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

It is like TPS cover sheets.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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?

[Anonymous Coward]

With respect to programming, Tom DeMarco has written at some length about the hazards of software metrics, eg. in "Controlling Software Projects". Whatever it is you measure, you'll get more of it -- but that won't necessarily be the same thing as the sublime Quality you were hoping for.

If you "gamify" (ugly word) a system, it will be gamed.

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.

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.

Re:Money is not really a motivator

[jimbolauski]

Gold stickers, cash, pats on the back all do very little to motivate a worker, what it comes down to is the workers pride in what they do. Everything else is in the noise when compared to a person's own work ethic. No amount of external reward will ever be enough to motivate a lazy person to work hard, a manager's job is to enable his employees to do their job. We hired a group of folks recently because the company they were working for insisted that the control system that they were developing use windows because every computer had to have windows. The manager took his group and the contract over to us because he wasn't going to deal with converting 5 years of custom software that worked perfectly fine on Linux over to windows.