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Is Gamification a Good Motivator?
CowboyRobot writes "Growing up, many of our teachers used gamification techniques such as a gold star sticker on a test (essentially a badge) or a public display of which students had completed a set of readings (leaderboard). These were intended to motivate students to strive to do better. Now, these techniques are increasingly common in the workplace where the parallel with computer games is more intentional. A report by Gartner predicts that 'by 2015, 50% of organizations that manage innovation processes will gamify those processes.' One example would be assigning badges for submitting work on time, another would be having a leaderboard in an office to show who completed a training module first. The idea of using game mechanics in work or study environments is not new, but its ubiquity is. Educators can discuss how effective gamification is in classrooms, but how useful is it as a motivator in the workplace?"
We have something similar already where I work, I can goomba colleagues.
It's really a shame system. If you don't have enough gold stars or silver turds or whatever, you look bad and might get fired.
That's an entirely different thing to being motivated, unless you consider jumping through stupid manager-invented hoops just to keep your job motivation.
But one has to accept that it will work only for a subset. Not everybody is interested to acquire as many badges/friends/top scores as possible. And some that like that in gameplay (leisure) might become desensitized to it when used at work. So perhaps games would need to find new motivators? (Followed by workplaces adopting them again? Lather rinse repeat.)
Not everybody has a RPG (or other game type) mindset. I'd feel weird if being given a "badge" at work. As in "Wtf is a badge anyway? And why should I care about it?".
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"Accelerated feedback cycles, short-term but achievable goals, compelling narrative."
So basically they're predicting that organizations will become even more focused on the short-term and immediate gain, and even step away from reality in order to make it more exciting. Because that's not what got us into this financial mess in the first place.
I think it's not a motivator by itself. It's a tool that helps you keep track of your achievements. It's useful for those that are already motivated to do well.
Nope. Not a good motivator. More precisely it's a motivator for the wrong type of behaviour. Once you "gamify" a system, you've just added one more layer of indirection, and several orders of magnitude more ways to game the system.
Perfection in game design is not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to cheat.
Then when there's no real reward .....
I do believe the rewards are called "money".
Just throw in some achievements while you're at it and you can really get the competition going.
Especially if they cannot call you while off.
The nazi's used to hand out stars to the jews, just for being so awesome!
Microrewards a great, but they only do part of the job. Engagement also relies on the feeling that your skills are improving (mastery). Autonomy and purpose are also fairly important.
I've worked in a number of workforces that use gamification techniques. Typically it's adopted brute force (leaderboards, backed by monetary incentives) that convince you to work against others. They basically turn a group of people who should be working together into fifteen year olds playing co-op Modern Warfare 3 - smack talk included.
This isn't to say they're bad, just typically poorly adopted.
...that's gonna work is if I can get a level up to throw lightning bolts at people.
As a bureaucrat in a dead-end job, I can say "Hell yeah!"
There's nothing I look forward to more than a little gold star that I can put on my cubicle to rub in the face of Jenkins because I submitted more dreary TPS reports than anyone else in our unit.
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A gold star sticker isn't gamification. Giving me experience that I can use to level up and get perks (say the ability to use "skip this question" on a test for the price of having to look up the answer after) or virtual currency that I can redeem for prizes, that is gamification. A gold star sticker is what everyone has done forever .
Please use real words in the title or at least put made up ones in quotes. . .
Money
Otherwise why are we truly there?
Apart from it being a shame system there are also other problems.
This is a form of measurement system, and sociological studies have shown that those are growing increasingly common in schools. The problems is the same as with most such systems: the thing being measured isn't necessarily anywhere close to what is thought.
In the case of a list of who completed things first, the probability is high that it measures who took the most shortcuts and did the least amount of work possible relative to their own capabilities.
Instead of focusing on measurement and rivalry studies have shown that focusing on equality and everyone in class doing a good job lifts the entire group. I do not know if this carries over to work environments, but I'm sceptical about using rivalry when there could be co-operation instead.
(Further reading: sociologists who have written about the culture of measurement in schools include David Hargreaves and Risto Rinne.)
I even do it when I work for myself. (software, web, tools dev, and now game and engines dev. )
If I meet certain deadlines within a day, I reward myself with watching or playing something I like, such as a new episode of a TV show I watch, or a game. (30 minutes)
If I even go above and beyond what I set out for that day, I will reward myself with a 60 minute segment instead of the typical 30. (good for those 1 hour shows, or 30 minute and some gaming, or whatever else.
