Hi, I'm Ethan Mollick, Professor here at Wharton, Studies of Management, Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Gamification. So what I wanted to talk to you bit about today, was the use of games for motivating people at work. So this is one of the big issues in gamification. Is how to use things like leader boards. And points and badges and more advanced gamification techniques, to actually encourage people to enjoy their work more. Find it more satisfying, work harder. Improve performance, feel better about their job and so on. And I want to talk to about some results that we have from some studies that we've been doing on this topic. I've been working along with Nancy Rothbard, who's another professor here at Wharton. Who is a, a, social psychologist, who's looking at these issues with me. So first, by way of introduction, I should mention that the idea of using games at work isn't new. In fact, archaeological evidence from as far back as the pyramids. Show that within the pyramids, there is graffiti. That actually indicated that different teams were competing together to build the pyramids. So, there's graffiti from teams like the Drunkards of Encari, or the Friends of Khufu. All of which were competing to build the pyramid faster than each other. Indicating that games at work are not a new thing. And this isn't a surprise to scholars. So studies dating back to the end of the 19th century, of sociologists going in and looking at work environments. Have found that games are almost ubiquitous at work. Especially in environments that are like factory floors, where the work can often be tedious, or difficult and not very satisfying. Workers tend to create games in order to find work make work more meaningful. To get a sense of accomplishment, to feel a sense of control. Originally both bosses and sociologists studying it, thought of this kind of work as negative, right? Games were shirking off. Instead of actually doing real work, you were playing games instead. This perspective changed in the 1970s with a scholar named Michael Burawoy from the University of Chicago. Because he realized that games actually served an additional purpose, beyond just people blowing off steam. Because people created games based on the work task they were doing. By playing games, they were actually accomplishing the goals that their managers wanted them to. Because the games involved, doing the kind of work that they were expected to do anyway. So thus, rather than workers conflicting with their bosses. And disagreeing with them, and fighting them over how boring and annoying. And unsatisfying their work was. Instead they were in conflict with their fellow workers. Who are all trying to work together to, to win these games instead. So this concept actually became very important. And, Michael Burawoy came up with the idea of describing through something called consent. Consent is the idea that you're buying in to work. And, we've taken this concept and applied it more to buy-in towards gamification. And this is something that people have tended to take for granted. Because many of these guessful gamification examples are voluntary. For example, if I gamify my website for McDonalds, right? The people who are playing that aren't, the people who are interested in playing a game on McDonalds website. And if you're not interested, you just won't come to the website. Who cares? Right? But when you're making games a requirement of work. You're engaging something we call mandatory fun. You're forcing people to do something that you think is going to be an entertaining. The fact is though not everyone feels the same way about it. In order for people to buy in to the game. To be, to reengage in gamification, and to get positive benefits from it. They need to consent to the game. And there are three factors that lead someone to consent to a game. The first of those, is understanding the rules. If someone doesn't understand the rules of the game, is not clear how it's played. They haven't paid attention, they lose interest. All of that will undermine gamification. The second is fairness. People need to feel the game is fair, that they have a chance of winning it. Otherwise, you won't get consent. And finally, there is the fact that people need to pay attention to the game. If they're not interested in games, if they're turned off by the theme. If they're uninterested in the concept. Then you won't get consent. So, those three elements, understanding the rules, think a game is fair, and paying attention. Are actually critical to any internal gamification effort. We've actually tested this with a experiment at a fast growing start up company. We took the company and went to their sales force. Which is quite large, and divided it into three groups. One group kept doing sales as usual. Getting extreme compensation for successful sales events. And for being the best person in their class. There were all sorts of sales contests and other competitions going on. Another group got the same kind of compensation, but were given a leader board. Which I think you've learned about in class so far. So, nice ESPN style you know, sports based scoring. Where people saw how well they were doing relative to each other. And the third group was, again, kept the same compensation scheme. But was given a game on top of work. So we turned their work into a game, in this case, a basketball themed game. When, whenever they were successful in contacting clients, getting sales. They'd see their name in lights, and a ball would be slammed through a basket. Then they'd get points for their team. It was an ongoing competition in order to see which team succeeded. We found is, initially, the gamification didn't actually seem to have much of an effect on performance. But we realized the reason why it weren't seem much of an effect was, we weren't taking into account consent. And consent turned out to be the most important thing, in determining whether or not games were positive, or negative for employees. So, as you could see, we've actually monitored the effect of consent. Which is the x axis here, on affect, which is positive feelings toward work. So, this is positive affect. The is the contagious energy and enthusiasm that you really want to see at a company. And escpecially in creative and sales roles. It's very important to successful productivity. And what you can see is, if people didn't consent to the game, they didn't think it was fair. They didn't understand the rules, they didn't pay attention to it, it actually had a negative impact on their affect towards work. Quite a large one, relative to the mean. On the other hand, if they consented to the game, they thought it was fair, and they understood the rules. And they paid attention to it, there was actually a positive impact on their affect. So games are a double edged sword. If people accept them and think that they're useful and consent to them, then you actually have a positive impact. Otherwise you've a negative one. What turned out to be the biggest driver of affect in this case, and therefore by, through consent. Was whether or not people were familiar with games outside of work. The more hours they played of games outside of work, the more accepting they were of games inside of work. And the more likely they were to consent to gamification and to have a positive affect, impact. So there's a couple of things I'd like you to take away from this. The first of them is that, games are not always positive. Not everyone likes games, not everyone likes the same kinds of games. If you force people to play a game, you engage in mandatory fun. Some people are going to find that exciting, and have a positive impact on that. Some people are going to find that demotivating. And it's actually going to decrease their performance and their feelings towards work. This is something people don't tend to pay a lot of attention to when games are voluntary. But even in those cases, you should pay attention to consent. So, in my hypothetical McDonald's example. If I've turned McDonald's into a fun web page and I find engagement has gone way up. Among the various people playing the games. I should also be aware there's probably a group of people, who've been turned off entirely from interacting with the McDonald's site. Because they're less interested in gamification. So be sure to be aware of both the positives and negatives. And second of all, you should realize that we actually are starting to gather data on some of these things. So this is one study of a number of people looking at gamification. And I'll include a link here to the study, Mandatory Fun. Which you can read and get more detail on the study. And some of the other work going on in gamification.
