Journal of Business Strategy

Gamification, the finer art: fostering creativity and employee engagement

Hari Kumar Satish Raghavendran
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Hari Kumar Satish Raghavendran , (2015),"Gamification, the finer art: fostering creativity and employee engagement",
Journal of Business Strategy, Vol. 36 Iss 6 pp. 3 - 12
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 Gamification, the finer art: fostering
creativity and employee engagement
Hari Kumar and Satish Raghavendran
Hari Kumar is Managing
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Principal at Deloitte
Consulting LLP, New
York, New York, USA.
Satish Raghavendran is
Vice President at Deloitte
Consulting India Private
Ltd, Hyderabad, India.
The authors wish to thank
Dr Prasad Kantamneni for his
assistance on the survey
design and analysis.
DOI 10.1108/JBS-10-2014-0119
Introduction
Today, the “asks” an organization makes of its employees have clearly changed. Instead
of simply executing tasks, employees are expected to engage in complex problem-solving – at
best, to generate transformative ideas through innovation and knowledge sharing. This shift
runs contrary to the conventional wisdom that a workplace is merely a transactional setting
where business gets done. Especially in client service organizations, employee
engagement and motivation are integral to driving innovative solutions for the benefit of
clients/customers.
At first blush, a “gamification” approach may seem to hold the key to igniting employee
engagement. Gamification refers to “the process of game-thinking and game mechanics to
engage users and solve problems” (Zichermann and Cunningham, 2011, p. 14). This
approach has been deployed extensively in the corporate world to tackle a wide variety of
business situations.
One successful example is Deloitte’s US India Offices deployment of Maverick, a firm-wide
contest that uses gamification principles to change organizational culture and behavior,
discover talent, encourage innovation and foster meaningful engagement among
professionals.
However, gamification does not necessarily suit every business challenge. According to
the experts in gamification, the best candidates are processes that address four core
questions (Werbach and Hunter, 2012):
1. Motivation: Where would you derive value from encouraging behavior?
2. Meaningful choices: Are your target activities sufficiently interesting?
3. Structure: Can the desired behaviors be modeled through a set of algorithms?
4. Potential conflicts: Can the game avoid conflicts with existing motivational structures?
However, the secret ingredient in employee engagement is gaining the “emotional share of
wallet” (Journal of Business Strategy, 2013) of employees to drive meaningful, enduring
organizational change. Emotional wallet share is the sweet spot that lies at the intersection
of employees’ skill sets, their aspirations and the value they generate for the organization.
Proactively identifying the sweet spot empowers an organization to capture employees’
emotional wallet share to identify enablers and catalysts that can unlock motivation and
performance.
Gamification mechanics work effectively in roles that are transactional, instead of roles that
demand autonomy, mastery and a sense of purpose (Pink, 2009). In such roles, intrinsic
motivation and positive inner work life have to work in tandem to trigger fundamental
VOL. 36 NO. 6 2015, pp. 3-12, © Emerald Group Publishing Limited, ISSN 0275-6668 JOURNAL OF BUSINESS STRATEGY PAGE 3
 changes in organizational culture that support autonomy, mastery and meaning. Moreover,
tackling complex and unstructured real-life client problems violates the structural aspect of
the gamification process. This is a real dilemma for leaders in large organizations seeking
to design a solution for processes that the standard gamification approach cannot
effectively tackle.

Large organizations
Fostering employee engagement in large organizations is a formidable problem that gets
even more challenging in a sluggish economy, when the standard lever of monetary
incentives are not a viable option for boosting employee engagement and motivation. As
the organization gets larger, building emotional connectedness or bonding becomes
challenging as teams expand to operate in different time zones. The overwhelming pace of
work in the modern workplace can also hamper bonding (Hallowell, 2005). Yet emotional
connectedness, when present, serves as a catalyst in driving superior performance and
employee loyalty.
The culture of many large organizations discourages innovation and out-of-the-box thinking
because their institutional structures encourage risk aversion. Even though large
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organizations are best positioned to absorb the ups and downs of intelligent risk-taking,
their talent processes enforce conformity, legitimize mediocrity and penalize failed
attempts at innovative thinking. Performance appraisals tend to promote employees who
take the path of least resistance.
Managers, of course, help perpetuate this risk-averse cycle of mediocrity. Either they have
been conditioned to think only in a linear fashion or organizational systems perpetuate
managerial insecurity at all levels. This insecurity manifests in several ways: managers may
take credit for the work performed by a subordinate; shoot down ideas a subordinate may
have; or deflect opportunities that a subordinate may get. Survival in such an environment
is based on being average and staying within the system. As a result, the spirit of
entrepreneurship is lost.

