Knowledge sharing solution Deskarma (www.deskarma.com) is applying gamification techniques around employee achievement and reward to inspire collaboration within businesses.
As businesses open up to the idea of introducing gamification at work, Deskarma is leveraging these techniques to improve knowledge sharing for larger corporations, including global professional services brand PwC.
The recent appetite for gamification techniques within the workplace suggests that, in an attempt to solve the perennial problem of improving and increasing knowledge sharing between staff, the collaboration software market is taking a new direction.
Deskarma believes gamification techniques hold the key to success through offering staff the opportunity to earn a form of social currency (“Karma”) by sharing and discussing their insights, case studies, ideas and pitches with colleagues, and by tackling ‘challenges’ set by their peers.
Deskarma co-founder Mark O’Neill explained: “Businesses are continually looking to innovate, and knowledge sharing has always been recognised as being vital to innovation. However, ensuring that your employees share expertise is tougher than it sounds, largely because it can require genuine cultural change.
It’s one thing to have the right tools in place to make collaboration easy for staff, but we have found they need more than that – they need the right recognition structures in place to motivate behaviour.
Adding a competitive context leads to improvements in the level and quality of knowledge sharing. These are the kinds of benefits Deskarma has delivered at PwC. If the first wave of collaboration tools removed friction from working together, we believe this second wave of new entrants will increase the ‘drive’ behind collaborative behaviour at work.”
The market for collaboration solutions continues to develop exponentially – growing to a $6.4bn market in 2016 at a compound growth rate of 61% according to Forrester and, although a number of large players dominate the market, many think the ‘silver bullet’ solution which will inspire employees to fully engage and share with each other has yet to appear.
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About Deskarma
Deskarma provides gamified knowledge sharing solutions for medium to large businesses through its own application or by working alongside existing installed collaboration solutions (such as Microsoft SharePoint). Rather than attempting to replace a company’s existing software, Deskarma adds a contemporary and innovative extension to established platforms.