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FEATURE

How to Use Gamification to

Engage Employees
MORE LIKE THIS

5 Key Benefits Gamification Brings to Your Business

7 Cool Consumer Technologies Coming Soon to a
Cubicle Near You
Gamification Goes Mainstream

More companies are adopting gamification to

improve engagement with both employees
and customers. Learn why gamification is an
evolution in management practices, how to
get started and where career opportunities
lie.
By Rich Hein
Follow
CIO | Jun 6, 2013 8:00 AM PT
Gamification is the process of using game
thinking and game mechanics to solve problems
and engage users, according to Gabe
Zichermann, author of the upcoming book "The
Gamification Revolution" and founder of
Dopamine, a consulting agency focused on

gamified campaigns for employees and

consumers.
"People may be motivated by getting a gift card,
but what really drives them is recognition [as
well as] status, access power and stuff
(the SAPS Model), "says Zichermann.

The problem with stuff is that it doesn't scale

very well and over time people want increasing
rewards for the same activity in order to feel
motivated. It's a common feature of humanity
called "habituation." Habituation means you've
become immured to a stimulus over time," says
Zichermann.
How does gamification fit in with managing a
tech staff--or any staff? Status, access and
power are virtual rewards, things like
recognizing employee achievement. These are
things that can scale cheaply and easily versus
"stuff" and cash. That's part of why businesses
are attracted to gamification--it scales.
Related Story: 11 Profiles in Bad Leadership
Behavior
The other part of it involves making work
increasingly fun by leveraging the concepts of
gamification. "It's about figuring out ways to
create alignment with incentives and
motivation. You increase productivity [and]
performance and you can attract a higherquality employee, this next generation of
employees or millennials generation who bring
with them their increased technology skills,"
says Zichermann.

Why Gamification Works: The Mechanics

Remember your first paycheck? It was pretty

exciting and felt awesome. Today, you probably
make more money, but you don't get as excited
about it. That's because it's the same stimulus
over and over again. Every type of reward will
need to increase in intensity over time due to
habituation, which is part of the behavior of
economics, according to Zichermann.
Rajat Paharia, founder of Bunchball and author
of the upcoming book "Loyalty 3.0: How to
Revolutionize Employee and Customer
Engagement With Big Data and Gamification"
lays out what he refers to as the 10 key
mechanics of Gamification:
1. Fast Feedback
2. Transparency
3. Goals
4. Badges
5. Leveling up
6. Onboarding
7. Competition
8. Collaboration
9. Community
10. Points
"Game designers have known how to do this for
a long time. All the way back from Pong in 1972
up to modern day Call of Duty, they have had
every piece of data about how users work and
behave in their systems, and they've been able
to use that data to get players to perform
better," says Paharia.

Bunchball realized that game designers have all

this data and they've learned how to leverage
that data to improve performance of players.
"We thought, can we take it out of the gaming
world and use it to motivate people to do
anything better," says Paharia.

What Gamification Isn't

"Gamification is a word that just throws a lot of
people off. The thing you have to make clear to
people is that it has nothing to do with games.
Gamification is about driving business objectives
and motivating people through data. It's not new
but it has suddenly become more powerful
because we have all this data available to us,"
says Paharia.

Gamification Penetration
"Gamification has been going on in the
workplace for a long time. What's really changed
in the last three years has been the new set of
tools, technologies, design disciplines and
frameworks that are allowing us to do
gamification in the workplace in a more scalable
and repeatable way. It's also about
understanding the evolving science of human
engagement and interaction in a way that
produces better long-term results," says
Zichermann.
Related Story: 9 Steps to Build Your Personal
Brand (and Your Career)

3 Examples of Using Gamification to Engage Workers

Target
One of the most classic examples of
gamification is Target's approach. Being a
cashier can be a disconnected job--the only time

you may get feedback is when your drawer

count is off, but what Target has done is engage
employees by encouraging them to get in the
flow when checking out customers by making it
more game-like.
Target stores have implemented a little game
cashiers play when checking people out. It
shows the cashier in red and green based on
whether the item that was just scanned was
done so in the optimum time. Then they see
their immediate score on screen and know how
"in-time" they are with the ideal time.
This, according to Zichermann, illustrates a
great point--that gamification isn't about turning
everything into a game. It's about using the best
ideas from games, like loyalty programs and
behavioral economics, to drive the behavior that
businesses are looking for in their employees.
"The bias that people have to win something is
how achievement-oriented people tend to view
the world," says Zichermann. People who are
achievement-oriented want some sort of pay-off
or prize, but people who aren't as achievementor winning-oriented--which according to
Zichermann, is the majority of people--are
rewarded through a feeling that they control
their own destiny.
Before, as a cashier, you didn't know how you
were doing. You just checked people out and if
you did something wrong, your boss would come
and yell at you. "The idea here is to bring the
feedback as close to the action as possible and
make the feedback as constructive and positive
as possible," says Zichermann.

