gamification

How Google is using the principles of Success Tracking

Nick Shah News , ,

An email from the team at Google Maps landed in my inbox recently.  I knew that it was a “robo-generated” email, and yet I got engaged.  The title of the email grabbed my attention first – “Your  review is making a difference”.  As I looked at it further and digested fully the message, I realised that Google was using the 5 core principles of Success Tracking

So, here’s how:

This bit of the email shows that I have opted-in to receive the success tracking report (score)

And the main part of the email shows how Google are adhering to no prizes, a simple score, storified content and positive score keeping

This is a great example of how just relevant feedback, storified and positive, is driving my behaviour change.

Great to see #success tracking at work.

 

Gamifying the gamification industry

Toby Beresford Customer News , , ,

This is a guest post by two of the Gamification Gurus, Pete Jenkins and Vasilis Gkogkidis, describing how Rise is being used to motivate gamification professionals to be more active on social media.

Introduction

Recently the Success Tracking University was launched by Toby Beresford (https://successtracking.teachable.com/blog/962609/launching).

When we read about it we immediately wanted to help spread the word by sharing some of our experiences with numerical feedback and how it can change behaviour. We have used numerical feedback as a tool to motivate users in a lot of projects we have designed or part of as it can be a quite powerful tool if used right.

In this blog post, we will talk about how Rise, a company that Toby Beresford founded, engages and motivates gamification professionals to be more active on social media. The aim of this case study is to have a look at how numerical feedback made us feel as users and changed our behaviour.

One way to use Rise is as a tool to make a leader board and keep track of how well players are doing on their social media and online presence.

The leader board we participate in is called Gamification Gurus Power 100 (https://www.rise.global/gurus) and monitors how well participants are doing on their social media. The metrics include Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn interaction with the audience as well how many blog posts you uploaded for the month.

We will start by explaining how leader boards work as a game mechanic and what effect they have on the players and on audiences watching the players. Then we will list the goals behind this leader board and how it promotes the gamification industry.

How do leader boards work

The sole purpose of leader boards is to introduce competition among the players. Let’s take a sport like Tennis as an example. Let’s have a look at the Men’s Singles leader board for 2017.

Screenshot 2017-08-29 09.58.24.png
Table 1: Source: http://www.espn.com/tennis/rankings

We need to keep in mind again that a leader board works on three levels:

  1. it helps the designer of the system to reach the goals of the project,
  2. it motivates and rewards players and;
  3. engages and informs the audience that follows the sport and the leader board.

Let’s break this leader board down and analyse it to see how it works on each of these levels. Going from left to right, the first thing we see is the rank of the players and their name. It may seem obvious but it’s important to have numbers indicating the ranking every player occupies on the leader board. Being number one is a matter of status, I want to see the number 1 next to my name if I am first on the leader board. The same goes for the audience, they want to know who is the best at their favourite sport. By giving this information first the designer of the leader board awards status to the players and informs the audience about who is the best at what they are interested in.

Next element of this leader board is a list of flags indicating where each player comes from and which country they represent. The designer here wants to remind us that Tennis is a sport that people play all over the world. It’s not a national but rather an international phenomenon and each player represents his or her country. Players feel proud to represent their country of course and audiences from these countries are proud to see their flag up there on the leader board.

Third element is the movement of players and how many places they went up or down the leader board. This element shows the progress of players in time. Maybe I was third last month but now I managed to climb to number one or two. It’s important to show how stable player’s performance is. The best players always perform well over a long period of time.

Finally, we have points! Points are rewarded to players for playing the game. The better they play, the more points they get and they perform better than their competitors. This is the element that determines the ranking in every leader board. This is the numerical feedback we have been talking about. Points can be very useful because we can quantify performances based on them. You can see how many wins each player made throughout the year and how many times he lost.

What does the Gamification Gurus Power 100 achieve?

Let’s have a look now at how numerical feedback helps the gamification industry grow by changing behaviours.

A leader board that rewards people to share good content online related to gamification works on three levels as well. First, we have the designer (Toby Beresford in our case) that wants to motivate gamification professionals to share content regularly to grow the industry and create a buzz around it and around Rise, which is his product and he wants to demonstrate its usefulness.