If I don't, no playtime for me. Boohoo. But it happens. Sometimes I just need to push through and find that light at the end of the tunnel in the case of something complex where a break would probably ruin my current mindset and I'd have no clue what I was doing.
It got me more productive in more ways than one, specifically more productive at having fun instead of wasting time sitting around doing nothing.
My organization is better, which used to be just a huge mess. Both with respect to working as well as play.
My days follow a pretty strict schedule mostly to fit around health issues. From exercise to work to play to work to relaxation, and possibly some more play and even work. (since it is both a hobby and job to me)
Works pretty damn well if I do say so myself.
Stopped me sitting around wasting away like a burst grape.
This just seems like yet another step towards employers treating their employees like children(that unlike real children they can, and do fire) rather than adults. Monitoring internet, asking for social network passwords, and now this....if they wanted to run a kindergarten, they should have gone into that field.
Monstar L
Competition in games works because competition is added to something that would be less interesting without competition. Same about classroom -- students don't perceive their achievement as significant or a part of some greater picture, public display (not necessarily competitive one) affirms the significance.
At workplace, environment usually is already competitive. Worse yet, the most "important" competition's results, salaries, are never disclosed, what already causes some uncertainty in the minds of employees (do people who clearly do worse job, actually earn more than me because they were hired this year?) Adding another "competition" seems like company trying to avoid raising salary for its best employees instead opting for cheap "badges". It sends a message -- yes, we have meritocracy here, we give worthless things to people who contributed the most, however don't expect us to actually return your loyalty with anything of value, we have salaries and bonuses determined by haggling, nepotism, management hierarchies, and $deity knows what.
There is also another aspect to this -- a person who underperforming in a "game" would live in fear that he is going to be fired, even if his work is entirely adequate for the company's purposes.
It's also an interesting detail that it was very common in USSR to have competition in a workplace, however first and foremost, it was based on originally non-competitive environment (no unemployment or "working poor", narrow ranges of salaries), and created "bigger picture" not unlikely one in the classroom. Second, competition was mostly between groups, not just individuals. "You suck because your construction project goes two times slower than neighbor's" hurts someone's sense of pride for his work and ability, especially when it is known that all other conditions, results and consequences are supposed to be more or less the same for his and neighbor's group. I have a strong suspicion that this is what is being imitated here. Nope. Doesn't work under Capitalism. You can't enroll the same people in three competitions at once -- one for money, one for not being thrown out, one for shiny stickers.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Gamification is an example of extrinsic motivation - the kind that gives you a substitute for the joy of work itself. It can be effective (in a similar way that money motivates people to do all kinds of jobs they hate) but it can be hardly a substitute for "intrinsic motivation" where you aim at making the actual work more interesting - in your example by making the training interesting and relevant to people, by avoiding all kinds of stress by submitting work in time, by giving people a greater variety of tasks, more responsibility - simply a more interesting job, not a more interesting badge.
The outcome may seem the same... until you remove the rewards - look for reference [11] in the Wikipedia entry. That's why intrinsically motivated people keep doing their jobs even though they are extremely badly paid (in my country, that would include e.g. pastors, teachers and even doctors).
In short - if you need "gamification" then in the first place you need to admit that the gamified job sucks.
"Badges" as motivators might be novel or perhaps "ubiquitous" in business via "gaming" culture, but the concept goes just a lil' bit beyond gold stars on school papers. Viz: military institutions have been using badges as a motivator for, oh, about >1000 years, now.
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"Gamifying" the system? Won't that just lead to...people gaming the system? Or is this the sort of obvious conclusion that people miss, the kind of people who have no problem using "gamify" as a verb.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
There was a quality bonus.
Every day without a return was a dollar. After the first month, it was 2 dollars. After the second month, it was 3 dollars/day.
The owner of the company would come around and give cash out of his pocket at the end of each month.
It wasn't a lot of money. It was gas money. But it was goal oriented and people liked it.
When I was apprenticing there, we got almost to the end of the third month and we got a return. A company had a new receiver and rejected a batch of hobbed gears because he didn't like the finish, because hobbing a gear leaves a scalloped effect that is apparent under decent lighting. It has nothing to do with the overall quality of the gear. He just didn't like the shine.
Some of us were... unhappy. We were literally 3 business days from the end of the month.