The Maverick program’s origins and goals

In 2009, to explore how leaders can tackle these issues in large organizations, the authors
created a firm-wide contest called Maverick to kindle playful engagement and creativity
and to experiment with building an organizational culture at the US India Deloitte offices
that fosters innovation. The Maverick program’s deeper goals included the following.

Shifting culture and behavior

Fostering innovation in large organizations requires a fundamental shift in organizational
culture and behavior. Maverick sought to embed the seeds of change into the status quo.
The fun and engaging aspects of the contest aimed to make the change appealing at an
emotional level, as opposed to a formal change management process that attempts
persuasion through logic and facts. One of the goals of the program was to enhance the
organizational culture in this region, given the short tenure and maturity of the organization
in this geography. This program offered a novel avenue to drive a positive change in the
organizational culture that is critical for the success of this region. As Kotter and Cohen
(2002, p. 2) aptly state:
Changing behavior is less a matter of giving people analysis to influence their thoughts than
helping them to see a truth to influence their feelings. Both thinking and feeling are essential,
and both are found in successful organizations, but the heart of the change is in the emotions.
The flow of see-feel-change is more powerful than that of analysis-think-change.

Talent discovery
Performance ratings may be able to identify talent who can intellectually engage on
challenging client projects, but they are not a reliable indicator of higher-order

PAGE 4 JOURNAL OF BUSINESS STRATEGY VOL. 36 NO. 6 2015

 competencies and behaviors, such as critical thinking, creativity and packaging insights, to
persuade an executive audience. These competencies are not revealed during the
execution of routine projects. In addition to the competencies, expected behaviors include
an ownership mindset, a drive for results and resilience to setbacks. The Maverick contest
was an attempt at allowing all professionals equal opportunity to showcase these
competencies and behaviors.

Brand building
A goal of the program was also to build a positive perception of the firm, both internally and
externally. Internally, it was intended to build pride among our professionals that would help
attract and retain talent. Our organization seeks to project a unique and vibrant culture that
is conducive to driving best-in-class innovative ideas for the marketplace. The goal was for
our professionals to personalize this brand and have a deep sense of psychological affinity
for the organization – an even bigger belief that the organization is committed to investing
in their growth than they had at the start of the competition.
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Meaningful engagement
The past few decades have seen major technology-driven disruptions to the way business
is done – in particular, an increase in employees’ flexibility and choice about where and
when they do their work. These technological advancements have created a demand for
highly skilled professionals who value autonomy and meaningful engagement. This, in turn,
has put employee engagement on managers’ radar – a topic that had less significance in
earlier decades. Simply put, professionals seek meaning in their work. As Amabile and
Kramer (2011a, p. 72) state:
Of all the things that can boost emotions, motivation, and perceptions during a workday, the
single most important is making progress in meaningful work. Whether the goals are lofty or
modest, as long as they are meaningful to the worker and it is clear how his or her efforts
contribute to them, progress toward them can galvanize inner work life.

The role for the manager or leader is to remove roadblocks and support employees’
progress in performing meaningful work, signaling to employees that their contribution is
valued by the organization.