Then we have the players, the gamification professionals that their reward is status that helps them boost their profile in the gamification community. I also think that getting credit from your peers when you share something useful is very motivating. The same goes for some of the conversations that start online and the information you may get on a new project you didn’t know about.

We can’t forget the audience of course. People that want to know more about gamification and they can have a look at the leader board to know who to ask for some information and knowledge on gamification.

Getting numerical feedback from this leader board has really changed the way we think about our social media. We all know that it’s very good to promote good content on social media and have active profiles that help you promote your work.

Participating in the Gamification Gurus leader board though, has really changed the way we use social media. We now feel that we get something extra for being active and for creating engaging content.

As we mentioned earlier, points can really help you analyse a performance and see what you need to improve and of course how well other people are doing on the same thing. Curiosity is in all of us and can motivate us to participate in something to see how good we are compared to other people.

We hope you enjoyed our small case study, if you want to know more about us please have a look at https://gamificationplus.uk/ and find us on Twitter: @petejenkins and @v_gkogkidis

PS. Editor’s note: you might be interested to see that Pete has increased his score from 24 this time last year to 73 (out of 100) on the Gamification Gurus, and Vasilis has increased his from 31 to 65:

Screenshot 2017-08-29 10.04.25.png
Pete Jenkins Gamification Gurus Score. Source: https://www.rise.global/gurus/p/2249879
Screenshot 2017-08-29 10.06.49.png
Vasilis Gkogkidis Gamification Guru Score. Source: https://www.rise.global/gurus/p/5916048/r/2526853

The Success Tracking Difference (3) : Self-Management

Toby Beresford Design Tips , , , , , , ,

In this mini-series, “The Success Tracking Difference“, we are focusing on the differences between the new discipline of Success Tracking and traditional analytics / business dashboards.

ben-warren-212050.jpg
Success Tracking enables introspection and self optimisation. Photo by Ben Warren

In Wayne Eckerson’s book, Performance Dashboards: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Your Business he describes 3 types of performance dashboards:

  1. operational dashboards that enable front-line workers and supervisors to track core operational processes
  2. tactical dashboards that help managers and analysts track and analyse departmental activities, processes and projects
  3. strategic dashboards that let executives and staff chart their progress toward achieving strategic objectives

Each type of dashboard offers three sets of related functionality – monitoring, analysis and management but in different degrees. For example operational dashboards focus more on monitoring, tactical dashboards help users analyse the root causes and strategic dashboards focus on achievement of overall management goals.

Instead of being focused on a traditional command and control management structure, the Success Tracking approach recognises staff to active participants in their own management. We want to see staff discover autonomy, mastery and purpose.

To enable, this a Success Tracking dashboard blends Eckerson’s three types of dashboards from the point of view of the user not the manager.

In success tracking we are now doing requiring all three performance dashboard types – monitoring ourselves, analysing our patterns of behaviour and managing our own progress journey.

This is different from the traditional approach where only an operational dashboard is given to staff. Each staff member is expected to monitor specific activities but is not being asked to take a wider view. Someone monitoring activity isn’t expected to ask “is what I’m doing as effective as I could be? Does it help me reach my overall goal?”

Real time isn’t that important

One side effect of this is that real time information, as is usually associated with monitoring use cases, can get in the way of analysis best practice. Instead freezing the data into periodic “releases” is more helpful. This means we can faithfully compare this week’s performance with last week’s for example.

Introspection and analysis requires time set aside to look at the data from a wider perspective. By notifying staff on a regular timetable – say the same time each week – you encourage the formation of analysis habits, setting aside time to consider progress.

Key takeaway

The key though to understanding and planning your success tracking program is think of it from the “player point of view” – how does this help someone achieve their epic win? how does the dashboard show them how they are progressing on the journey? how does it allow them to self-optimise?

 

7 ways to train for your dream job – lessons learned.

Toby Beresford Customer News , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

7 ways to Train for dream jobCareer development isn’t something most of us do very well. Our horizons are all too often limited to the career progression offered by our current organisation, our bosses job or perhaps a dreamy, unfocused vision of turning our hobby into a day job.