We glass beaded the gears (in our opinion, ruining the finish) and sent them back and they got accepted.
Making a game out of the quality of the product changed people's attitudes.
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BMO
The important thing to understand about modern use of gamification, is that the benefit is not to the employees (or students), nor to the company (or school). The benefit is to the management, so they can say "look, we are actively monitoring performance" and "look, we are actively seeking to improve performance". Plus, with a bit of inflation in the system, "look, performance is improving". The wider the disjunction between how the company creates products, and the typical manager's understanding of that process, the more gamification you'll see.
Call me a communist, but these, along with respect for the dignity of employees, seem the best motivators.
Korma: Good
It is easier to drag other people down than to do actual work. Within our company this is very obvious in our sales department. People are not focussed on winning. They are focussed on other people loosing.
The idea of stimulating competition between employees is not new, nor is giving out "badges" such as plaques, trophies, other ritual and non-monetary icons that can be displayed to demonstrate one's prowess in front of other members of staff (e.g. "salesman of the year" "long service award").
I am not a researcher of workplace environments (IANAROWE?) but I should imagine there is a lot of written research on employee motivation, competition, and so forth.
Grow up, you thumb sucking, diaper wearing 20 year old over-privileged snots. It's a fucking business, not a social networking site or a video game. Your motivation is to do the job and get paid.
This is the result of helicopter parents. College grads are showing up for job interviews with their parents, or having their mom call and chew out the boss when they don't get a big enough raise. This crap happens at big New York financial firms, for God's sake.
The US will be screwed when this generation takes over. I can just see them trying to negotiate with Chinese or Indian firms and calling their doddering parents to whine that the people on the other side of the table are not playing fair.
Why is Snark Required?
I attended a Gartner 'Summit' 5-6 years ago. I recall talk of 'Second Life', 'Avatars' and 'virtual shopfronts' as inevitablities. :-)
If someone needs motivation by gamification in his job then it's just clear that they are just doing the wrong thing for them. If companies introduce gamification into their workplaces all this tells me is that they know that they hire people who don't belong there in order to pretend to do something but in reality nobody is interested in actually doing anything.
For jobs with short-term oriented goals, I can see this as successful.
For jobs with mid to long-term oriented goals, this will have no effect.
My mindset tends to work in 3-4 month increments, my spouse's in 3-4 year increments each based on the nature of our respective work. We also both regularly work 60 hours a week. Short-term motivators won't cut it for us when we are focused on achieving the end-goal, not simply what looks good today.
However, [citation needed], psychological studies have shown time and time again that for such short-term rewards, the only thing that does not have diminishing returns is money. Gold stars / leadership boards / respect have diminishing returns, money does not. If they want to may me more for doing the same job, I won't complain.
My friend works for Achievers (www.achievers.com). Basically, their business is providing gamification to other businesses. You give points and stuff to coworkers for doing good things, which they can then turn in for prizes. It's all kinda creepy and false IMO.
I used to think gamification was an interesting idea which might lead somewhere: especially when dealt with as kudos, since monetary rewards so easily can lead to really counterproductive behaviours. Then I realized it had already been tried: in Soviet Russia, no less, under names such as 'socialist competition'. http://www.kmjn.org/notes/soviet_gamification.html
Now, the fact that the idea is not new is not an automatic rejection of the idea; but its history should be carefully considered to avoid replicating failure. Can gamification be managed so as to 1) reward both short and long term objectives, 2) avoid acting at cross purposes to monetary rewards 3) make it serious enough to affect sufficient numbers of employees, and 4) still be fun? I don't think I'm smart enough to setup such a system. Good luck to those who try: it'll be interesting to see any results.
http://extra-credits.net/episodes/gamification/
You don't have to watch it, but the narrator, Daniel Floyd, who works for Pixar Canada and is a game enthusiast, gives some pretty cool ideas. there is one more episode that was requested by teachers on a possible way to apply this to the classroom. He gives some good ideas that I would have thought of myself or anyone else if they spent an afternoon thinking about it. Link is provided.
http://extra-credits.net/episodes/gamifying-education/
You know how to make me feel encouraged or valued? Just acknowledge what I'm doing from time to time. Say "thank you" or even just comment on the fact that I did some work over the weekend.
