In the early part of this decade, gamification became marketing’s silver bullet. FarmVille was Facebook’s biggest game, with everyone trying to convince friends to help them harvest crops. FourSquare encouraged people to check-in everywhere they went, collecting badges and rewards as they did. Google attempted gamification by allowing users to collect badges through their now defunct Google News app.
Many of these apps no longer exist or are a fraction of the size they used to be. Gartner's prediction that “by 2014, eighty percent of all applications using gamification will fail to meet business objectives, primarily due to poor design” proved true. This begs the question of whether gamification is just another fad or if there are design methodologies that can make enterprise gamification efforts successful.
In my work, I’ve found an approach to gamification design for large-scale business applications. Driving a successful gamification experience includes learning from others’ failed attempts in the past and applying our understanding of what employees really need in order to feel engaged.
Leaderboards work—but only for the people at the top
Leaderboards are a key part of many games, and can work in gamification, as well. However, when leaderboards act as the primary method to motivate employees, a handful of competitive people will participate to collect points or social glory, but as the leaderboard expands, the idea backfires. For someone who doesn’t reach the top 10, leaderboards become very demotivating. Employees will choose to stop competing if they feel they have no chance to “win.”
Lots of games approach this challenge by limiting the size of leaderboards, similar to Candy Crush, in which each board has a cap at twenty spots. With this type of modified leaderboard, there’s always the illusion of upward momentum. Within gamification, consider modifying or completely eliminating the leaderboard and replacing with game mechanics that result in a more balanced and healthy competition.
Employees should compete against themselves, not their peers
Setting up a platform so that employees compete against themselves, versus their peers, is a stronger way to approach competition. When a worker is focused on being better today than they were yesterday, the motivation becomes intrinsic versus extrinsic, which is shown to be more powerful.
Design for long-term and short-term successes
There’s a reason why blogs, inspirational books and TED talks encourage people to break large goals into smaller chunks, to be achieved along the way. To the point of the age-old question of how to eat an elephant, gamification successes should be doled out one step—or one bite—at a time.
In designing for enterprise gamification, it’s important for employees to achieve successes both in the short-term (day-to-day) and as part of a larger target over time. Some accomplishments should be achieved more regularly, like hitting a milestone, unlocking new badges, or winning a challenge. Other successes should be designed to be harder to attain. Leveling up is one method to do so, and a higher level or rank can come with a new set of goals to be achieved. Introducing new objectives as an employee masters easier, exiting tasks creates longevity in a gamified application, and prevents staleness and boredom for the employee.
Workers want real-time feedback and insights
A good gamification effort should be like a good manager—checking in often with the team, sharing feedback on employee performance, and offering suggestions on ways to improve. Many platforms capture data about how well employees are doing, but not all share these metrics back in a meaningful way.
Consider approaching feedback in two ways: quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative feedback is the numbers and metrics associated with the work performed. Just seeing a total of tasks completed can have a powerful effect if a worker also knows the goal or baseline. Qualitative feedback can be harder to deliver, but tends to have a stronger impact when done well.
In a past role, I designed one solution that incorporated the creation of two types of badges for a business application. The first set was systematically generated when a worker hit a certain target, like accomplishing X number of tasks. The second type was a set of badges that managers could manually award to employees who went above and beyond; for instance, if they stayed late to finish a task or helped onboard a new hire. In addition to the badge, a short note from the manager was captured in the system, so employees knew why they earned it.
Gamification forces business leaders to examine what really motivates employees
Gamification is changing the way management and employees interact. Understanding what employees are doing well and rewarding them for those behaviors helps maintain employee morale and engagement. And engaged employees are valuable ones—17% more productive, 21% more profitable, and 24% less likely to leave. Source.
In Gartner’s 2012 report, they point out that “current top-down, command and control management approaches are being replaced by game design skills. Successful managers in the future will be great designers of games … that are designed to achieve specific business outcomes.”
“Organizations should seek to clearly define the organizational objectives of employee-facing applications, understand employee objectives and focus on where the two overlap. Applications should be people-centric and enable employees to be successful in achieving their objectives — where they are aligned with organizational objectives,” the report concludes.
When done well, gamification can be an extremely effective way to increase employee engagement. Simply incorporating points, badges or leaderboards to an existing interface is not effective. Before considering gamification, understand it’s not a silver bullet, but a long-term approach and an investment in your workforce that can deliver the successful results you seek.