Even in well run organisations, career progression is only properly discussed in an annual performance review and tends to be narrowly focused on roles within the current business unit. Of course this makes sense, there are few rewards for HR and managers who “outplace” cost effective and high performing staff!

However in the digital age, employees no longer need to accept the status quo. Just a mouse click away are the informal learning resources and opportunities for us to take our career in a new direction – we just need the guts to try.

In this post I want to talk about the journey of Andrzej Marczewski who in 2011 set out on a journey to leave his job as an intranet manager to become a leading gamification consultant. It took him 5 years but he eventually achieved his dream job!

To do so he used a number of informal learning methods, not provided by his then employer, that brought him success. We can learn from the route he took.

In his own words, the tools he used were:

Social Media

“Social media was the key to getting really going as it gave me access to people who had the same interests as me and could point me in the direction of what to read to learn more – as well as being willing to teach me directly. If social media didn’t exist, there would have been no chance at all for my work to get me noticed.”

Books and Papers

“I read up on game design, with books such as The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell and A Theory of Fun from Raph Koster. I researched the psychology of rewards from papers by the likes of Deci and Ryan, but also from more “pop” books like Nudge and Drive.”

MOOC Courses

“Kevin Werbach released his Coursera MOOC course on gamification. I wish this had been around in 2011 as it was a great way to validate a lot of what I had been doing.”

Blogging

“I started to write about my version of gamification and my views… I continued to research and produce content on a weekly basis and just kept gaining traction.”

Meetups

“I went to meetups and events about gamification as often as I could and eventually started to speak at them. I remember my first Gamifiers Meetup talk with abject horror. I spoke at conferences such as the Gamification World Congress which helped with exposure greatly. ”

Success Tracking

“By 2012 I was getting fairly established, I had started to be a regular in the Gamification Gurus top 10. I have to give credit to being on the Gurus leaderboard as well, for better or worse it provided good exposure over the years!”

Moonlighting

“I did a little bit of gamification consultancy on the side, but it was not until 2016 that I finally broke into gamification as a career – 5 years after I started making a move on the industry!”

So those are the some great lessons learned!

For me, the most interesting aspect was how Andrzej used the Gamification Gurus Rise board to track his social media success. The board tracks his blogging activity, engagement with his twitter content and the reach of his talks using Slideshare. By optimising all three of these metrics, over time Andrzej was able to reach the top 10 and improve his online social presence. Having such a strong online presence in the sector was a big benefit to his prospective employers looking to offer expert advice to their clients. Success Tracking in action!

andrzej marczewski.png
Andrzej Marczewski is now a Senior Solution Consultant focused on gamification at Motivait and continues to blog at www.gamified.uk.

Reflections on using Rise to support conference-based gamification

Nick Shah Customer News , ,

This is a guest blog from:

Fiona MacNeill, Learning Technologies Adviser, University of Brighton and UCISA Digital Capabilities committee member. AboutMe: http://about.me/fmacneill Twitter: @fmacneill

In early June I had the pleasure of implementing a conference-wide gamification activity in support of the UCISA Digital Capabilities event. The event took place at MediaCity, Salford; a vibrant and engaging venue for an event stocked-full of innovative ideas. The event focused on showcasing successful practices for supporting academic staff and learners in their use of technology within further and higher education. Another goal of the event was to highlight findings from the recent Digital Capabilities survey. So when a member of the event organising committee, Iain Cameron (University of Aberdeen, and UCISA Digital Capabilities committee), mentioned the idea of a Twitter selfie (or Twelfie) competition as part of the proceedings; Rise immediately came to my mind as the right tool for the job! I had encountered Rise before at a demo at the International Confex event in 2013 and then again during the Mahara 2014 Hui held at the University of Brighton.