Where I work this actually happens, and it sure as hell means more to me than some fucking gold star or my name on a board. I hate attention being drawn to me publicly, I much prefer private acknowledgement. The letter I got from HR noting my contributions to a specific project along with telling me I had a £2k pay rise effective immediately? Also nice.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
Oh, please give me a +1 insightful mod, and pump up the tires on my karma, oh benevolent Slashgodz, please!
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
[sarc]
All of this competition smacks of watered down capitalism.
Capitalism, of course, is that failed source of all human misery.
We must reject all comparisons of right/wrong, better/worse, vaguely homosexual/slightly Canadian, in order to regain the idyllic, Edenic, stress-free, Utopian existence which is our natural right.
[/sarc]
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
These techniques abuse and promote competition rather than cooperation. They train people to view their peers as somewhat benign threats rather than colleagues. I suspect that it's techniques like this that prevent societies from being able to effectively transition to collectivism.
Badges? We don't need no stinkin' badges!
Not only was giving gold stars and showing leaders publicly not intentionally "gamification", this summary has the relationship backwards. It's the games that copied real life practices like those. Games are increasingly realistic. Of course, that's because all of life is adopting practices used in other ways in the past in new situations. Since real life came first, games copied RL, and then RL repeated the compliment by copying the updated practice from games.
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I tend to have an attitude of "I'm here to do work, keep out of my way", if the pointed haired types get a kick of out systems like this that's up to them, if my general attitude of "keep your damn leaderboard and key performance indicators away from me" causes them a problem then I'll take my genius elsewhere ta very much.
Usually they just let me get on with my job and if they have to report back to their PHB overlords they just make shit up as needed.
If anyone approaches me with an "Annual Assessment Form" I usually just growl at them and they scuttle away in fear....
If the little gold stars are printed on a check I'm all for it.
One example would be assigning badges
Well, that would be the day when I'd stick such badges up in the originator's behind and leave for greaner pastures.
This is not gamification, it's introduction of idiotic, ignorant and almost always unncessary extra race factors, with the negative aspect over all others that this type only motivates the idiots at your company and the rest will feel as being considered a child.
Some managers just need to be kicked out when they are stupid, not all their ideas are great, understood? Good. Now get back to work.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
when i was a kid it was a semi-motivator. kids that didn't care wouldn't try. but you'd get a bunch of kids putting in some effort to try lift their game. overall it was tough to get a sticker. do well and you got a simple reward for it. but on a larger scale it meant effort = reward which was an investment in your future work ethic later on. i wasn't top dog in getting stickers but i had my fair share.
of course the problem is that parents eventually get involved. when their kid hasn't gotten a sticker they complain to the teachers. the kid may be struggling, have a learning problem, or they just don't care. either way the parents want the teachers to reward the kid anyway in order to "encourage" them. that way no-one is a "loser". the result is the whole sticker system is heavily devalued. what's the point of getting a sticker if you'll get one anyway for a "good try" without putting in any effort? hence we end up with a system where "everyone is a winner". in that kind of a system, where is the motivation to do well when you generally don't see the results for years to come (it's hard to get a kid to plan that far ahead).
of course parents of sutdents putting in a lot of effort argue their student should be rewarded better. the worry being that not rewarding well is a demotivator for good students. thus you get a downward spiral. on one side, parents ask for better rewards for good students. on the other, parents ask for better rewards for worse students to raise the bar and encourage them to put in effort. in the end, with a bad balance it will drag down good performing students.
the same applies to the workplace. you can add various motivators to encourage people to try do well. people that don't do well should not be rewarded. never raise the minimum bar unless you're absolutely forced to by law. that way those that want to succeed put in the effort. those that want to cruise can barely just get by. you eventually cull those that put in zero effort and bring in a new batch of employees to replace them. never make the rewards too excessive or the "game" becomes about maximising their own personal interests (such as CEOs getting excessive bonus for hitting a certain target regardless of long term consequences).
where things fall over though is with unions. i'm not saying they're bad. it's more there needs to be a balance. unions are there to serve the interests of all workers of the union. the collective bargaining power basically tips the game in favour of the workers. unions will bargain for a pretty good minimum for all workers regardless of how much effort if put in by the worker. so as a union worker, there's no incentive for the "collective" to put in extra effort when they're guaranteed a pretty good minimum (else the company faces industrial action). so in the end the union ends up being the parents arguing for good rewards for everyone regardless of effort.
so with a bad balance, a downward spiral begins. good workers won't put the effort in as their counterparts get the same pay, treatment, and rewards with a lot less effort. hence good workers become demotivated which brings performance to a tedium everyone is happy to work.
so overall, gamification only works when there are definitive winners and losers.
when everyone is a winner, it's no longer a game.