Inside the Maverick program

Participants in the program joined problem-solving teams that gave them the opportunity to
tackle a wide variety of challenging real-life business problems while demonstrating
higher-order competencies, such as critical thinking, creativity and packaging insights, to
persuade an executive audience. This contest was implemented across Deloitte US India
and garnered overwhelming acceptance among both professionals and leaders. Due to
the strong positive impact of the inaugural (2009) contest, it was repeated in 2010 and
2012.
In 2012, the Maverick program was also expanded to a number of university campuses
across India. The program was instrumental in strengthening the perception of the Deloitte
brand on these campuses, helping the organization to identify and recruit high-quality
talent.
The contest served as a catalyst to enhance Deloitte’s culture at its US India offices. It
fostered employee empowerment and meaningful engagement and provided a novel
alternative to conventional monetary incentives for achieving these goals. In fact, it has
generated a positive progress loop, as articulated in the progress principle (Amabile and
Kramer, 2011b).
Survey results validate the impact of the Maverick contest on a broad set of attributes that
included employee pride, engagement and organizational culture. The contest’s innovative

VOL. 36 NO. 6 2015 JOURNAL OF BUSINESS STRATEGY PAGE 5

 design provided the right ingredients to drive productive behaviors and embed them in
organizational culture.

Anatomy of the contest

The Maverick contest is open to all Deloitte US India employees. Participants form teams
of four professionals, each of which should include a female professional. Because the
contest is an equal opportunity program, it has no exclusionary criteria based on
professionals’ performance ratings, location or title. Participating professionals inform their
respective supervisors/reporting managers about their participation in the contest and
ensure that they deliver on their regular work commitments.
The fundamental focus of the contest is to identify and reward creative, out-of-the box
thinking on challenging business problems. All teams are assigned business cases to
analyze, and teams submit their written case studies to a panel of judges for a rigorous
evaluation. The criteria for evaluating the written case study are:
 Issue identification: This criterion addresses the extent to which a team identified the
right issues to solve, framed the issue effectively, went beyond the obvious to identify
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root causes to address and/or identified interesting hypotheses.

 Quality of analysis: This criterion addresses a team’s thoroughness in drawing
inferences. It speaks to the extent to which the team backed assertions with data,
conducted comprehensive research/due diligence, used a strategic framework to
uncover insights and/or demonstrated critical thinking in identifying interesting
hypotheses.
 Recommendations – innovative approach: This criterion addresses the extent to which
a team looked at unconventional solutions and/or provided recommendations that
challenged the status quo of existing processes, business model or industry norms.
 Recommendations – realistic/implementable: This criterion addresses the extent to
which a team delivered practical recommendations grounded in the real world. It
speaks to the extent to which the team provided clarity on next steps, enablers, risks
and impediments.
 Business writing: This criterion addresses the extent to which a team demonstrated
logical structuring of ideas, coherence, persuasiveness and clarity. It speaks to the
extent to which the report was engaging to an executive audience, included smooth
transitions between sections, was properly formatted and contained an agenda,
introduction and executive summary.
Contestants are given weekly assignments to deliver and undergo several rounds of
elimination. Short-listed teams are offered training in the logical structuring of content and
presentation skills. These short-listed teams ultimately present their case studies to a leader
panel, which evaluates them on the following criteria:
 Structured content: The effectiveness of the presentation’s storyboard format.
 Persuasiveness: The extent to which the presentation included compelling points of
view and effective positioning.
 Articulation (oral delivery): The presentation’s clarity and fluency.
 Engaging the executive audience: The team’s effectiveness in fielding questions,
demonstrating command over content and displaying poise under pressure.
The whole event is run along the lines of a competition-based reality show. Winners are
given the opportunity to work with executive leaders on challenging projects to fast-track
their careers. This prize serves as a pull to attract professionals to participate in the contest
in the future.

PAGE 6 JOURNAL OF BUSINESS STRATEGY VOL. 36 NO. 6 2015

 Most importantly, the Maverick program offers a fun and engaging experience to contest
participants and non-participants alike through the efforts of enthusiastic and committed
volunteers. The program has a significant play element designed to energize, entertain and
engage both the contestants and the spectators. During the elimination rounds, audiences
are entertained with music bands and talent shows. The program is thoughtfully designed
to capture the hearts and minds of our professionals and leave them with a positive
emotional feeling toward the organization and its people. Footage of contestants engaging
in animated debate and discussions is replayed on the digital signage for all professionals
to view. Professionals who do not join a Maverick team themselves participate in an
audience poll to vote for their favorite teams, and these scores are used to resolve any ties
among the teams. A social media tool (Yammer) is deployed to engage the audience in
discussions. The final round is organized as a public event, where all Deloitte US India
professionals can watch the short-listed teams compete fiercely to win the coveted prize;
the event is followed by a celebration to recognize the winners.