The rules of the game were simple and already outlined for me by the organisers. One point was awarded for original selfies; @mentions; and retweets featuring the #udigcap hashtag. Two points were awarded to reward the befriending behaviours needed to: take selfies with another delegate; take selfies with a speaker; and take selfies with organisers. Three points were awarded for imaginative selfies; selfies with passing celebrities who work or visit the television studios of MediaCity; and a selfie with a famous landmark. Although the game was simple, we entered into it with a sense of playfulness, completed by my donning the literal udig-Cap on my head, to signify my position as the twelfie official! Here’s the photo evidence

Leaderboard-cropped

Benefits

Observed positive effects of using Rise Leaderboard:

  • Rise really stoked attendee engagement via Twitter. There were around 90 tweets that included twelfies. Overall, there were almost 1200 tweets related to the event, many of which were a direct result of attendees taking part in the Leaderboard.

TweetFeed

  • The competition called for attendees to take photos of themselves with other attendees, speakers and celebrities. This encouraged both in-person and online engagement.

TweetFeedwphoto

  • The twelfie competition promoted a sense of fun and resulted in crowdsourced documentation of the event proceedings. The documentation is now archived as a Storify
    • The competition boosted discursive engagement and publicised the twitter feed prior to the event. This was largely achieved by some pre-conference challenges where attendees were asked to take engaging photographs of their journey to the conference.

TweetFeedwphoto2

Top tips for using Rise in a conference situation

  1. Our photo-based metrics meant that we had to do a lot of manual scoring. I suggest using a wider variety of metrics, including a mixture of automatic metrics derived from twitter polling and manual metrics.
  2. I recommend linking a Google doc to the active leaderboard to enable simpler player addition and
  3. Limit the number of times a certain metric can be scored. We found that some of the twelfies became repetitive, as there was not a limit on the number of times that a twelfie could be scored.
    • Include some wildcard activities to promote positive conference behaviour:
      • g. tweet and tag someone whom you met at lunchtime (with their permission);
      • engage in the conference treasure hunt and tweet what you found etc.
  1. Take greater advantage of the need for the human superviser, or games-master, and consider using them to lead tweet-ups of certain topics raised during the event. These could also have point-awarding options.
  2. Consider day-by-day scoring and options for remote attendees and second day attendees.
  3. Points for @mentions of anything other than the conference hashtag, can affect the quality of tweets’ written content due to the character limit. Best to keep it to one @mention metric.
    Add players in advance of the conference, if possible.
  4. Having clearly defined board release times was a good strategy and led to a sense of anticipation, e.g. breaks worked well as times to release and show the updated leaderboard. Leave at least 10 minutes for the polls to complete and to release the board. I owe this idea to Katie Piatt (University of Brighton), who used this strategy to great effect at the 2014 Mahara Hui.

Future ideas

As I contemplate gamification at the next iteration of the Digital Capabilities event I have been considering how the competitive element could be developed further. Here are a few ideas, although I won’t go into specifics, as I don’t want to give the game away in advance!

  • Make awards unexpected – as Daniel Pink, explains in his 2010 book, Drive expected extrinsic rewards can negatively affect performance (pp. 63-70). Therefore adding some unexpected rewards for completed tasks could add value. However these rewards will not be itemised on the rules list, so a disclaimer about judge discretion may be helpful!
  • Reward introverts as well as extroverts – one of the best conferences that I have ever attended was Eyeo Festival based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA (http://eyeofestival.com). Eyeo is an awe-inspiring event focusing on data visualisation, interactivity and maker ethics. However in the midst of all the flashy stuff, in the two years that I attended they had quiet spaces where one could engage in puzzles and inventions related to the event, sans supervision or sales influence. This was an invaluable opportunity to play and learn. Having an area in a conference like this provides time for time-out and inspiration as well as hidden scoring opportunities!
  • An idea inspired by Jane McGonigal’s book, Reality is Broken (2012): we allow attendees to +1 each other. This is like an in-person analogy of a “favorite” star or a “like” thumbs-up, but because it is real, perhaps it means even more within the context of the event. I like the idea of using physical +1s (think cardboard cutouts the size of a plate) which could become the subject of a selfie; a nice option for camera shy attendees.
  • Finally this is an idea that I owe to Pete Jenkins (http://gamificationplus.uk), who suggested making the next iteration of our competition, a team-based activity. Rise Leaderboard can support this mode of use. The concept is that player interest will be more sustained if they are contributing to a group effort, as opposed to seeing individuals rapidly ascend up the leaderboard and losing the will to compete due to very high leading scores. In the team model points can still be awarded individually for small activities and these can contribute to the collective team score.