Nope. Not a good motivator. More precisely it's a motivator for the wrong type of behaviour. Once you "gamify" a system, you've just added one more layer of indirection, and several orders of magnitude more ways to game the system.
Perfection in game design is not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to cheat.
I have actually seen that happen. A bonus scheme based on the number of incidents fixed meant that teams quickly found out that rather than "try something, test, try something, test" until it worked, if they instead would "try something, send back to user as done" it would not only mean that they could move on to the next problem quicker, but also have the added bonus that the user would probably have to raise another problem report on the same incident. Quality went down, incidents went up, bonuses went up - for nearly two months until the scheme was revised.
My company is a major international company. What they do is this: they have a points reward system where you can exchange the points for anything from American Express giftcards, to hotel rooms, to jewelry, even a few boats(if you get millions of points). You can get points in several ways: the main, regular way is by your department reaching certain monthly goals; the other way is by supervisors/other people recommending you for points awards, which are then approved by your supervisor. So the reward system has actual, tangible value. Of course, you are also dependent on your supervisor; some hand out the points like candy, others can be very stingy. But at the very least you can still get the monthly points as those are tied solely to department performance.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
I think they got bored of it, wonder what the next one will be.
Admit nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter-accusations.
In the workplace it pits employees against each other. Not exactly a "team building" option. I also didn't see any indication of research by Gartner on this one. Are they just making predictions based on how they feel things should be done? Or did they actually ask company leaders about their "gamification" strategies?
I'm a gamer and gamification annoys me, mainly because I'll treat the task as a game and not a learning experience. BUT I can see it as a way to motivate others.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
From my days in the "large blue multinational computer company" sales force:
"How do you find out you're in a sales competition?"
"They announce in a team meeting that you won a prize".
No kidding, this happened so often there was a joke about it.
"Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. This sig is intended to clog filters and annoy do-gooders
I use a form of it when I use a time tracker at work (personal choice, not company mandated). My tracker has a prominent bar chart with my percentage of productive time vs the average of everyone else using the tool. I make a game out of it and try to keep my bar higher than the average. Personally, I am not motivated at all by the more public forms of gamification; I could care less about a gold star. I feel like if it is used as an actual performance metric that the PHBs can get their greasy hands all over, it breaks down. After all, games are meant to be gamed. People have been trying to come up with even a few quantifiable metrics to evaluate software engineers for years, and every one of them can be gamed. Lines of code: a recipe for copy/paste olympics. Fewest bugs: projects get delayed as the balance between speed and quality get out of whack, or the smartest coders use their weight to get the easiest projects. Most features: 80% of the bug reports are unwanted features, not actual "glitches". For lines of code specifically, Bill Gates once said that "measuring software by lines of code is like measuring airplanes by weight". I tend to think that for most metrics used in this way (even outside programming), they misdirect workers from using common sense and reduce overall quality.
then it might actually be better than being judged by managers on how much they like you
being condescended to at home wasn't *enough*
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Considering that /. has a gamification system in place for posts, and that it works...at least in some cases.
Every post here has a score. Post something positive (Funny, member of the 3 I's, etc) and you gain points. If you post something stupid, try to flamebait, etc, lose points.
Points affect karma score, and also affects (I believe) getting points to give to others.
Now do I want to see gamification at my hospital... going into to surgery and seeing a score board for "10 pts for organ removed, 15 pts for replacement organ, -1 pt for every 20 minutes in surgery"... I wouldn't be happy.
if (it != oneThing) it = another;
Stackoverflow is, I think, a good example of how giving out badges and points helps. The knowledge base they have accumulated is amazing. Nowadays, I find most things I need, without even posting a question.
However, I realized it did have an interesting effect when contributing answers. This happened a couple times to me. I would contribute a long answer with all kinds of details and would get annoyed when the questioner would say a (genuine) thanks without upvoting the answer or marking it as the right answer. I mean, here I am, pissed off about some points that wont effect my life in anyway whatsoever, when I should just be happy, that I was able to help someone out.
I think the ideal evolution of such systems would get us to points where we just feel good that we are helping out, rather than reinforcing some mindless craving for a reward.
There is already a "gamification" system where you get pretty monopoly money ... and it can occasionally be used to buy stuff.
