virtual world will help us survive the automated real world in the future, is not a bad idea at all.