Gamification is the application of game elements and digital game design techniques to non-game problems, such as business and social impact challenges. This course will teach you the mechanisms of gamification, why it has such tremendous potential, and how to use it effectively. For additional information on the concepts described in the course, you can purchase Professor Werbach's book For the Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business in print or ebook format in several languages.
9.2 Workplace Motivation
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From the course by University of Pennsylvania
Gamification
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From the lesson
Applications
This module describes particular challenges and opportunities when applying gamification in two contexts: within an organization, and in social impact or behavior change environments.
Meet the Instructors
Kevin WerbachAssociate Professor
Legal Studies & Business Ethics
An important question for
enterprise gamification is, what actually motivates people in the workplace?
So there are all of the standard kinds of things,
your salary, bonuses, stock options,
verbal praise from your supervisors, promotions, more job responsibility.
All the traditional kinds of levers of compensation
that get used in the workplace to encourage people to work.
But hopefully, if you've been listening to the course so far, you realize that
these are almost entirely extrinsic motivators.
They are not things that are about the inherent joy and
pleasure and engagement of the work.
They are external rewards that are designed as compensation.
Think about what the word compensation means, it's something you have to get to
compensate you for doing something that you don't really wanna do, i.e., work.
So there's nothing wrong with that, of course,
that 's how salaries work everywhere, and they're going to be the core element
of how people get motivated to do jobs for most people.
But there's more to the story than that.
There's something beyond working for external rewards, and
that's where gamification has a real opportunity if it's designed
in the ways I've talked about to focus on producing engaging experiences and
activating intrinsic motivation.
So let's look at a few different ways that gamification
can motivate people at work outside of chasing rewards.
One is learning or skill development that might be in order to attain some
of those intrinsic rewards, if you have better skills, you get a higher salary, or
you get promoted to a better job, or maybe you get a better job somewhere else.
But learning, as I've talked about, is also about problem solving, and
it's about engaging those parts of your brain that love to figure out new things.
So skill development in the workplace can take advantage of gamification
in a way that is helpful for the employees and also beneficial for the companies.
What I've highlighted here is a screenshot from a service by LiveOps
which is an outsource call center operator.
What LiveOps does is they essentially create virtual call centers by stitching
together people working at home
using an application to act as though they're part of a call center.
And so LiveOps has lots of people working part-time for them.
Stay at home moms, people who are out of work,
people who pick up an hour here and an hour there answering calls, or
making outbound calls for the call center from home.
And therefore, people who are often eager to develop new skills if it can be
done in a flexible way that fits in with their situation.
So LiveOps has built their own gamified site.
It's got the usual kinds of trophies and badges.
It's got the feedback metrics about what people are doing.
Points.
All of the usual things.
But it's very much geared towards skill development.
It's geared not as much towards we want you to get off this call
you're on with a customer quickly, and in a way that makes the customer happy,
which was the other call center example I talked to you about.
This is much more about we want to help you learn how to better at this job.
How to learn different aspects of the job, and
how to be effective in a way that will then move you up,
in a way that's recognized by the badges and achievements and so forth.
And then potentially help you on the path to your success in your career.
So that's one motivator that lots of companies have for
their employees, the opportunity to learn things and scale up.
Next is information.
So what's the value of information to an employee?
Well, employees don't always know how they're doing.
Performance review every six months, every year, and
that's very far removed from the day to day process of your work.
You get feedback from your coworkers and your boss and so forth, but
many employees don't really have any sense about the quality of their work.
And certainly, no ability to directly turn that back around and
take advantage of situations where they are doing a good job.
This is a screenshot from a company called Objective Logistics,
which does gamification initially targeted at the restaurant industry.
So they provide a dashboard for restaurants to use for
their servers, where they can track how the servers are doing,
what the check size they're getting, and what their performance is.
And they can then provide feedback to the employees about how they're doing.
In this week's challenge is sell a bunch of the dinner entrees, and so forth.
There are various metrics that are put on here.
There are summaries about your ranking on the leaderboard.
And how much you earned in extra tips.
All of this provides information to the server, and
it provides information to the company.
And the company can use this in order to
target the best shifts to the employees who are doing the best job, which
motivates the employees to do a better job to get the better work opportunities.
And also gives them a much more concrete sense of what their performance is.
It activates the competitive instinct and the desire to chase the reward.
But it also paints a better picture for the employee, connects up very directly
what they're doing via feedback to the way that the company treats them.
The next one is corporate citizenship.
So this I'll talk about in more detail in a subsequent segment.
But there are things that you do sometimes in a company that are not
necessarily about your job.
Great example is the language quality game from Microsoft that I
used as one of the early examples.
Where they got employees to review all of these dialogue boxes for
Windows localization in different languages.
And I told you that thousands of Microsoft employees did this voluntarily.
Why?
Well, part of it was just the inherent fun of the game.
Part of it was competition to want to beat the other offices.
But part of it was a sense that they were doing something that was good for
the company.
They were helping Microsoft make better products by removing bugs and
errors in the localization of Windows.
And that's something that people who are part of an organization,
part of a team, feel some resonance with.
They are not going to work as a volunteer for weeks on end just for
the company's good.
But they wanna take pride in their work and
their workplace and they want to be good corporate citizens.
So that's a motivator that can be used for gamification.
Finally, last but certainly not least, what about fun?
What's the role of fun in the work place?
Well, there are lots of benefits of fun in the work place.
Creating a more congenial environment, promoting team work, so on and so forth.
But there are opportunities to specifically use fun
to achieve direct workplace benefits.
This is something called the Face Game at the Zappos.
And if you want to see more details, there's a little video here about this.
Zappos is an online retailer initially of shoes,
now of other clothing-type items that's part of Amazon.com now.
Amazon bought it for roughly a billion dollars.
And Zappos, as we'll talk about, is a very fun workplace.
This is something that they created called the Face Game for their employees.
When you log on to the company intranet, after you type in your name and password,
you get shown a picture of someone who's one of your coworkers,
randomly selected, and you get to say, who is this?
And you can fill in, this is Ronda, or you can say,
I have no clue, don't know who this is.
And what the game does is once you do that, it either says congratulations you
got it right, it's Ronda, or it says, nope, that was actually Brenda.
And we'll give you Brenda's profile page in the company intranet.
So what this does is creates a little bit of fun and
helps people get to know their coworkers.
Helps them find out more about the people who work with them, what they do,
where they work, what their skills are, which can be valuable in terms of
promoting better collaboration and teamwork within the organization.
All based on leveraging off of fun.
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