Well, I for one am excited about the next Digital Capabilities event!

References

McGonigal, J. (2012). Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. London: Vintage.

Pink, D. H. (2010). Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Edinburgh: Canongate Books.

Telfest 2015 conference uses Rise to enhance conference participation and crowd-source content on social media for non-attendees

Nick Shah Customer News , , , ,

This is a guest post by Farzana Latif, posted first on 29th Sept 2015 here

During September 2015’s TELFest (a week long festival consisting of workshops, discussions and drop-in sessions related to Technology Enhanced Learning) we introduced a leaderboard to enhance participation throughout the event, and to encourage the use social media to share experiences amongst colleagues that were unable to attend. Having experienced the leaderboard at the UCISA Spotlight on Capabilities Conference in June, I was interested in using it to introduce ideas related to Gamification, and bring an extra element of fun, to TELFest. The leaderboard is generated by a website called rise.global, which automatically calculates the scores for tweets that contain a specific hashtag, and, following some pointers from Fiona MacNeil who had set it up for the UCISA event, I set up a leaderboard for TELFest. Given the aims behind using the leaderboard, I decided that points should be primarily awarded for tweeting with the #TELFest hashtag and there were additional points for attending drop in sessions and tweeting TELfie’s (TELfest selfies). Below is a breakdown of the points that could be earned:

Tweets with the #TELFest hashtag 1 point
Being Mentioned by someone else 2 points
Having your  #TELFest Posts Retweeted 3 points
Tweeting a TELFie with the hashtag  #TELFest (TELFest, Selfie) 3 points
Attending a drop in session 5 points

Each day we saw the top tweeters changing positions and there was healthy competition amongst TELFest participants.

To keep tweeters motivated, automated tweets were sent out every evening, informing them of their position on the leaderboard.

Twitter activity increased significantly compared to September 2014, there was a tenfold increase in the overall number tweets, a tripling of the number of tweeters and, on the Friday, TELFest trended in the Sheffield area, meaning that it was promoted to local users on the main twitter interface.


An additional benefit of promoting the use of Twitter through the leaderboard was that it helped to capture the variety of views and opinions shared by participants during the event. We were then able to use the tweets to create daily blog posts summarising these discussions using Storify, allowing us to produce a record of the day’s events for participants to look back on and to give some insight into the discussions for those unable to attend.

While the leaderboard was highlighted during the Gamification session as an example of a method to encourage participation and motivate learners, it is hard to say whether, in this case, the leaderboard led to an objective increase in Twitter usage. Early feedback indicates that its’ introduction did motivate some people to tweet more than they might ordinarily, yet others stated that they were unaware of the board. Another reason why the increase in the use of Twitter at TELFest this year cannot be solely attributed to the leaderboard is that we integrated Twitter directly into some of the workshops. It is however clear that the leaderboard did not appear to influence the number of colleagues attending drop-in sessions.
We closed the board on Friday at 12pm and as a token gesture awarded chocolate medal to colleagues that were top of the board – congratulations to Gary, Nik and Maria.


Below is a screenshot of the final top 20 for the leaderboard:

This blog has been verified by Rise: Rd886fcb9534f0f3e25d5be49b850a9bc

Why leaders must take control of the score

Toby Beresford Design Tips , , , , , , , , , ,

As a leader, one of your jobs is to keep those you lead focused on the goals you are trying to reach.

An underused tool in every leader’s toolbox is to create and share “the score”.

“The score” is how you have decided everyone should measure success, whether as individuals or as a group.

Whether we realise it or not, we all take account of the score in our daily lives. Indeed,  if you don’t share the score, people will invent their own. This can have hideous consequences as people chase after the wrong activities. No, it’s far better for you to take control of the score by choosing which KPIs matter and communicating them clearly.