The sweet spot: Maverick’s heart and soul

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The contest’s overriding intent is to identify and capture the sweet spot that lies at the
intersection of the three fundamental questions that matter to employees and organizations
(Figure 1):

Figure 1

Expression of Sense of pride/

Identity ownership

Team size
averts
social loafing

Autonomy and
decision making
Play
promotes
creativity and
emotional
connectivity Meaningful
Branding
What you work
like to do

Sweet
spot What
What adds
you do value to
best Flow
organization experience

Conation Talent Culture

Discovery Shifter

Shared
understanding on
client service
Supervisor
skills and quality
disintermediation
benchmarks

Risk taking
Culture of and
experimentation Failure
tolerance

Contest design
Organizational culture
Motivators

VOL. 36 NO. 6 2015 JOURNAL OF BUSINESS STRATEGY PAGE 7

 Q1. What would the employee like to do?
Q2. What does the employee do best?
Q3. What adds maximum value to the organization?
By placing each employee in his or her sweet spot, organizations can seek to maximize
their “emotional wallet share” among their employees to drive engagement and motivation.
Identifying the sweet spot provides valuable information that can help organizations design
effective job roles and organizational structures, as well as identify enablers and catalysts
that can unlock employee motivation and performance.
The Maverick contest challenges the conventional talent management view of human
relationships as transactional, offering a better alternative to gaining both the hearts and
minds of an organization’s employees. Operating in the sweet spot is a critical success
factor for the program; the sweet spot serves as an emotional anchor to garner employee
immersion and passion.

How does Maverick create the sweet spot?

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The Maverick contest was designed to favor the formation of the sweet spot critical for
engaging and motivating employees. Various elements interact and reinforce each other in
enabling the sweet spot.
Team size. An optimal team size promotes collaboration and inclusive credit sharing,
minimizes free riding, facilitates constructive conflict resolution and builds cohesion. In the
Maverick contest, team size is restricted to four members. The intent of keeping the teams
small is to guard against the phenomenon of social loafing prevalent in large teams. (The
term “social loafing” refers to situations where individual team members reduce their effort,
as their individual contributions are not easily identifiable.) Small teams allow for meaningful
division of labor, transparency and accountability, all of which are critical in building trust.
Maverick’s four-person limit helps avert social loafing by making each individual’s
contribution identifiable and separable from that of others. This is facilitated by a clear
division of roles and responsibilities, which are an important driver of motivation in team
work.
Conation. The term “conation” (KolbeCorp, 2015) captures the notion of approaching a
problem in a way that reflects the natural or innate style of the individual. The Maverick
contest allows participants latitude for creativity in problem-solving, giving them free rein to
reveal their signature problem-solving style. Out-of-the-box, original thinking that
challenges received wisdom is rewarded. This freedom to experiment is a powerful
motivator for individuals to immerse themselves deeply in the contest and raise their level
of contribution. Freedom from conformity also allows creativity to flourish.
A sense of play that promotes creativity and emotional connectivity. As the name of the
contest suggests, original and breakthrough ideas emerge when there is ample scope for
imaginative engagement and experimentation. As Hallowell (2011) aptly states:
An expectation of rigid conformity, of political correctness and robotic obedience of procedures
and rules, may prevent lawsuits, but it deadens people and sooner or later kills organizations.
No one ever got great by doing only what they were told.

The Maverick contest provides a safe environment for participants to unleash their
imaginations and creativity. Emotional connectivity drives a level of psychological
ownership and positive feeling that is critical to boosting motivation.
Flow experience. The Maverick contest carefully matches participants’ skills with the level
of the challenge given them to provide participants with a “flow experience”
(Csikszentmihalyi, 1997). Typically, the flow experience results when skills and challenge
levels are appropriately aligned. Participants’ intellectual and emotional engagement on
the task is one of full immersion and focus, along with feelings of the joy of discovery.