Inevitably the "gamification" b.s. boils down to consultants and technology firms trying to convince workers into doing more for less money in exchange for an even more worthless compensation. Good luck.
You've got to be a proper idiot engage with stupid tricks like awarding badges.
Honestly anyone not taking the piss and doing their utmost to ruin the game are assholes.
we've had to all have sit through conference calls where upper management makes a big deal out of so and so for doing thier job...
and we just continue playing BS bingo...
the gold stickers just dont cut it...
Doctor and hospital ratings are public scores that we do check. The better the medical rating, the more likely I am to use them. The only caveat is that I expect the system to be policed in a way that it's hard to "game" the scores.
money...Plain and simple, THAT is my motivator at work.
Lots of studies have shown money is not a great motivator.
From my own personal experience, bonuses for projects are not really a lasting motivator, they feel nice for a day perhaps but they do not make you happier or really alter how you work.
Trinkets do not help either. One of the few things I do think can be a motivator is control - as a reward instead of cash or gifts, give the employes some more control over their life at work. Let them choose the next project to work on. Give them extra time (like Google does) to improve any old thing in the company they feel is messed up. That's a lot more permanently empowering and enjoyable than money.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
These techniques abuse and promote competition rather than cooperation. They train people to view their peers as somewhat benign threats rather than colleagues. I suspect that it's techniques like this that prevent societies from being able to effectively transition to collectivism.
It all depends how you structure the rewards. Most people do part-personal and part-team. We do want high-achievers to feel appreciated but we want to also encourage team work. I've seen this done well with agile teams. They are self organizing so encouraging the high productivity of a team can act as an additional reward.
They did this when I was in grade school. I was a slow learner, so I never got a star, gold or otherwise. They used to use silver and gold. I don't remember if I gave a damn or not. I think that it was a little embarrassing to never have one though.
I drove a hazmat tanker 3 year just before I retired (lost programming job). They had a monthly board where they would put different colored circles denoting that you had not had any accidents or incidents, or had an accident (with another vehicle) or incident (ran over a pipe at a refinery, etc). The only reason we would look at it was to see who had been bad and find out what happened. It was actually a gossip board. After a while, people would grow weary of the system and not look at it at all.
Companies need to leave this grade school nonsense where it belongs. It is an extremely childish practice. There is a good possibility that it might also discourage good employees to move on, seeing that management is not seeing and/or appreciating their work.
On the one hand virtual shopfronts always felt like a novelty that would play itself out really quickly. On the other hand, smartphones and tablets have kind of made the concept of a virtual world we all travel to in order to interact/transact obsolete. In a way, people still browse virtual shopfronts and do business there, but they don't need to log onto a central server and instead of "virtual shopfronts" we call them "apps".
"It is claimed that the Legion of Honor is a rattle. Well, it is with rattles that one leads men."
- Napoléon Bonaparte.
("On prétend que la Légion d’Honneur est un hochet. Et bien, c’est avec des hochets que l’on mène les hommes.")
(Fun fact : captcha for this comment was "admiral". Yes, like Nelson.)
Gamification, or what we used to call extrinsic rewards, will probably continue to grow until the first major lawsuit over how it is being used to discriminate or violate privacy. If gamification is used as part of performance reviews and employee performance reviews are confidential, then does it violate privacy? If it can be shown that the best rewards go to the men or whites or pick your category, even if it is non-monetary, is it a form of workplace hostility.
My suggestion would be to leave gaming rewards to gamers and businesses to focus on more traditional forms of recognition.
the dead Greek guy thought (Aristotle) is that there must be a root cause for all human action. Why do people get up and go to work? They need money. Why do they need money? They have bills to pay. Why do they have bills to pay? They need things. - and so on, until you get to the root motivator. Aristotle argued that this root motivator is "happiness."
so the reason people do things is because (they think) it will make them happy (please remember that philosophers/psychologists/lovers have been arguing over this subject for as long as people have been arguing - we are dealing with the ultimate "black box" in the human mind)
the practical advice is that people want to do useful work that has a purpose. if you feel that your job is pointless ("yeah, about the cover on the tps reports"), giving you a gold star for turning in your pointless work on time isn't going to help. If you feel that your work is important and you are emotionally involved in the process then you might think that putting explosives in your underwear is a good idea - and then the gold star is really pointless.
my personal opinion is that "gamification" might work for certain people/certain jobs - but not as a long term motivator
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Achievement System
I can think of lots of horrible achievements:
The Weekender ...
