Chapter 11

Game On! Driving Engagement with Gamification

In This Chapter

Defining gamification

Understanding what gamification does

Developing a gamification program

Gamification. Say the word, and chances are, the response will be, “Gesundheit!” The fact is, the term just hasn't made it to the mainstream vernacular — although I'm confident it will soon. Before August 2010, almost no one searched for the term gamification on Google. Since January 2011, however, searches for that term have spiked.

If the results of a 2012 survey by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project in conjunction with Elon University's Imagining the Internet Center is any indication, interest in gamification will continue to grow. According to the ensuing report, titled “The Future of Gamification,” 53 percent of respondents agreed that by 2020, there would be significant advances in the adoption and use of gamification. Their reasoning? As one respondent so aptly put it, “Playing beats working. So, if the enjoyment and challenge of playing can be embedded in learning, work, and commerce, then gamification will take off.”

They weren't the only ones. Gartner, the famous technology consultancy, predicts that by 2014, more than 70 percent of Global 2000 organizations will have at least one gamified application, and that by 2015, 50 percent of corporate innovation will be gamified. And Deloitte, another major consulting firm, included gamification as one of its Top 10 Technology Trends of 2012.

This chapter serves as a brief primer for gamification. If you're interested in finding out more, crack open Business Gamification For Dummies by Kris Duggan and Kate Shoup (Wiley).

Paging Mr. Webster: Defining Gamification

So, what is gamification? Simply put, gamification is the use of game mechanics and rewards in a non-game setting to increase user engagement and drive desired user behaviors. In part, the idea behind gamification is to tap into people's innate desire to play games to influence how they behave and what they do.

Sound creepy? Fair point. Yes, gamification can certainly be used to promote behaviors in which people may not otherwise engage. But the best gamification programs operate by rewarding people for behaviors they are already inclined to perform or are required to perform, increasing their engagement and enjoyment. In other words, gamification makes the things you have to do more fun. And by now, you should know that injecting fun in the workplace goes a long way toward increasing employee engagement.

To be clear, gamification isn't about creating a game. Instead, with gamification, you use game mechanics to enliven an existing experience — say, an employee training program, a company intranet, or a database application — making it more engaging. Note that the “experiences” listed here are digital in nature. These types of experiences are the focus of this chapter. That's not to say, however, that some principles of gamification can't be applied in a real-world setting. In fact, my fellow organizational development, facilitators, and training professionals and I have used a non-digital form of gamification for years when facilitating experiential exercises into our workshops. We learned years ago that that there are real benefits to injecting fun into our agendas. Engagement — and energy — always goes up!

But What Does It Do? Understanding What Gamification Does

Does your organization have low retention rates? Is your onboarding process a drag? Do you have trouble getting employees to collaborate, share knowledge, or keep records the way they should? All these problems stem from — you guessed it — a lack of engagement.

Enter gamification.

Gamification enables you to drive, measure, and reward high-value behaviors by employees. Game mechanics leverage design and behavioral psychology principles inherent in today's social games to drive and reward specific user behaviors in business environments. Smart gamification elements — such as points, achievements, levels, leaderboards, missions, and contests — can be employed to drive desired behaviors on virtually any enterprise application.

Your employees, like anyone, crave attention, recognition, approval, and rewards. With gamification, you feed this craving — and in the process convert employees into highly engaged collaborators and advocates.

Get with the Program! Developing a Gamification Program

Interested in applying gamification to your business? If so, the first thing you need to recognize is that gamification, like engagement, requires an investment of time to develop a multistep process to ensure success. Gamification is a program, not just a project. You can't just apply gamification for three months and call it a day — you need to invest in the strategy for the long term.

Developing a gamification program involves these broad steps:

• Pinpointing your business objectives
• Identifying the user behaviors that will drive your business objectives
• Choosing rewards
• Selecting game mechanics

Pinpointing your business objectives

For your gamification efforts to be successful, first you have to pinpoint your business objectives — what, exactly, you want to achieve. For example, maybe you want to speed up business processes. Or maybe your goal is to drive sales. Encouraging collaboration is another common aim, as is improving employee education and training and developing an effective onboarding process.

