National University Health System

NUHS Nurses’ Day celebration digital games

Gamifying micro-experiences for employee engagement

As a key public healthcare cluster, NUHS stands at the frontline of Singapore’s fight against the pandemic. Since the beginning of the crisis, its healthcare workers have toiled without respite to deliver the best care possible to Singaporeans.

NUHS wanted to acknowledge its nurses’ contributions through its Nurses’ Day festivities. To drum up excitement and increase participation for the actual celebrations, HOL created an engaging experience for NUHS nurses as part of its Pre-Event Activities leading up to Nurses’ Day.

What we did

  • Experience strategy
  • Engagement strategy
  • Illustration and animation
  • Project management
  • UIUX mapping and design
  • Web app development
  • Engagement data collection

Challenges

Large organisations like NUHS would need to invest substantial time, money and human resources to organise in-person and virtual activations such as appreciation events. 

Additionally, with Covid-19 still ongoing, any sizable in-person celebration would increase infection risk. And given the nature of nursing work – with shift work, emergencies and the need for nurses to be present round the clock for their patients – it would also be a challenge to get all NUHS nurses together at a fixed time for an in-person event.

How could we create an experience that could engage the nurses easily at any time without increased virus transmission risk and the need for huge logistical set-ups?

Insights and strategy

The experience we would create should:

  • provide a no-touch experience that would reduce transmission risk
  • engage all NUHS’s 20,000 nurses despite their busy and varying schedules
  • offer the nurses mental reprieve from work stress
  • allow the nurses to celebrate together digitally even if they did not gather in person to do so

Solutions

Our answer was a digital celebration through micro-experiences on mobile phones enabled by QR codes. QR codes were placed around NUHS’s various campuses and in internal communications. By scanning the QR codes, the nurses and other staff members could access 5 mini-games per week over 3 weeks. 

These micro-experiences were:

Gamified

With engaging and memorable games, namely, Pop the Balloon!, where players popped a balloon by tapping; Dalgona game, shaped after the challenge in Netflix’s series Squid Game; and NUHS-Wordle, based on the New York Times word game. The latter 2 games came with a different challenge every day of the week, each more difficult than the previous one. Encouraged to play whenever they had a break, the nurses could uplift their moods and take their minds off work with fun and competitive challenges.

No-touch

Delivered through the nurses’ own mobile phones, these experiences were no-touch and thus didn’t increase infection risk, even though many nurses participated in the micro-experiences.

 

Social

While the nurses and non-nursing staff members enjoyed the micro-experiences on their mobile phones individually, they could also share the fun with others thanks to the social sharing functions. Sharing helped the nurses – and non-nursing staff members – celebrate the nursing profession together and fostered organisational camaraderie.

 

Rewarding

Although anyone could play the games, the tangible rewards (voucher prizes) were exclusive to the nurses. The reward redemption function filtered out non-nursing staff and the public so that the daily prizes were reserved for NUHS nurses.

Impact

When employees are happy, organisations thrive and improve their customer satisfaction. Through these gamified micro-experiences, NUHS showed appreciation to its nurses while nudging them towards more engagement and happiness at work.