Overtime
Bootlicker
Pushover
I don't need Rah Rah Ziss Boom Bah Show me dah money!!!!! Now you have my attention and motivation
Attempting to shame folks into not breaking the build by checking in new files w/o building the whole tree (> 1 hour endeavor for cmodel + rtl), someone put up a "leader board" with a gold star for every confirmed build break.
Unfortunatly, this lead to 2 common extreme behaviours. The first was some folks were so fearful of breaking the build, they always built the whole tree (rather than say just the cmodel) for even very minor check-ins wasting lots of their time (often waiting for a floating licence to compile the rtl). Other more reckless folks relishing in getting long chains of gold stars to show that they were being productive (and just occasionally breaking the build) and thus were probably more reckless than normal ultimatly wasting other people's time with broken (although easy-to-fix) builds. For most other folks, we just essentially ignored it. So basically other than a silly in-office entertainment diversion, the net effect on group productivity was likely near-zero.
I imagine that most attempts at gamification will end up this way. Net zero...
First, it you, not your boss, especially not your boss's boss.
Second, you don't have co-workers and other people oogling your carrots and sticks.
Third, what constitutes privacy depends a the person
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Back when I worked at the Boeing Commercial Aircraft Division, I was involved in a project to build an engineering document configuration control system. They already had an existing process and system in place, but it had fallen afoul of FAA regulations, was horribly expensive and difficult to use*, resulting in high error rates (which is what got the FAA involved). So, management gave us the charter to build a better system. They couldn't just pull the plug on the legacy stuff, or all its support staff would just walk. So, they told us to build ours for one production facility (Renton), leaving the old system (and staff) in place at the other (Everett).
After a few months, we gout ours up and running and, after showing it to engineering and manufacturing management (the end users) ours was selected.
The system worked well from the company's point of view. But it did have its drawbacks. The competition created a lot of political in-fighting between the two divisions. And as management wasn't on its toes, so to speak, they didn't referee the process correctly. After the final decision, there were quite a few morale problems on the losing side. A number of good s/w people quit the company. This is another problem management didn't deal with well. In any sort of process improvement, the (desired) more efficient process is going to require less resources (people). The less efficient one will need more. So the end result is that people are always going to be surplussed. This isn't a problem in companies where the workload is high and demand for developers is growing. But in an environment where work is being spun off to foreign firms (as at Boeing), the employment pressure is higher.
Its interesting to note that they are trying this approach again, with the production of 787s being split between Washington State and South Carolina. Metrics will be compared and management rewarded based on relative performance.
* We had the advantage here in that this was done during the mid '90s, when the Web was just coming into being. What the legacy apps did (on text-based terminals) with massive s/w development resources, we could do very quickly and with a much more intuitive UI.
Have gnu, will travel.
I think badges for doing certain things (ie, launching a product) are good things, especially for long term employees where others can see what they've done. Giving people 'levels' depending on their experience in the company with tools or technologies might be good too...I often wonder "Just WTF does that guy do?" Informal rewards such as half days for pulling off critical items that others couldn't is nice too, so it doesn't feel like you're carrying someone else 'for nothing'.
The whole 'answer 1 ticket get a point' is just way too open to corrupting the process.
Which is why us old-timers regard Agile as merely the latest revision of "reward people for fixing bugs", knowing full well what happened the last time: people added bugs, just so they could take credit for fixing them.
(The real greybeards are those around long enough to recognize that "rewarding people for fixing bugs" was my generation's version of measuring productivity as a linear function of KLoC - counting lines of code.)
What do you think about a system of acheivements like in MMO's?
i thought this would be fun for our helpdesk, and it could be both individual and group based.
**Acheivement** : help desk has closed 10000 tickets!!
**Acheivement** : newb teckie has closed his 10th ticket!
if you want to make it fun, then make it silly and random.
if you want warm fuzzy teammwork, dont treat people like dirt.
If you want to increase stats, promote an enabling environment. (try cutting out the useless work, listen to your employees)
oldhack: "Security is a waste of money until shit hits the fan. 5 minutes later, it becomes waste of money again. "
False, but hey, people like you don't needs to actually understand what people are talking about before chiming in.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I work for a large fortune 500 company and i was recently told by an org that if I did x, y and z I could then put a 'badge of honor' in my directory profile. So basically I could link to some .jpg that says "I'm a super contributor". Now my company already has the ability to reward people on the spot for a job well done. It's a token cash award and any manager can give them out (a couple hundred dollars).
