Second Life. World of Warcraft. Call of Duty. A whole generation of your workforce knows first-hand how engaging – even addictive – these games can be. Gaming provides the experience of striving towards a nearby objective while completing fiercer and fiercer challenges and gaining the respect of peers and strangers alike. This intensely rewarding experience does not need to be confined to the realm of video games. By rethinking the way your employees’ accomplishments are defined, tracked, rewarded and shared with others, work can be made to feel like play. This presentation will introduce the essential concepts of Gamification and the technologies that are already helping companies to engage their workforces in an exciting new way.
You can watch a full video presentation here:
http://ity.vc/webi310
More than Just Lines on a Map: Best Practices for U.S Bike Routes
Sability IHR WFM Gamification
1. Workforce Management
Fundamentals Series
Gamification and Why it’s
Important to WFM Professionals
Jeremy Finney
Chief Technology Officer, Sability
2. What is Gamification?
• Short answer: it’s a way of making ordinary
activities more engaging based on lessons
learned from games.
• For example, a conference call…
15. So I just need to add points, levels and
avatars…?
No.
16. So I just need to add points, levels and
avatars…?
There is a huge misconception that you can just tack
game elements like badges on to something to make it
more fun, and you are going to get the results that you
want: people will be more engaged, you'll get that
discretionary output. ... It's very hard to design games that
engage people and that work.
Nick Stein, Director, Content & Media, Rypple
18. Meaning
• Gamification feels pointless if it isn’t
supported by real-world meaning.
• Reward people for doing things they are
already motivated to do.
• Meaning in the workplace
– Job title, salary, power, recognition, feeling
valued, office size and location, perks, professional
relationships, social status, sense of purpose…
20. Extrinsic Motivation
• It doesn’t work
– Devalues activity
– Feels controlling
– Misses the point
• Do not use Gamification as part of your
compensation or bonus plan.
– It has better uses…
21. Intrinsic Motivation
• Motivation through internal factors:
– Desire to excel
– Professional interest
– Psychological need for play
– Self-efficacy
• You can help
– Autonomy
– Free, safe place to play and create
22. Goals and Challenges
• Daily tasks as goals and challenges
• Choice
• Starting Points
• Side-goals
• Nested goals
• Scaffolded challenges
24. Flow
Our best moments - those we say we enjoy the most -
occur when we're voluntarily trying to accomplish
something difficult for which we have the right skills.
Total Engagement: Using Games and Virtual Worlds to
Change the Way People Work and Businesses Compete
• Sense of time is distorted
• The experience is an end in itself
28. Mastery
• The experience of being competent, of
achieving something.
– Recognition
– Bragging rights
– Reputation
– Status
– Feeling valued
– Thanks
29. Gamification and WFM
• Misconceptions:
– Games have to be “fun”.
– Games are for kids.
– Games are not appropriate at work.
– Work + game elements = engagement
• Video games are highly engaging (even
addictive)
– Why?
30.
31.
32. What Video Games do Well
• Feedback • Flow
• Transparency • Engagement
• Information • Teaching
• Status • Sense of mastery
• Reputation • Sense of progress
• Recruiting • Eliminate distractions
• Communities and teams • Narrative
• Communication • Immersive experience
• Goals and challenges • Sense of play
• Rewards • Self-efficacy
33. Why Video Games Work so Well
• Well-combined Game Elements that fit a
narrative
• Effective game design process
– Iterative design
– Careful monitoring for balance and unintended
consequences
– Know your users
• Closely mirrors effective software
development processes (agile).
34. Unintended Consequences
• Be careful what behaviors you incent
– Backstabbing
– Gaming the system
– “Pointwhoring”
– Cheating
– Messing with social meanings
• All can be minimized by avoiding extrinsic
motivation
35. Gray Area
Player trust reputations, and are comfortable with
transparency, in part because it's difficult to cheat. […]
You can't advance merely because the leader likes you or
owes you. You advance because you perform well, and
recognition for good play is communicated directly from
your computer and not from other players."
Total Engagement: Using Games and Virtual Worlds to
Change the Way People Work and Businesses Compete
36. Vendors
• “Don’t try this at home.”
– The game is too complex (and costly) to try to
build yourself
– Implementing a bad game or part of a game can
be worse than no game at all
– Use the expertise of a vendor
37. Time Flies!
• Too much to cover in an hour!
