I first discovered Officevibe when I was doing some research on employee engagement about 2 weeks ago. If you’ve never seen or heard about it, Officevibe is what I would call an employee engagement and team building platform. It is essentially a social network that companies can use internally to encourage employee participation across 5 categories that are generally associated with the best places to work lists: Wellness, Productivity, Social, Environment, and Generosity.
Officevibe has a clean look-and-feel that made a good first impression on me, so I made a mental note to come back and experiment with it. Did it hold up after a full review? Well, let’s get started…
What is Officevibe?
Officevibe is a web site and mobile app that uses gamification to get employees to complete a series of activities in competition with each other, to encourage interaction and team building among co-workers. While gamification is a buzzword-du-jour that drives me a little crazy, it does make sense here. When used correctly, gamification can be an outstanding way to rally a team, generate excitement, and improve employee engagement.
@Officevibe – “We Create Awesome Workplaces! — We promote great #CompanyCulture and #EmployeeEngagement through a unique #Gamification platform.”
Signing Up
Officevibe registration is simple and fast. I set up my account and I was logged in to the site in under a minute. Note that you have to use a work email address when signing up. (I tried to sign up with my Gmail account and it wouldn’t let me in.) Why do they do this? I believe they use the same approach as Yammer: By requiring users to register with their work account, Officevibe is able to associate co-workers with each other (based on the domain name in their email address). This lets them automagically group co-workers together without you having to identify or list all of them individually.
One thing that I didn’t love is that the site asked me to enter 5 email addresses of co-workers in order to gain extra points. I totally understand why they do this – it’s to gain adoption within an organization and to help get the word out. Anyway, there’s an option to skip this part, so that’s what I did. No harm, no foul.
Using Officevibe
After signing up and clicking on the confirmation email, I logged into Officevibe and was prompted to take the guided tour. This was a good user experience, I appreciate that they guide new users to get the most out of the site from the very beginning.
Here is their quick description of how you interact with Officevibe each week:
The main goal of Officevibe is to complete your “Weekly Mission”. It consists of a set of 5 to 10 activities that improve your workdays. If you complete them by the following Monday, you’ll get a reward. We automatically send everyone a new and unique mission every Monday.
There are more than 250 activities in Officevibe! They are split in the five categories identified by their color: Wellness, Productivity, Social, Environment, Generosity. You can explore them to get inspired for new ways to improve your workdays.
As an alternative to the Explore tab, you can use the Search tab to quickly sort through our 250+ activities.
Beating (er, Competing with) Co-Workers
Here’s the Weekly Mission that was assigned to me. Pretty straightforward and fun. I could see people having fun with this in the right environment. It never hurts to have reminders to encourage and reinforce positive behaviors:
You can also log activities outside of the Weekly Mission, which help you earn points and outrank your co-workers. As mentioned above, there are lots of activities (250+) – I wasn’t able to represent them fully in the screenshot:
When you mark an activity as completed, Officevibe asks you to fill in a brief description that is shared in your news feed and in your co-workers’ news feeds. You can also comment and high-five (“like”) those activities. Plus, you earn points for whatever you completed:
Your points are tracked in a widget in the sidebar, and a leaderboard is made available once there is enough participation on the site from your co-workers:
Keeping true to the gamification philosophy, you Level Up when you’ve completed certain accomplishments or reached certain point levels. This gives you that little boost of confidence to keep you coming back for more:
Video Walkthrough of the Officevibe Site
I found this walkthrough on Youtube:
Video Walkthrough of the Officevibe App
And here’s a walkthrough of the mobile app:
Final Thoughts About Officevibe
- The pricing for Officevibe is based on the freemium model: You can sign up for free and then upgrade to get additional features such as customizable activities, administration options, multiple departments, and API integration. All of this looked straightforward and reasonably priced.
- Managers (typically people in HR) are able to use an Admin Panel to customize the activities, manage members, customize missions tasks, and more. Again, this is similar to Yammer.
- The user experience within Officevibe is well-thought-out; I had no questions or issues when using the site. It was intuitive and I imagine I would have no issues rolling this out to a large audience.
- Single Sign-on would be a nice-to-have for larger companies, but not a must-have.
- The main thing that could make Officevibe sink or swim within an organization would be adoption (or lack thereof). How do you get users to go in and track information within the site each week? What’s the incentive? And how do you keep them coming back for more? The gamification elements can certainly help with that, but I believe you would also need a coordinated campaign and support from senior leaders to keep employees excited and engaged. I’m not saying it can’t happen, it would just take some additional work. Perhaps that’s an opportunity for Officevibe to provide consultation and share experiences from their previous clients.
- The Bottom Line:
Overall, I’m a big fan of Officevibe. It’s a really fun idea that could help breathe life into the average office. I plan on showing it to senior leaders at my company and I’ll be sharing it with quite a few friends. Check it out!
Learn More About Officevibe
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