EXPERT VIEW

Joel Onyshuk, founder of Huddle Tech, Unisyn

Regardless of what sort of gamification you employ to engage, motivate, and focus your employees, several underlying needs exist to be addressed.

The employees must be able to know, in real-time (or at least daily), if they are winning or losing against their critical objectives and/or KPIs. Whether you are winning or losing changes the way you behave. You must have developed a community where communication is clear and open. Simply adding another tool or piece of tech isn’t the total solution but must be something that actively enables organization priorities.

As a result, there needs to be absolute clarity surrounding what those objectives and/or KPIs are, why they are important, how they benefit the company, and what’s in it for the employees (i.e., motivation) if they succeed. Organizations must understand what matters most and where effort drives maximum results. The idea of gamification, at its core, allows for keen focus on priorities that drive desired results. Without an understanding of where to focus, there is a risk of wasted effort and lackluster results.

Defining a corporate “obsession”, a major, time-constrained, and impactful goal, and then repackaging it in such a way that it motivates and engages the frontline teams is essential, and yet this critical step is missed by most organizations.

While gamifying work can improve company culture and results, it is ultimately unsustainable if there are not mechanisms in place to “operationalize” the deployment and daily review and recognition of the gamification and its positive outcomes.

Companies merely “throwing technology at a problem” will not see sustained results. Rather, companies must change the way they ultimately operate to 1) make the gamification part of the DNA of the company, 2) review actual performance, and regularly, 3) unlock collaboration between employees on solving problems that stand in the way of winning, and 4) celebrate, recognize, and reward great performances weekly (if not daily).

The most common daily opportunity that service industry companies may leverage to consistently “operationalize” these behaviors is during their daily team huddles or pre-service meetings. With the team gathered, reviewing their “match day” performance, gathering ideas for improvement, and celebrating prior performances can be rapidly delivered in just five to ten minutes, leaving ample time to review whatever other critical data must be shared with the group during that time.

GAMIFICATION: MYTH BUSTING

Perhaps you are considering the pros and cons of gamification and if its right for your business, here are some of the myths of gamification:

MYTH #1: Gamification can replace real world changes in company culture.

MYTH #2:

Gamification can only enhance what is already there, if what is offered to workers does not meet their basic needs, gamification will only go so far, it can entertain for a while, but it won’t create long term employee value.

Gamification is not a one stop solution; it requires understanding the business and its strategic goals as well as understanding employees needs to design an experience that will motivate and engage them. In other words, it is unique to the business, to the culture and to the people for that particular company and/or department.

MYTH #3:

As long as you have badges, points, and leaderboards, then you’ve got a good, gamified experience.

Many marketing and business specialists might assume that adding badges, points and leaderboard game elements creates a gamification experience. A quick google search on gamification at work will show that all the proposed solutions include 1) badges, points, and leaderboards (sometimes progress bars) and 2) some sort of digital game training program. However, to create a true gamification experience, it’s important to evaluate the extrinsic and intrinsic needs for each employee throughout their entire journey from job application to a long-term employee. This means that the game elements that are used need to be specific to the company context and the employees that work there.