Omnicare
Zichermann's group also worked with Omnicare,
which is a more IT-centric organization that

produces pharmacy management software --a

kind of outsourced helpdesk for pharmacies.
Omnicare was experiencing long wait times at
its helpdesk. The employees were experienced
and knowledgeable about the service. The
company wanted to gamify a solution to
improve efficiency. It started by adding a
leaderboard and showing the reps the board.
They also issued cash rewards to employees
with the fastest times on the floor.
However, the results weren't what management
expected. Immediately wait times increased and
employee turnover spiked; people were quitting
their jobs and customer satisfaction plummeted.
The difference here versus the Target example is
that the client didn't think about what was
motivating the reps.
These helpdesk employees were high tech and,
according to Zichermann, felt like they already
had a sense of control over their own life. When
Omnicare introduced a scoring system as it did,
these employees felt like Big Brother was
watching them. "To a Target cashier, it's positive
feedback to a high-end helpdesk rep, it's Big
Brother," says Zichermann.
So Omnicare iterated and changed the design of
the system. Now instead of being all about time
and motion, they set up a series of
achievements that reps could reach. The reps
are given a challenge at the beginning of every
shift. For example, a helpdesk support analyst
might receive a note like this at the beginning of
their shift, "Today find three customers who
have a specific problem with billing and help
them with billing." As they progress through
these series of challenges, they are given shortterm rewards that are achievement and
recognition oriented (non-cash incentives).

"Time in their waiting queue was halved,

customer satisfaction went back up and
employee turnover was down. It's a very
different design, but with the same core premise
and with wildly different results," says
Zichermann. The bottom-line is that there is no
one-size-fits-all answer.

Ford Motor Company

Bunchball worked with the Ford Motor company
in Canada to help add gamification to its
learning portals to assist sales and services
teams that must become familiar with new car
models, financing plans, technologies and
options every year.
After testing and implementing the
methodology, Ford's learning portal saw a 417
percent increase in use and its younger
audiences, in particular, were more engaged,
which resulted in better sales and customer
satisfaction, according to Paharia.

3 Tips to Help Management Get Started With Gamification

1. Delegate someone to be the point person for
advancing the gamification idea. According to
Zichermann, one of the main things folks can do
to get started is to find the person who would be
the right kind of engagement advocate
internally.
2. Get your point person certified in gamification
design. This is an essential step and will provide
the basic frameworks to get started.
3. Identify where the engagement issues are
with your employees and/or customers. Using
this gamification framework and methodology,

the point person can apply this knowledge

against whatever engagement issues your
company faces.
You can do a low-tech or a high-tech
implementation, according to Paharia. For
example, in a car dealership, you'll see a
leaderboard that shows monthly sales. In many
hotels, in the back you'll see a leaderboard that
shows most rooms cleaned or best customer
satisfaction rankings.

Gamification Career Opportunities

In a recent article, Zichermann answers his most
frequently asked question: How do you build a
career in gamification? Below is the list he put
together on what he sees as the top career
opportunities within the emerging gamification
job market:

Gamification Design Consultant

Gamification Project Manager

Business Process Analyst/Engineer

Product Manager/Designer

As companies grow, according to Zichermann,

they will need to have a Chief Engagement
Officer or someone inside the organization, likely
from IT, who is responsible for knowing how to
engage both employees and customers.
Companies will need someone who knows what
the best practices are and can put those into
action. "It's not about knowing everyone's
perspective; it's about knowing the science
behind engagement. It's a lot of design and a
little bit of psychology," says Zichermann.

If you want to further investigate gamification

credentials, these organizations offer
gamification design courses and certifications:
1. Gamification Design Certification from the
Engagement Alliance
2. Gamification from Coursera and the University of
Pennsylvania
(This list isn't all inclusive. If you know of a
gamification course or certification, please add it
in the comments section below.)
Is your company putting gamification into action
or do you think it's a passing fad. We'd love to
hear your thoughts and feedback so please add
your comments.
Rich Hein is a senior writer for CIO.com. He
covers IT careers. Follow everything from
CIO.com on Twitter @CIOonline.

Rich Hein Managing Editor

Rich Hein is Managing Editor for CIO.com. He covers IT careers.
Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter @CIOonline,
on Facebook, and on Google +.
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56 days ago
Danny Oldenhave
In the Netherlands I teach two accredited post-hbo (dutch) courses
regarding Gamification at the HAN University of Applied Sciences
(sponsored by Atos). Partly based on the framework introduced by
Werbach in his book and course. Students who pass the exam (there
is an exam to conclude both courses) receive an certificate from the
HAN. You can find more information here: Gamification Foundation
Course http://www.han.nl/opleidingen/cursus/gamification-foundation/ & Gamification Advanced Course http://www.han.nl/opleidingen/cursus/gamification-advanced/

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0

100 days ago

Marcel Heys
If you're looking for a Help Desk solution that integrates the
Gamification features Hein mentions above, check out InvGate
Service Desk.
http://www.invgate.com/en/service-desk/gamification/

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