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?"

Comments

What Is Being Measured?

[Iskender]

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.)

Re:What Is Being Measured?

[azalin]

It probably boils down to this: Are you sure by introducing rewards for certain things, you are really encouraging the kind of behavior you want for your team and company?
This is a already a serious problem with sales based bonuses. Measuring performance is difficult if you want to do it right.

Re:What Is Being Measured?

[Anonymous Coward]

This all reminds me of the tale I once heard of a Soviet-era nail factory.

The Workers had a quota of nails they had to fill, the output was some certain mass of nails, and once they filled that, they could pretty much take the rest of the month off. So, the manager being a clever sort, set his workers on the task of producing lots and lots of railroad spikes. Within a week they produced the quota, took the month off, and the manager was awarded the Medal of Lenin for filling his quota. The politburo, realizing what had happened, changed his quota for the next week. No longer was the gross indicator mass of nails produced, but rather the number of nails produced. The manager, still being the clever sort, switched the factory to producing thumb tacks... again, within a week, the factory had filled its quota, the workers got to go home, and the manager was awarded the Medal of Lenin.

The moral of the story, of course, being that you want to make sure what you're asking for and what you're motivating for, is actually what you want.

Re:What Is Being Measured?

[thesandtiger]

That is absolutely a problem. Or what about the very charismatic and friendly person that the customers absolutely love, but who is completely incompetent? They may be great at getting customers to like them but absolutely horrible at actually helping customers with their real problems.

I use Sprint for my cell service, and literally every time I speak to anyone with that company they let me know I'll be getting a customer service survey in a day or two and that they want me to give them the best scores. They specifically ask, "Will you do that for me?" because that kind of "pressure" will often work, and customers will feel like liars if they say yes then don't.

I have told the people asking me that kind of question that despite their performance being excellent, I will simply refuse to take the survey because that kind of "pressure" will wind up skewing the results and lead to real problems being hidden. I've told managers at stores the same thing, and did my little stick-it-to-the-man thing by emailing the Sprint CEO directly (since he has an allegedly public email address that he claims to read). It's a shame, actually, because by and large my interactions with their customer service have been really great, but there's no way for them to distinguish between someone who actually performs well and someone who guilts customers into saying they did.

The only metrics that are useful are ones where social engineering, sandbagging, and other kinds of artificial manipulation are removed from the equation. Unfortunately, for pretty much any job these days, those kinds of foolproof metrics are completely worthless since they don't measure anything worthwhile.

One way I've seen the problem addressed is a zero tolerance policy. A friend of mine works in the customer service group for a largish firm and they have stated that they will terminate, immediately, any employee found to be requesting good ratings or even mentioning that there will be a customer evaluation contact. Evaluations are handled by an entirely separate group so there isn't an opportunity for friends to fudge the numbers for other people, etc.

But even so, performance metrics are REALLY hard to create - much better to have managers who are actually good managers and good at evaluating performance than to have arbitrary systems.

Not at all.

[Alex Belits]

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.

Money is not really a motivator

[SuperKendall]

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.