PAGE 8 JOURNAL OF BUSINESS STRATEGY VOL. 36 NO. 6 2015

 Supervisor disintermediation. Maverick contestants work in teams without involvement from
their reporting manager or supervisor. Thus, team members get an opportunity away from
the expectations of a conventional hierarchical setting where deference to authority,
permission-seeking and flawless execution of leader’s instructions might be prevalent. This
provides a safe environment for professionals to learn to make decisions independently
and demonstrate accountability for outcomes.
Autonomy and decision-making. The contest gives participants autonomy to pursue
creative solutions and make critical decisions. Status quo practices and approaches can
be critically examined and challenged in a safe environment. In this way, the Maverick
contest caters to the innate need for autonomy that is critical in driving high performance.
Contestants learn to adapt to setbacks and build resilience.
A shared understanding of client service skills and quality benchmarks. The Maverick
contest simulates a client service engagement, giving contestants the chance to display
the competencies and behavior required to deliver superior client service. The contest,
therefore, promotes a shared understanding and appreciation of what it takes to deliver
outstanding client service. It renders the abstract notion of delivering outstanding client
service to a more concrete level.
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Maverick’s influence on organizational culture

Driving change in the organizational culture of large organizations is a formidable problem,
given the mutually reinforcing nature of existing processes and values. The solid,
interlocking elements across talent processes, organizational culture and leadership
values frustrate attempts to dismantle the status quo to drive positive change. As Denning
(2011) states:
That’s why single-fix changes, such as the introduction of teams, or Lean, or Agile, or Scrum, or
knowledge management, or some new process, may appear to make progress for a while, but
eventually the interlocking elements of the organizational culture take over and the change is
inexorably drawn back into the existing organizational culture.

The Maverick contest’s novel approach of encouraging the formation of the sweet spot
among participants was an attempt to enhance the organization culture across various
dimensions. In September 2012, we surveyed the organization to determine the perceived
impact of the Maverick program on Deloitte’s broader culture. Respondents were asked to
rate “Your perception of how ‘The Maverick’ may have influenced the Deloitte culture” with
regard to 15 attributes:

1. sense of pride;
2. brand image;
3. sense of ownership;
4. friendly and dynamic work environment;
5. inclusion and diversity;
6. reputation and prestige;
7. challenging environment;
8. sense of belonging;
9. learning and development;
10. reward and recognition;
11. networking opportunity;
12. showcasing opportunity;
13. teaming opportunity;

VOL. 36 NO. 6 2015 JOURNAL OF BUSINESS STRATEGY PAGE 9

 14. motivation; and
15. fun and engaging environment.
Respondents used a five-point scale to rate the Maverick program’s impact along each
attribute:

1. Significantly worse;
2. Worse;
3. Remained the same;
4. Better; and
5. Significantly better.
The 506 respondents to the survey were distributed among 3 groups:

1. Applicants (171): This group included all the applicants of the Maverick program.
2. Supporters (150): This group included all the professionals who contributed to the
Maverick program by volunteering to execute various tasks.
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3. Tenured (185): This group was made up of professionals who were not directly involved
in the program with at least three years’ tenure at Deloitte.
These three groups were mutually exclusive and were selected independently of one
another to seek multiple perspectives. The sampling units were randomly chosen for each
sub-population. The respondents were segmented in this way to compare and contrast
their responses to assess the overall effectiveness of the Maverick program on all the 15
attributes.
The survey results indicate that the Maverick contest was perceived to have a positive
impact on all the identified attributes. This is a testament to the program’s success as a
pivotal driver of a positive organizational culture. Further, it validates that the Maverick
contest identifies several levers that leaders can use to positively influence organizational
culture (Figure 2).
The average responses on all attributes of culture indicate that the Maverick program has
made them “better”; one can only surmise that some attributes relatively contributed more
than the others.