As a leader it is your job to identify the scores that matter for the objectives you are seeking.

To do this, first write out the objectives and the success criteria for those objectives. These may be fairly numerical already. Then break down those objectives into the constituent parts and identify the important signals that you can measure reliably and easily. These are the metrics that go into making your score.

Next you need to attribute the score correctly. You have several options:

  • personal scores – this is a score for each individual. This approach works best in a group setting where there isn’t really a team objective – e.g. a conference, a group of separate businesses or a very large business
  • team scores – a score for your team. This works best when you are seeking to focus the efforts of your internal team – e.g. a KPI such as number of visitors to our website each month
  • market comparison – in more mature markets it may be more useful to focus on the comparison with peers – e.g. we are the number 1 supplier of milk in our region.

Finally, as a leader it’s not only your job to identify the scores that matter but also to communicate them regularly.

This could take many forms from a weekly email to a big screen TV leaderboard in the office. Whatever you choose, you need to remember that facts don’t speak for themselves. The medium you choose is important – people will take more notice of a leaderboard engraved in stone than one hastily scrawled on a piece of paper!

The score is an essential part of leadership. We all take account of the score whether we realise it or not. As a leader you can leverage the score and its communication to achieve the goals you’ve set for your team.

A great example of the importance of leaders and ‘communicating the score’ has recently taken the world’s media by storm. The Republican Party or Grand Old Party (GOP) Presidential candidates for the 2016 US elections recently debated each other on Fox News and presented to the audience what “scores” were important to them to keep and raise for the country. From here on in, how these individuals communicate their leadership goals to the people will be paramount. The use of Social Media will be more important than ever in reaching out and speaking to the electorate.

Interested in how much influence you have online? Why not join our Online Influencer ScoreBook and see how you compare?

 

 

Pros & cons of teamification

Toby Beresford Design Tips , ,

Rise LetMeGetMyScarfTeam based gamification, recently branded “teamification”, has much going for it.

For one, it avoids the problems of individual gamification at work, particularly around badly drawn comparisons on leaderboards that cause unwanted disengagement  (“I’ll never get to the top, I’m happy being a middle ranker I’ll just stay here, I can’t get a top score because I don’t use that tool”).

The benefits of teams are in the shared celebrations, the shared sense of endeavour and collective achievements create bonding and high relatedness amongst team members. We all like being in winning teams.

Recently I put this to the test with a collective endeavour twitter competition to see if we could spread the word among “foreverists” – fans of the recently cancelled ABC show “Forever”. I published an hourly-refreshing leaderboard during the tweet storm and it was well received among the fans who saw their personal dashboard, their rank within the community, and most importantly the progress of the whole community towards the goal.

It worked really well and we hit  our goal and more. 349% of our target to be precise. For 284 participants to drive 4500 tweets, 2300 retweets and over 3000 mentions is no mean feat. Clearly the power of teams and collective endeavour is worth tapping into.

But is there a downside?

Certainly being stuck in a perpetually losing team is no fun either. Teams that lose frequently tend to disband or morale simply drops through the floor – worse, being a loser becomes the cultural norm with anyone trying to challenge the status quo being laughed off as naive.

Within teams there are issues too.

At a recent Gamifiers meetup, Sebastian Deterding highlighted the issue of Social Loafing – that’s what happens when someone coasts on the back of the rest of their team’s hard work – not really contributing yet sharing in the team rewards.

In a short term finite campaign like the Forever example above, it’s not an issue, but in a long term infinite scorekeeping project, the problems of social loafers can become acute.

The problems that occur (probably after the two week honeymoon period any group seems to enjoy) are infighting, factions, politics and disengagement. They can be just as damaging to individual motivation as badly designed leaderboards that pit individuals against each other.

Avoiding the issues of teams is worthy of another discussion but for now it is worth bearing in mind that although teamification has its strengths it also has weaknesses too.

