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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.
"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.
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.
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.
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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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.)
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.
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 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.
The difference is that most military decorations are for bravery, valour and honour. For helping others rather than putting yourself first.
Actually, most US military decorations these days are for, um, showing up. When I was stationed in England, the RAF guys (who really have to earn their decorations; it's not unusual in the British military to go an entire career without earning more than a couple of ribbons) used to laugh their asses off at the amount of crap decorating our dress uniforms. And lest anyone think this is just an Air Force problem, I have a green uniform hanging in my closet too, and it's even gaudier than the blue one.
Personally I'd have been a lot happier with a lot fewer decorations, and the sense of having had to really earn the ones I had; most of the people I served with felt the same way. There's probably a lesson here for the corporate "gamifiers," but I can practically guarantee you they won't learn it.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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.
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.
According to Punished by Rewards , which cites many studies, it can also be counterproductive, especially in work that requires creativity or teamwork. The only creativity it appears to encourage long term is cheating. It's short term productive at best and long term counterproductive at worst (here's looking at you Wall Street).
Programmers in mirror are brighter than they appear
Badges? We don't need no stinkin' badges!
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.
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?
Bronze Star Medals have a lot of cache, so the officers got together and made those the end of tour awards for E7 and up. E6 and below got ARCOM's. Thing is, people who know, know that the BSM without a "V" device (for valor, indicating it's for a combat action) is just BS. I'm sure they'd go for higher awards, but you can get a BSM for non-combat action, and that's not true with higher awards what the Silver Star.
My experience was a bit odd. Getting an ARCOM with false information (maybe just confusion as to the part I played on that mission) for not getting NJP'd on the deployment is cool; but a Combat Action Badge for what I actually did during a rocket attack would somehow "cheapen" the award. However, it's not new. I remember my grandfather mentioning how messed up the award system was during WWII, and my guess is there's some dudes at Valley Forge that didn't get anything because they're Platoon SGT thought they were a shit bird.
It happened in the Marines, too, but it wasn't as bad, I think because promotion points weren't tied to awards. When they help you get promoted faster, there's more incentive to game the system to get more awards. Oh, well, I ETS'd a while back, so all those awards don't really mean a damn thing now, anyway.
Back when I was a kid you won and you got a prize. And if you didn't win you got jack. Yes, you lost. Suck it up, loser. Work harder and next time you'll be the one with the trophy.
The thing is, that theory didn't work so well. It bred a generation of people who think "Suck it up loser!" is a good thing to say.
Some people have potential in a given field, some people do not. Basketball players are naturally tall, long distance runners and sprinters are built differently. For more intellectual pursuits, some people are born more intelligent than others. Some have a gift for music, etc.
It's great that we have people that excel in different fields, and for these people success is it's own reward. Labelling people that are merely average as
losers, is the act of a dick.
Far better to encourage and help people to find out what they are best at, and then encourage them. At whatever level. Yes, even if they'll never be great at that thing they are best at.
Suppose you have a disabled child. What are you going to do? Call him a loser every day because he can't do the things his siblings can?
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