By Alexey Sidorin, knowledge and corporate communications management practice chief, CROC
Lots of articles have been published on gamification and many hundreds gamification projects have been launched, but nevertheless, for most companies it is still unclear whether that instrument does function, or is a mere HYIP story. The answer to that is quite simple and blatant: gamification does work if applied properly. This article explains the specifics of the instrument.
Some theory…
Gamification is a generic concept at the junction of business and psychology. It has been known for a long time, that a good mood, a deep involvement and a simple smile make the work process much more efficient, but there was no way to measure that impact. Quite often I can hear company owners saying, “If my employees were as hard working all year round as they are during the last week of a quarter, I could have become a billionaire since long”. Hence one of the main gamification purposes is showing employees that they are truly treasured by the company which is well aware of all their achievements and is eager to remunerate them in various ways, not by end-of-quarter bonuses only.
Gamification relies heavily on the human desire to compete, including competing with oneself. I want to recall a widely cited story about Henry Ford, no matter whether it is true or not, since the main point here is displaying gamification mechanisms. So, Henry Ford was once requested to help improve effectiveness at a car plant. He asked the assembly line workers about the number of cars they assemble daily and learnt it was nine. Ford then drew “9” on the wall and left. When back a month later, he saw a different figure on the wall, it was “13”. The story is a good demonstration of the human psychology functioning: once we know a numerical measurement of our performance, we immediately tend to improve the score and engage in competition. Therefore, gamification in a company is in fact open KPIs available to all employees. The mechanism may be implemented in whatever format, as some companies build a corporate portal or a corporate social network, others brand corporate departments as space shuttles or launch a virtual currency and exchange.
Some practice…
In CROC we’ve practiced gamification for five years. We have a currency of our own, bobrik (beaver), and a beaver-shop where one can exchange the beavers earned for some handy things such as a gym membership or a driving school course. Beavers are granted for some extra efforts, not for coping with the routine duties. Extra efforts may include business improvement ideas, attending a training course, or contributing to a knowledge database. In CROC, gamification is linear, i.e. there is no option for an offset to a colleague. To put it simple, every employee has a personal corporate achievements counter displayed in our corporate network where one can see one’s and other colleagues’ achievements and find employees of relevant competences to join new projects.
Also, we have a tasks exchange, where tasks may not relate directly to the competence of specific employees. Employees get extra points for performing the tasks outside their business hours, thus helping the company to reduce costs, as, basically, a task resolved by an employee during business hours would be 50 to 70 times more expensive to the company compared to the option when it is made for and paid for in beavers. At the end of the day, it is to everyone’s advantage.
Some mistakes…
Gamification implementation may seem simple, but it is most essential to thoroughly plan what particular business processes it should be linked to. One of the gravest risks here is employees starting to cheat in order to gain extra points and rewards which at times happens if the overall motivations system is not carefully thought through in every detail. A good example here is the practice when inputting some content to the corporate portal may bring employees extra points in line with a straightforward correlation: one documents is worth one point, twenty documents are worth twenty points, etc. But it may happen that such sort of incentives result in producing mountains of absolutely useless content with some people even generating blank documents. Another risk is discouragement or priorities dilution. Therefore, while implementing gamification, business processes must be the target points. HR processes development is certainly extremely important, but a proper balance should be observed to make sure the entire business does not transform itself into a game as may occur if too many non-work related tasks are encouraged.
Regretfully, there are no lifehacks to help building an ideal gamification system, it all is to be learnt through trial and error. My advice is, pay close attention to the employees’ feedback and to the equivalence of encouragements for differing achievements.
Some prospects…
Gamification is already here, and its most vivid examples are the present-day taxi services where the drivers can see online their every move bringing them some money. Still, if gamification is a well established trend in external business processes, it is a newcomer to the internal corporate communications, actively expanding there though. The open KPI gamification concept is employed even on a government level, as some government agencies have experimented with pubic ratings of their senior managers when ordinary employees could anonymously award rating points with the results becoming a public domain. The managers with lowest ratings were furious at first, but their anger then turned into fruitful practical deeds. Openly available ratings thus produce breakthrough results. Do try.