With an aging workforce and an often quoted lack of new talent coming into transport & logistics, our industry is said to be facing a ticking demographic time bomb.
The looming driver deficit is already pushing up costs, both financial and in more abstract ways, and making workforce planning a constant pressure for many companies.
So what if there were a way to attract younger talent while helping to improve your existing driving workforce performance? A concept known as gamification may well be able to do just this and is sweeping through many industries.
Gamification is the process of understanding how we can apply the same principles that make games entertaining to real-life situations to increase engagement, encourage tasks to be carried out more efficiently, improve performance and incentivise desired behaviours.
According to an article published by Forbes, people around the world are spending more than 3 billion hours a week playing video and computer games. Meanwhile almost a third of high school students play 3 or more hours of video or computer games on an average school day.
Research firm MarketsandMarkets forecasts that the global gamification market could grow from USD 1.65 billion in 2015 to USD 11.10 billion by 2020. These figures highlight just how significant gaming has now become, having also overtaken the film industry in size and scale.
This may all seem a little inconsequential to the transport industry… but it does identify a trend, which if harnessed, has the potential to impact positively on transport and logistics.
There are endless examples where applying game mechanics to non-game situations has been successful. A quick search online brings a Google example in which it deployed gamification techniques to encourage staff to submit expenses claims in full and on time. A further example would be Tripadvisor which boosted reviews on its website significantly. But the range of applications extends from education, through to financial management, language translation and to pretty much any application you can imagine.
So, given the excitement around this phenomenon we thought the idea and its potential for transport merited further research. We’ve therefore explored how gamification could be applied and the potential benefits.
