Using Gamification to Enhance Staff Motivation in Logistics

Abstract

Staff motivation as a key challenge in logisticsLogistics is concerned with effectively managing the flow of materials and supplies for production, commerce and other purposes (Christopher, 2003). Transport logistics deals with resource flows on a large scale level, as it involves transport by land, water, and air. A second domain of logistics is intralogistics, which is concerned with the internal handling of materials and supplies within specific production sites or intermediate storage facilities (Arnold, 2006). This paper focuses on intralogistics or, more specifically, on one of its central tasks, order picking.Despite ongoing automation efforts, order picking still frequently involves intensive and repetitive manual labour. For fulfilling a customer order, workers typically receive lists of items to be picked from storage and combined in a shipment. Orders have to be fulfilled under time constraints with as few errors as possible in shifts which can easily involve dozens of orders. Due to these challenges and context conditions, and taking into account that order picking is typically performed by low-paid unskilled workers, it is not surprising that staff motivation and high turnover rates are recurrent problems for efficiency in intralogistics. However, most optimization approaches in order picking concentrate on technical aspects, leaving out the human factor (cf. Coffey, 1999). This paper introduces gamification as an innovative approach to enhance staff motivation in intralogistics. Gamification is a recent trend (originally from marketing) that quickly spread to other areas of application such as education and training, traffic control, or influencing environmental behaviour. Conceptually, gamification denotes the application of game elements for engagement, motivation, learning, or problem-solving purposes in non-gaming, real world contexts (cf. Kapp, 2012, p. 10). As games continually succeed in luring players into investing large amounts of time and effort, it is expected that some of the mechanisms making them effective entertainment devices can also be used in nongaming environments.

A definition for gamification: anchoring gamification in the service marketing literature

“…While gamification has become one of the most popular trends of electronic markets and commerce, understanding it from the service marketing perspective could bring proven models from service marketing to the development of Bgamified^ser-vices. Currently, gamification has already been employed and researched in majority of the above mentioned domains such as commerce (Bittner and Shipper 2014;Cechanowicz et al 2013;Hamari 2013;Hamari 2015;Terlutter and Capella 2013), education (Denny 2013, Hakulinen et al 2013Domínguez et al 2013;de-Marcos et al 2014;Farzan and Brusilovsky 2011;Simões et al 2013;Christy and Fox 2014;Filsecker and Hickey 2014;Bonde et al 2014), healthcare (Jones et al 2014;Hamari and Koivisto 2015), and logistics (Hense et al 2014;Klemke et al 2014). However, even though empirical research is accumulating on the deployment of gamification in several areas, we have still had a gap in our conceptual understanding about what gamification is and how it can be defined.…”

CISELexia: Computer-Based Method for Improving Self-Awareness in Children with Dyslexia

“…This is proven by the use of gamification in game-based learning in some previous research [21][22][23][24][25]. To achieve those goals, it is necessary to know the game elements that are capable of supporting three dimensions of learning: cognitive, emotional and social [26][27][28].…”

Level Up Your Strategy: Towards a Descriptive Framework for Meaningful Enterprise Gamification

“…Although elements such as points, levels, leaderboards, achievements, and badges can certainly constitute components of a gamified experience (i.e., game mechanics, as described in later sections), this overall experience should be geared towards non-game situations and towards persuading end users towards intended behavioural outcomes. In the organizational context, gamification has been shown to enhance employee engagement and produce desired business outcomes in a variety of business functions including marketing, logistics, human resources, customer service, and knowledge collaboration (Buggie et al, 2014;Hense et al, 2014;Meister, 2013;Post, 2014;Sayeed & Meraj, 2013;Werbach, 2014;Wood & Reiners, 2012).…”