• Questions on gamification in the workforce?
Contact me!
– jeremy.finney@sability.com
39. Bonus Material
• A visual representation of the employee
motivation problem
• Useful for designing a gamified WFM system
and evaluating vendor offerings
– Does it address everything?
44. Sources
• Total Engagement: Using Games and Virtual Worlds to Change the Way People Work and
Businesses Compete (Byron Reeves & J. Leighton Read, Harvard Business Press)
• Meaningful Play (Sebastian Deterding, UX designer and Gamification expert)
http://www.slideshare.net/dings/meaningful-play-getting-gamification-right
• Work Better, Play Together? On Enterprise Gamification (Daniel Debow, Co-CEO, Rypple)
http://www.slideshare.net/Rypple/work-better-play-together-on-enterprise-gamification
• Why play is vital – no matter your age (Dr. Stuart Brown, Founder, National Institute for Play)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHwXlcHcTHc
• Badges in Social Media: A Social Psychological Perspective (Antin, J., Churchill, E.F., Yahoo!
Research) http://research.yahoo.com/files/Antin%20&%20Churchill%20-
%20Badges%20in%20Social%20Media.pdf
• Fun is the Future (Gabe Zichermann, author of Gamification by Design)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6O1gNVeaE4g
Notes de l'éditeur
I work from home and pace during conference calls to keep my mind active. But it can get dull.
Imagining lines coming from the corners of the furniture gives me something to focus on, to avoid stepping on like cracks in a sidewalk. Suddenly the whole room is like a bank vault scene from Mission Impossible.
Another motivation problem: treadmills. They’re terrible, hateful things.
Consoles like this one give you lots of progress information, but at the same time it really emphasizes how far you have to go.“To lose a pound, burn 3500 calories… geez I’d have to do this for a whole hour just to burn 1000!”Tracking progress can actually be de-motivating.
Adding a narrative – a simulated road that moves as you run – makes it a bit more interesting. But it’s still a treadmill.
Now THIS is more like it. These people are running even harder than they would on a treadmill, and they have to do it for 90 minutes to finish a game. Look at the concentration, the determination, the engagement with the activity.
You’d never get this experience from a treadmill, but you get frequent feedback playing soccer. (without sacrificing the purpose of the activity: physical fitness)You don’t want your work environment to be like a treadmill, you want it to be like a soccer game. This is what gamification is about.
… or in our case, the work environment.
Yahoo Answers is a great example of gamification. This popular website allows people to ask questions about anything, then select the best answers that other people give. Over time, the best answers rise to the top and the most knowledgeable contributors earn much-deserved reputations. Net result: free access to expertise.
The system couldn’t work without a framework of points and rules: points are awarded for positive contributions to the site and deducted for activities that drain the site.Note that there is no cash value behind the points.
Levels are another example of a Game Element that, together with points, allow contributors to earn “thank you”s, status and power on the site.
More game elements on display: avatars, reputation, points, levels, and transparent, open information. This is Calimecita’s Online Identity, and it must mean a great deal to her, because she has answered 3554 questions on Yahoo Answers over the last 5 years! (that’s a lot of work to reach level 7!)
Promotions and salaries are decided in most non-unionized work environments by performance reviews and other processes that are opaque to the community and are outside of the Game. This amounts to a side-deal: power and money is being allocated independent of the reputations, achievements and status in the Game. This sends a message thatthe game is not important.However,It's a bad idea to get extrinsic motivation tangled up in your game. The point is to promote intrinsic motivation, flow and engagement, which psychological studies have shown to be hindered by extrinsic motivation.Lesson:Games accumulate information on personal competencies and experiences, like a virtual resume. You would be unwise to make promotion and compensation decisions without using this information, so you might as well accept that it is going to be one of the sources that is consulted when deciding who to promote. All you can do is try to limit the feelings of unfairness and extrinsic motivation. Do this by employing the power of Unexpected Rewards: by not tying achievement in the game too explicitly or directly to compensation and promotion. Expect to be held accountable by your workforce if you decide to promote somebody who is performing very poorly in the game or who is not participating in the game at all - this will make people angry and totally kill engagement. This doesn't mean promote the highest-scoring player; it means don't promote the lowest-scoring player.