4 Ways Arcade Can Help You Win the Post-Covid Reset

There’s no getting around it. The Covid safety shutdown is hurting most businesses. Statistically, yours is one of them. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, more than half of America’s small businesses have temporarily closed during the outbreak. But as reopenings begin, perhaps there’s a silver lining to this setback. Here’s four ways Arcade can help you win the post-Covid restart and come back stronger than ever.

1. Let your employees come back to good news.

You employees have had enough bad news lately, especially if you had to lay them off during the pandemic. Here’s some good news: Work is fun now. Arcade gamifies your work goals. For every sale or task your employees complete, they earn virtual tokens, which they can spend via Arcade’s store on real rewards, like gift cards to their favorite shops and restaurants.

You can even set up custom initiatives for special rewards like double tokens. Arcade turns real work into a video game, completely changing your team’s mindset about the office. Formerly mundane tasks become opportunities to level up and earn more.

Any work will be fun after a lockdown, when employees are finally seeing their old teammates and getting back into the swing of things, but soon excitement will die down and things will get back to normal. Don’t let them. Start a brand new pattern of thinking about work, and do it now. Arcade establishes a new attitude about work, and now is the perfect time to press start on that shift.

2. Retrain faster than you thought possible.

After months away, your team might be a little rusty. Perhaps you’ve even had to hire an all new team. Everyone could use a little training, but will there be time? You need to hit the ground running to meet the expected surge in post-lockdown business.

Arcade has an answer. We provide you with the ability to incentivize engagement with your training programs. Your team can earn rewards for every training module they complete, all customized by you. Set up games for product and process training quickly and easily, then send them out to your team to play through as they get time. You can even send them out now, before you reopen. Since all games run through the Arcade app, your team can play them on their smartphones and be ready for opening day. One of our customers, Long & Foster, implemented Arcade-based training programs and saw a 20% increase in sales during the lockdown. Read more about their success story here.

Like any other task on Arcade, each training game completed earns the employee tokens. This is the perfect incentive for those “experienced” team members who claim to totally remember everything to the letter and would be insulted that you would want them to retrain, but they might as well earn some tokens.

Maybe your employees had begun to fall into some incorrect or outdated routines before lockdown. It’s very common. As managers we sometimes let these slide, not because we wouldn’t like to fix them, but because doing so takes more resources than we have. This post-lockdown reopening is the perfect opportunity to get everyone on the same page with a fresh course of training.

3. Start communicating with your team now.

According to a 2019 study by Asurion, the Average American checks his or her phone 96 times a day. Much of that, no doubt, is for social networking. You could try to ban this behavior, but why not harness it instead? That was our thinking when we built a social network into Arcade. The Newsfeed is a place where your team can share their achievements, inspiring their coworkers and building energy within the company.

It’s also where you can communicate with your team. Announce important dates, policy changes, new initiatives, birthday celebrations, and, of course, new games they can use to earn more tokens. Or just send out a hilarious meme to keep everyone smiling.

4. Win While Working from Home

Whatever comes out of the Coronavirus wave, it will forever impact the option of working from home. Even at the start of the lockdown, 67% of employers were taking new steps to research work from home as a viable option. The virus has forced a nationwide study on the effectiveness of the remote office.

Working remotely has real benefits. First of all, it’s safe in the face of something like Covid-19. It’s also less expensive, requiring less office space and utilities. This might not make a dent in the expenses of traditional office spaces, which are corporate-owned or leased by year, but for the ever-growing number of startups and other small businesses operating out of shared workspaces, it can be huge. Plus, employees love it. Who wouldn’t want to reduce their morning commute to a few feet?

But working from home also has some serious drawbacks. Distraction runs rampant, communication can be an issue, and you don’t have any idea how productive your team is actually being. Are they making their calls or making TikToks?

Arcade fixes all three. The fun and engagement keeps your employees focused on their own goals of earning tokens— which just happen to coincide with your company goals. As mentioned above, communication is a snap via the Newsfeed. You can cut down on those laggy Zoom calls. Best of all, you can track productivity in real time. When one of your employees earns tokens, you’ll know it.

If working from home will be an ongoing strategy for your company, Arcade is an essential tool.

As the lockdowns begin to expire, don’t just go back to your previous standards. Maximize this opportunity and restart stronger. Learn more here and get restarted today.