Whatever your objective, gamification can help you meet it — while at the same time fostering engagement! For details, read on.

Speeding up business processes

Most business software, though designed to automate business processes, still relies on human participation. For example, companies such as Oracle, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, and others offer sales, financial, and communications technology to help businesses run more efficiently. Quite frequently, though, actual humans must input and manage the data. Often, they don't do so well, resulting in lost productivity and diminishing the value of the extremely expensive software.

For example, consider a support organization in which a key business process is the opening and closing of support tickets in a service desk application. Using gamification, you could recognize key behaviors such as opening a support ticket and closing one. After the behavior tracking is in place, the system could reward high-performing employees. In the end, the result would almost certainly be an increase in the rate of closing those tickets, and in engagement in general.

Driving sales

Gamification can reward people for performing key business processes in sales applications and, in doing so, speed them up. For example, in a sales application, sales teams must manage their leads and opportunities by inputting critical data points. By measuring and tracking desired behaviors, you can set milestones and showcase success on a leaderboard. The social pressure to succeed can help drive adherence to company processes. They'll naturally fill out more lead forms, creating more opportunities for the business.

Encouraging knowledge sharing and collaboration

As companies have observed the power of social sites like Facebook, Twitter, and even Wikipedia, they've tried to apply similar principles in their own organizations by providing internal social networks, blogs, wikis (websites that allow for the collaborative edit of content by users), and other technologies to promote knowledge sharing across the workforce. But more often than not, the workforce tends not to use them. According to Forrester Research, such tools are adopted by only 12 percent of the workforce.

Why not? One reason is that people are resistant to change. They're used to e-mail and their other creature comforts. They also believe knowledge is power, and they aren't terribly inclined to surrender that power to others. Using gamification, companies can champion employees who leverage these types of collaborative applications. As people share valuable knowledge, other employees can benefit. Improving knowledge sharing and collaboration can also speed up productivity — another common business objective.

Improving training and education

At many companies, people must complete various training courses online. The problem is, no one wants to actually complete these courses. In fact, sometimes it seems as if the age-old instinct to play hooky becomes more powerful than ever when you're faced with the prospect of completing online training. By leveraging gamification programs, companies can acknowledge and champion employees who complete important training.

Aiding with onboarding

These days, to get started at a new company, employees must move through a mountain of paper or digital paperwork (see Chapter 14). By gamifying certain processes along the way — for example, filling out forms, completing compliance training, and learning about key company policies — companies can improve the rate at which these tasks are completed.

Identifying desired behaviors

Next you have to determine which user behaviors will drive the objectives you identified. Put simply, behaviors are the foundation of all gamification programs. Once key behaviors are identified, you can determine which game mechanics are most likely to drive those behaviors and reward users for performing those behaviors — that's what gamification is all about.

Here's a list of the aforementioned business objectives, along with behaviors that may drive them:

• Speeding up business processes: The specific behaviors associated with speeding up business processes will vary depending on the business and the process. For the sake of example, suppose you run a service department that responds to customer complaints. The key behaviors associated with speeding up business processes may include responding to an issue, resolving the issue, and updating records associated with the issue. For even better results, you could upgrade these behaviors from simple ones to more complex ones by being more specific, with time as your qualifier: responding to an issue within 30 minutes, resolving the issue within 24 hours, and updating records associated with the issue within three days.
• Driving sales: Key behaviors in sales include calling, e‐mailing, or meeting with a customer; responding to a lead; following up on a lead; converting a lead into an opportunity; and closing a deal (with extra credit for larger deals). As with speeding up business processes, you may see even better results by upgrading some of these behaviors from simple ones to complex ones — again, with time as your qualifier: responding to a lead within 30 minutes, following up on a lead within three days, and converting a lead to an opportunity within three weeks.
• Encouraging knowledge sharing and collaboration: Behaviors associated with knowledge sharing and collaboration include asking questions on the company intranet, answering questions, voting on answers, and receiving votes for your answers.
• Improving training and education: Relevant behaviors in this area include starting a training course, advancing to the next module of a course, answering questions correctly, and completing the course. Arguably, that last behavior — completing the course — is the most important one. For that, you could offer an extra‐special reward or broadcast that the employee has earned some type of certification. By leveraging gamification programs, companies can acknowledge and champion employees who complete training.
• Aiding with onboarding: With regard to onboarding, these behaviors are likely the ones that count: reading about company policies; completing compliance training; filling out HR forms; setting up health insurance, 401(k), and retirement benefits; and exploring the company's culture.

