GiftCard Partners Blog

As businesses increasingly recognize employee wellbeing as foundational to both employee performance and organizational success, it’s clear that a holistic approach is essential. Gallup’s 2024 report on employee wellbeing highlights the need for companies to address five interconnected elements of wellbeing: career, social, physical, financial, and community. Yet only a small percentage of employees feel their employer supports these elements. This gap can leave employees feeling undervalued, risking burnout, low engagement, and attrition.

For many employers, making the connection between “games” at work and increased productivity can be a tough leap to make. But evidence of the success of gamification increasingly piles up and now there are many corporate success trends we can point to. Yet, the term “gamification” and the motivation technique is becoming a cornerstone of corporate and employee incentive programs. Snowfly, an employee recognition and incentive company reports over 2,700,000 hits on Google for the term, over 150 million of their corporate performance games have been played, and they expect gamification to be a 2.8 billion dollar business by 2015.1 In
Snowfly’s 16 Key Findings for Success white paper, they tout that their workplace games have a 93% participant approval rate within incentive and employee performance programs, yet the national approval average for traditional programs hovers around 45%.2 Many more key discoveries and lessons learned can be found in the
white paper. In
Incentive Research Foundation’s (IRF) recent top trends webinar, they list gamification as #4 out of their
12 Trends in Rewards and Recognition for 2012. IRF white paper outlines Gartner Group’s prediction “that by 2015, half of all managed innovation processes will include game mechanics, and that by 2014, 70% of all the Global 2000 organizations will have at least one “gamified application” in place.3 The future seems quite bright for this innovative interactive method of motivating, incenting, and rewarding. Are you using such techniques yet? Sources: 1 & 2:
Gamification after Twelve Years and 150 Million Games: 16 Key Findings for Success 3:
IRF Trends &
Gartner’s report: Gartner Says By 2015, More Than 50 Percent of Organizations That Manage Innovation Processes Will Gamify Those Processes

The workplace looks a lot different than it did just a few years ago. Employees are ambitious, financially stressed, and navigating new expectations around balance, technology, and growth. According to SurveyMonkey’s 2025 Workplace Culture and Trends report, the gaps between what employees want and what employers deliver are widening — but so are the opportunities to bridge them.

QR Codes, originally created in 1994 by the Japanese corporation Denso-Wave, have become a ubiquitous tool in modern marketing. They effortlessly bridge the gap between physical and digital realms, allowing businesses to deliver messages, coupons, gift cards, or direct links to websites. As their usage continues to rise, let’s explore some innovative ways QR Codes can engage customers and promote products.

In today's competitive workplace, the performance of employees is crucial for the success of any organization. However, what if I told you that one of the reasons for underperformance could be related to the physical or mental health of employees?