How to use gamification to improve drivers’ behaviour

Using gamification techniques in the management of your fleet can help to greatly improve drivers’ behaviour. This not only saves fuel and money, but also increases the safety of vehicles and employees.

Playing your way to better drivers’ behaviour

Drivers’ behaviour greatly influences the final results of a company's fleet. If drivers tend to operate their vehicle aggressively, with sudden accelerations and braking, if they leave the engine idle, or if they constantly exceed speed limits, all those behaviours will be seen in the final accounts of the fleet. This is why it is so important to educate drivers in the use of road safety and savings practices. But traditional training techniques are no longer as efficient. If this is your case, you can incorporate gamification technique to your team and create a safer and more efficient fleet.

Gamification is nothing more than using rules and aspects like games in non-game environments. These aspects can be storytelling, competition, scoring, or gaming psychology, among others, and all of them are aimed at improving drivers’ behaviour. That way we seek to empower the player behaviour in employees. That behaviour is what will encourage them to compete with each other and to win the previously established prize. In addition, player behaviour spurs learning ability, creativity, interaction, or engagement. And at the end of the day, an engaged worker is an efficient worker.

How to introduce gamification in your day to day fleet management

There are many ways to introduce gamification techniques into your fleet management in order to improve drivers’ behaviour. Some will be more useful than others and it is important to try out different strategies and choose the most efficient one. For example, you can create a fuel-saving league. Each driver records their results in points form during a preset season. At the end of the month, the semester or the year, the results are compared and a winner is announced, who will be the driver who has saved the most fuel.

Another way of improving drivers' behaviour is to reward employees whenever they take positive action, and not just punish them when they commit negative actions. Thus, if a driver has not had an accident in a whole year, he can be given a salary plus a physical gift.

Another way of improving drivers’ behaviour is to set a goal and encourage employees to compete to see who reaches the goal faster. In this way they are encouraged to better execute their work day by day, in a model more similar to the marathon than to the sprint. In addition, gamification techniques allow control over the behaviour of drivers without them feeling observed or think that the fleet manager interferes in their work.

As you can see, gamification can be very helpful in helping drivers improve their behaviour. While they compete and win prizes, they learn to act favorably to the company. Gamification techniques can be applied to all aspects of a business to improve results and final performance.