Gamifying these behaviors — or, really, just about any behaviors — can be even more effective if you make the results visible to other employees in the company. When everyone across the company can see who is being recognized for a behavior, more employees tend to adopt the behavior. This is thanks to a little thing middle-school counselors call “peer pressure.”

Choosing rewards

Even the mere hope of receiving a reward — even a really lousy one — can motivate a person to perform a desired behavior. Why? Oddly, it's not the reward itself that's motivating; instead, it's the achievement tied to the reward. That is, the reward acts to validate the achievement. It makes sense, then, that successful gamification hinges on the use of rewards (preferably good ones).

In a gamification program, rewards can be divided into three categories:

• Recognition
• Privileges
• Monetary rewards

Conferring recognition

Pretty much everyone wants to be recognized for their achievements. Indeed, recognition is part of just about every type of competition on the planet. (You'll learn much more about recognition in Chapter 17.) Recognition for completing a task or accomplishing a goal not only feeds this basic human need, it also encourages engagement and increases repetition — both of which are probably in your list of business objectives. In a gamified environment, you can recognize your users in a couple different ways:

• Reputation: For some users, it's all about reputation. These employees are intrinsically motivated by esteem. They want to be respected. Rewarding these users for their expertise is key — assuming, of course, that their expertise relates to your area of business. By rewarding employees for expertise, you enable them to develop a reputation.
• Status: Whereas reputation is tied to expertise and a body of work, status refers to the relative position of one individual compared to another, with those having a higher position or rank being conferred greater status. In a gamified environment, status is often tied to valuable behaviors that support a company's business objectives.

A great way to confer status (and, for that matter, reputation) is through the use of badges. If you were ever a Boy Scout or a Girl Scout, then you're already familiar with the idea behind badges, such as the Stamp Collecting, Bugling, and ever-useful Nuclear Science merit badges available to scouts nationwide. To quote Merriam-Webster, a badge is “an emblem awarded for a particular accomplishment.” Badges can be physical (like the aforementioned merit badges, which are sewn onto scout uniforms) or virtual (like the badges earned on various websites). As you can guess, the latter is more common in gamification programs — even the most loyal employees typically don't want to sew badges on their clothes.

Giving privileges

Although some users prefer to be rewarded with reputation or status, others will be more motivated by receiving privileges. These may include the following:

• VIP access: Giving your top employees access to key personnel is a great way to reward, engage, and motivate them. For example, you may offer lunch with the chairman of the board, general manager, or district VP to employees who reach a certain score in your gamification program.
• Moderation powers: One way to reward users is to empower them. For example, on an intranet forum, you may endow your top thread starters with the power to moderate the site. This is doubly excellent, because the user is typically thrilled to take on this responsibility, and you essentially receive free labor. As Wikipedia has taught us, people will work for nothing if they're intrinsically motivated to do so. Giving users powers over the general riffraff is also a way of conferring status.
• Stronger votes: To quote George Orwell: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” Which is why you may decide to give some of your users stronger votes — on an intranet site in which content is voted up or down, for example.

Giving monetary rewards

Some users will certainly be satisfied with recognition and privileges, but others may hold out for more tangible benefits. These benefits are typically monetary in nature but could also involve free stuff.

These are not bonus programs, and the monetary rewards should always be nominal in value. As the Enrons of the world have proven, if you inject too much value in rewards, you'll encourage cheating.

