How can employee anxiety over poor evaluation be avoided by management? When implementing gamification, what are steps that management can take to prevent a culture of anxiety among employees, when employees feel they are constantly being monitored and begin to worry that they will be judged as poor performers at their work?

For example, employees may grow anxious over things like:


Ranking near the bottom of some leaderboard
Having fewer badges than others
Not being as excited about the gamification of their work as other employees


What should management avoid to prevent this kind of anxiety?

What can management do proactively to prevent such fears or put them to rest, without getting rid of competition altogether?
Make it less obvious.

If you can implement gamification a bit more subtly, then any anxiety employees may have of being evaluated based on a leaderboard will be reduced. 

For example a 'leaderboard' could implemented as a statistical tool, to determine the usability of an application. If you take feedback from less performant employees, then they may feel that they are benefitting. This keeps the competition element present, but also has the added advantage of improving your application.

The top answer to this question raises a good point about keeping the stakes low, if you do offer any tangible rewards (which would help with those less interested in badges) you must ensure that they are of low value. Focusing on rewarding employees for good work is (typically) better than ranking them based on performance, this could also be on a team level to take stress away from individuals.