Figure 2 Overall results (all respondents)

PAGE 10 JOURNAL OF BUSINESS STRATEGY VOL. 36 NO. 6 2015

 While the three respondent sub-groups differed slightly in the three attributes they
perceived as being most positively influenced by the Maverick contest, these differences
were not statistically significant (Table I).
Interestingly, brand image was one of the top three attributes only among the “tenured”
group. Plausibly, one could assert that people with at least three years of tenure with
Deloitte take pride in the Deloitte brand, which may be contributing to their continued stay
with Deloitte.
The bottom three attributes for the overall category match two attributes for the three
respondent categories. There is one attribute that is unique across the three respondent
categories. It is plausible that the bottom three attributes also contributed to the positive
perception of the Maverick program, albeit not as much as the other attributes (Table II).
The overall success of the Maverick program is contingent on striking the right chord
among the sweet spot, motivators, contest design and cultural influencers to maximize the
share of employees’ emotional wallet, much as an orchestra conductor skillfully combines
all the vocalists and instruments to create a perfect performance that enthralls the
audience. This is the heart and soul of the program.
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Conclusion
Talent management programs could use innovative contests such as Maverick to drive
employee engagement and transform organizational culture. The contest tackles the
formidable problem of “reluctant stayers” (Hom et al., 2012) prevalent in large organizations
with low levels of employee engagement and emotional connectedness. Typically,
reluctant stayers have a tendency to display work avoidance behaviors that reflect
dysfunctional retention (Schiemann, 2009).
The Maverick approach might be of interest to leaders of large organizations that are
struggling to increase employee engagement with limited resources and that wish to foster
creativity to drive innovation. The program offers a compelling way for talented
professionals to meaningfully contribute to their organization that is agnostic to their
position in the hierarchy. It gives employees the freedom to strive without the fear of failure;
the chance to build their personal brand and pride; and a safe environment in which
they can question received wisdom and attempt an unconventional approach to
problem-solving. It creates a playful environment to bust stress, foster innovation and
encourage an entrepreneurial mindset.
The concept of allowing employees to be themselves is intellectually and emotionally
appealing to leaders and employees in an organization, but it is an ideal that is rarely
realized. Goffee and Jones (2013) state:

Table I Top three attributes

Top three attributes
Overall Applicants Supporters Tenured (⬎ ⫽ 3 years)

Networking opportunity Teaming opportunity Fun and engaging environment Networking opportunity
Fun and engaging environment Fun and engaging environment Networking opportunity Teaming opportunity
Teaming opportunity Networking opportunity Teaming opportunity Brand image

Table II Bottom three attributes

Bottom three attributes
Overall Applicants Supporters Tenured (⬎ ⫽ 3 years)

Sense of belonging Reward and recognition Sense of belonging Sense of belonging

Reward and recognition Sense of belonging Reward and recognition Sense of ownership
Sense of ownership Inclusion and diversity Learning and development Learning and development

VOL. 36 NO. 6 2015 JOURNAL OF BUSINESS STRATEGY PAGE 11

 The benefits of tapping the full range of people’s knowledge and talents may be obvious, yet it’s
not surprising that so few companies do it. For one thing, uncovering biases isn’t easy. More
fundamentally, though, efforts to nurture individuality run up against countervailing efforts to
increase organizational effectiveness by forging clear incentive systems and career paths.
Competence models, appraisal systems, management by objectives, and tightly defined
recruitment policies all narrow the range of acceptable behavior.
Keywords:
Employee engagement, Programs such as Maverick make a bold attempt to create a safe environment that offers
Talent management, employees the opportunity to be truly themselves and that allows differences to flourish.
Emotional wallet, Such programs can help empower leaders to dismantle the vicious cycle, endemic in large
Fear of failure, organizations, of complacency and mediocrity that stifles entrepreneurship and innovation.
Large organizations, In other words, it can create an environment where leaders can thrive. In short, they can
Maverick program, empower leaders with an innovative change management tool to drive positive
Mediocrity organizational change, especially in large organizations.

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Corresponding author
Hari Kumar can be contacted at: hakumar@deloitte.com

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