Here are a couple examples of monetary rewards:

• Discounts: If you're in the business of manufacturing or selling a consumer product, you may give top performers a special price break on items in your catalog.
• Prizes: Prizes can be literally anything, from a wee food item to an American Express gift certificate. But the easiest type of prize to give is whatever you have on hand. Are you an electronics retailer? Then electronics are the logical choice as prizes. Another good type of prize is one that broadcasts your brand — say, a coffee mug or baseball cap with your logo. This is a form of tri‐branding (see Chapter 10), where you'll be encouraging key stakeholders to brand on your firm's behalf.

Although prizes generate buzz and excitement, offering even humble amounts can be expensive in the aggregate, and may not result in a lasting engagement or even positive feelings on the part of employees. This is especially true if the prize is stuff rather than an experience. That is, if someone wins a TV, that TV will likely decrease in value (emotionally speaking) over time. In contrast, if someone wins a weekend away, the trip will increase in value due to the happy memories that result.

Selecting game mechanics

Game mechanics are the components of a game — the tools employed by game designers to generate and reward activity among players (or, in the case of a gamification program, employees, customers, or other users). Most gamification programs leverage game mechanics in one way or another.

When it comes to game mechanics, various tools are available to you, each designed to elicit a specific reaction from players. These tools, which can be combined in infinite ways to create a broad spectrum of responses and experiences, include the following:

• Points
• Leaderboards
• Levels
• Missions, challenges, and quests
• Feedback

In addition, you'll want to consider anti-gaming mechanisms. We cover all these subjects in this section.

Points

Points help users know they're in a gamified environment and that many of the small behaviors they take along the way are being recognized at a system level. Companies running gamification programs use points to spur desired behaviors. These points can then be compiled into a score. To really drive desired behaviors, game designers can weight points. Weighting points means awarding more points for those behaviors deemed more valuable or that require more effort.

Leaderboards

Winning is great. But you know what's even better? When everyone else knows you won. That's the power of the leaderboard. A leaderboard is a board that displays the names and scores of current “competitors” in a gamified system. Companies with robust gamification cultures may even consider adding these scores to their balanced scorecard! Alternatively, a leaderboard may simply indicate a person's ranking in the system without noting the scores of others.

Recognizing that achievement is super important, the purpose of a leaderboard is to show people where they rank. Those at the top enjoy the notoriety it brings; as for everyone else, the leaderboard shows them where they stand relative to their peers. Building friendly competition is a key cog in a high-performing culture.

Often, the very presence of a leaderboard can elicit the desire to play. The simple goal of rising up the rankings serves as a powerful motivator to continue. People like to keep score. Understanding this and providing easy ways to do it is a great way to foster engagement. For some, the mere sight of their rank on the leaderboard is all the reward they seek.

Levels

Anyone who has ever played Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, or Angry Birds (or, for that matter, pretty much any electronic game ever) is familiar with the concept of levels. After you conquer one level, you move on to the next one. Each level constitutes a sub-game of sorts, often with different types of obstacles and tools at the player's disposal, and typically more and more difficult.

A gamified experience doesn't employ levels in quite the same way as arcade games do. If your goal is to gamify your company intranet, users won't, for example, suddenly see their whole screen change to offer a new set of challenges the moment they “level up.” Instead, gamified systems more closely mirror role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons, where a level is effectively a rank that corresponds to the player. It's earned through accomplishments and represents additional privileges or abilities.

So, if players don't level up by rescuing a princess from a giant gorilla, how do they level up in a gamification system? In a gamified system, the change in level occurs when the user reaches a set point threshold, often indicated by the reward of a new badge.

Levels serve two important roles in gamification systems:

• They indicate progress. Proceeding from one level to the next gives players a sense of satisfaction.
• They convey status. A player who has reached level 42 of your system can reasonably be considered more expert than someone who has failed to advance beyond level 7.

It's a good idea to make the first few levels easier to attain because that encourages users to participate more often. The highest levels may require extended usage over a longer period.

Missions, challenges, and quests

Mission, challenge, and quest are essentially different words for the same thing. They require users to perform a prescribed set of actions, following a guided path of your design. A mission, challenge, or quest may involve a single step (for example, completing necessary paperwork during the onboarding process) or several steps — even as many as 20. Often, missions are about discovery or education.