I might as well walk around with ribbons on my chest for "blogger of the month, webserver team!"
"Punished By Rewards" by Alfie Kohn
Executive summary: Such programs are generally detrimental and stifle creativity
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
The only badge I'm interested in is whether your gonna give me more money or not, if you don't I'm not interesting in how many golden stars you as an employer are gonna give employee's unless it means sacking. If i do my job, I want to to be paid for it, if i do more then I'm expected too I "expect" to be paid for the extra, if not, well fuck the extra, find someone else to do it.
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Adding a bunch of arbitrary metrics on top of a game makes it worse, not better. It motivates people to do something they used to like like until they really hate it or they "complete" the task list, and completionism is basically OCD. Non-game activities aren't better subjects for being gamed. Why bother?
If you want a better job done, pay for better help. Don't pretend it's something it isn't.
People are motivated by things that interest and engage and matter to them, and also by money. Gamification, essentially a Skinner box, is none of these.
Perhaps this pandering is the real problem.
Why should two people, who are in different situations, be judged the same just because you want to handle an external situation? If my kids are a B then I expect to see a B, if a D, I want to see a D, if A, then I want to see the A. I, as a parent, can decide if a C is good enough or do I want to push my kid for a higher grade. But just because I can't feed my kid, or it takes effort just to get them to school, doesn't mean my kid deserves an A for effort!
Parents are having so much hot air blown up their asses they can't make logical decisions to help anymore, and/or don't believe their kids need help since little Johnny is doing so well. And on the flip side, the reason little Johnny is doing well is because Little Smart Sara is always picked to be his "team" partner for all their assignments (that then she does all the work) and gets a B they both get to share.
Little Johnny's parents think Little Johnny is doing great (afterall, they only got D's and B's are so much better); Little Sara feels screwed over and figures she's stupid since she can't quite get that A and gives up; or (the far worse case) realizes, hey, no matter how much work I do I can't get rewarded so might as well do the minimum and still get that B....
Then real life hits and they both realize that B is good for nothing and that the workplace won't care about your excuses (for Little Johnny) or for your laziness (for Little Sara) and then what? Two more for unemployment/welfare or taking the easy way out whenever they can, blaming everything and everyone else for their problems since that worked for the first 18 years of their lives? Basically, the only way for a student to win in this scenario is for the parents to pick a "good" school where the "stupidest" student is still above average.... To me, this means Private Schools; so basically, we are returning to Education for the Rich; with a bone tossed in for regular parents being "Free Babysitting"...
So, who is winning with this BS?
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It really depends on what you're motivating people to do, and who your employees are. If you have employees where you need to trust their judgement on what is a good use of their time; things like leaderboards can backfire when the best employees decide that the metric is for things like TPS reports.
No, I will not work for your startup
In a large corporation the reward system is very good at identifying who is in what clique, especially when employees are able to give out small piecemeal rewards to each other.
Gamification requires an objective. If it is to measure employee output, they will smell it. In reality some workers will never have the capacity of others, and you will make it publicly known, that's some bad karma heading your way. If we gamify employee efforts not the results then all can achieve highly if they put effort in, and you will get a very good measure of employee dedication. Another side effect will be employees enjoying work!
Really... just how much more are we going to infantilize our society? Does mummy & dada need to make sure their sweet wittle muffin gets their gold stars for doing WHAT THEY'RE BEING PAID TO DO?
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At the risk of sounding naïve, I've found the key to getting the best performance out of staff is treating them like human beings, being honest to them and actually giving a damn about what's going on in their lives. Does that always work? No, of course not. You'll occasionally strike someone whose performance in real life doesn't measure up to their potential, as indicated by their qualifications. But anyone who thinks there's some magic way to make every staff member work to the best of their ability all the time – whether it be game mechanics or something else – is dreaming.
The grades you get in university are a prize for doing well on tests and projects. The good job you get is a prize for the skills you've learned, the experience you've acquired and the network of business acquaintances you've developed. The money you earn is a prize for the work you do. Bonuses and raises are a prize for better work and loyalty. Retirement is your prize for have worked all your life, hopefully, to the benefit of society. Death is the end of the game be it the conclusion of your story or an early game-over.