Sometimes, the actions in a mission must occur in a certain order; these missions are called progression missions. Other times, actions can occur in any order; these are called random missions. The tasks in a mission may revolve around the same behavior (reading five posts, for example), or could be an around-the-world variety, where different behaviors are performed (for example, reading a post, commenting on a post, and adding your own post).

As each action is completed, the player is generally given a reward. The player is also given a reward — usually status based — when the mission is complete. At the same time, the next mission is unlocked. Successive missions contain harder-to-earn rewards. From the player's point of view, completing missions is a lot like leveling up in a particular topic. As the player completes each mission, her perceived status will likely increase.

A track is a collection of missions. Like missions, tracks can be ordered or unordered, although if the track centers around expertise, ordered tracks are the way to go. Why? Because the ordered progression of missions represents increasing mastery or advancement in a particular topic or specialization. In other words, the user must complete the first mission before progressing to the second mission, and so on.

Feedback

One way to encourage engagement in your gamification program is to broadcast well-written, helpful, engaging onscreen feedback in the form of real-time notifications within the game system and/or via e-mail when users perform a desired behavior, level up, unlock a reward, or need to complete an additional behavior in order to earn their next reward.

Notifications may appear in the user's activity feed or as a small pop-up on the screen and can become increasingly sophisticated, triggered by any behavior or series of behaviors. Often — especially in gamification systems that involve daunting goals — feedback can keep players from feeling paralyzed, as if no progress is being made.

Don't go crazy with feedback, or you'll likely overwhelm your user.

Anti-gaming mechanics

Sadly, people can be jerks. (Not you, obviously.) Which is why you can rest assured that at least one bozo out there will try to game your system — that is, attempt to cheat or to earn points by exploiting loopholes. If it could happen throughout the banking system, as it did in 2008 and 2009, it can happen with your gamification program.

For example, suppose you offer a free T-shirt to all employees who earn 10,000 points. Suppose further that users receive 10 points for each page view on your company intranet. Users may attempt to game your system by simply clicking page after page after page. They're not really doing what you want them to do — reading the content and interacting with it — they're just clicking to increase their points.

Fortunately, you can apply various anti-gaming mechanisms to thwart them. Don't worry — unlike with matter and anti-matter, applying game mechanics alongside anti-gaming mechanics won't cause an explosion. But it will enable you to prevent users from gaming your system.

Here are a few anti-gaming mechanics to consider:

• Cool‐downs: If you follow IndyCar racing, you may be familiar with the push‐to‐pass feature. When a driver presses the push‐to‐pass button on his steering wheel, the car receives extra horsepower for a few seconds, enabling the driver to pass the car ahead (or defend against one creeping up from behind). So, what's stopping the driver from pressing that button all the time? Simple. IndyCar officials implemented a cool‐down mechanism. After the button has been pressed, drivers must wait a certain period of time before pressing it again.

  A similar approach is used as an anti‐gaming measure. With cool‐downs, you wait a certain period of time before rewarding a behavior. For example, if you reward users for visiting a page, you might require a 30‐second gap between each page view. This increases the likelihood that users are actually doing what you want them to do — in this case, reading the content on the page.

• Rate limiting: Using that same push‐to‐pass example, IndyCar officials took further steps to ensure that drivers didn't spend all their time with their fingers on the push‐to‐pass button by limiting the number of times they could press it per race (or, in some cases, limiting the total amount of time per race the button could be depressed).

  Similarly, to prevent users from gaming your system, you might limit the number of times you reward a behavior over a certain period of time. For example, you might decide to reward players 10 points for each view — but you might limit the number of points rewarding that behavior to 50 per day, 20 per hour, 10 per minute, or what have you.

  This approach does have a negative aspect: It could discourage users for accessing additional content. So, just be sure to strike a balance.

• Count limiting: Another option is to limit the total number of times a user is rewarded for performing a certain behavior, ever. For example, you could set things up such that users receive a reward for visiting a particular page just once.

In addition to these approaches, you can also manually remove points from problem players’ totals and remove problem players from your leaderboards. (That'll learn ’em!) You can also set up your system to measure behaviors that are harder to fake — for example, receiving votes from other users.