Grandfather of Gamification, Chuck Coonradt, explains infinite scorekeeping

Chuck Coonradt Design Tips , ,

When I wrote the “Game of Work”, in 1984, there were five core principles that would be considered, by many, to be the DNA of Gamification. They are as follows:

  • Goals Must Be Clearly Defined
  • Scorekeeping Must Be Clear and Predictable
  • Feedback Must Be Frequent and Appropriate
  • Rules Don’t Change in the Middle of the Game
  • There Must Be Freedom to Perform and Choice of Methods

Coach John Wooden said “It is what we learn after we think we know it all, that really matters.”

I agree, and after almost 40 years of hands-on experience with over 5,000 organizations, and hundreds of thousands of practitioners, I believe the most important learning has been that the creation of a culture of appropriate feedback is the most significant of the five principles we previously identified.

This principle is much more significant than I first realized and is the cornerstone of improved employee engagement through the gamification process.

The next great learning was that scorekeeping’s primary purpose was to create agreement between player and coach (not measurement or metrics). Feedback is based on:

  • When (what is appropriate frequency);
  • What Kind (celebratory, or corrective); and
  • How Much (primarily determined by the recipient)

Feedback is appropriate. This is the basis for judgment of the effectiveness of the scorekeeping system and scorecards within that system.

I am not a management scientist, like Jim Collins, but rather an observer of the different motivational levels demonstrated by the same people in different circumstances. Our observations produced a bit of a tongue twister, when we asked “Why will people pay for the privilege of working harder, than they will work when they are paid?

Let us learn about the power of infinite scoring from our experience with the games people all over the world love to play. The scorekeeping systems have several elements which make them the sustainable worldwide standard .

  • They are credible to the participants – all players accept the scorekeeping methods before being asked to play
  • They seldom change, if at all. Basketball took years to determine define and adopt the three point line, and then had to have several different distances.
  • They are objective – even the scoring of ice skating, diving, and gymnastics, (seemingly subjective) are governed by principles that insure the consistency which is necessary to gain credibility from the participants and viewers (fans)
  • They maximize the number of winners.
    • Compare 144 employees playing in a company golf tournament. – 6 different flights separated by player handicaps, 24 players per flight. Then you add longest drive, closest to the hole, and maybe even an award for most lost balls, and you have the possibility of multiple winners and several games within the game for overall best player.
    • Contrast that with the same 144 players in a tennis tournament where there will be only one ultimate winner. The first round 72 folks lose, and 72 move on to the next round., where another half of them will lose, until the final two are standing and then one of them will lose, resulting in a single winner. Unfortunately, the end result is 143 players whose final memory of the experience is a loss.
  • They allow the comparison between my CURRENT PERFORMANCE, MY PERSONAL PAST PERFORMANCE, AS WELL AS AN ACCEPTED STANDARD. For example,
    • Whether you are in a marathon or other measured distance running the primary goal is to beat your personal best, or
    • Golf , where a handicap (based on past personal performance) allows all of us to challenge ourselves against our previous performance
    • In both cases, there is a world record, and of course PAR, but the vast majority of participants are motivated by the comparison to past personal performance.
  • They are dynamic. Meaning players know the score during the game (which allows them to change their behavior to win, before time runs out)
    • Hockey fans are much more enthusiastic than figure skating fans because they know the score during the game.
    • A figure skater only knows how she/he did after the performance is over with no chance to improve.

The very powerful question, which drives human behavior, on and off the job is “Am I winning, losing or don’t know the score?”

Leaders, Coaches and those of us who assist them, must stay true to the principles of established scorekeeping to bring true employee engagement and satisfaction to the workplace.

The Game of Work is just like the Game of Life. Everyone wants to be a winner. With clear and predictable scorekeeping, you can win.

For additional information you may contact us for a free executive summary of ‘Scorekeeping for Success’ via email or visit our website

By using the core Game of Work principles, we have much more than just a shiny new object. We will have a very valuable tool for management and an opportunity for individuals to reach their full potential.

Just remember – “Given a Good Game, People Will Play Their Heart Out”.

This guest blog was written by Charles “Chuck” Coonradt, labelled as “the Grandfather of Gamification” in a Forbes Magazine article in 2012 by Ken Krogue

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Chuck is Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of The Game of Work, founded in 1973 and dedicated to the success of its corporate clients. Graduate of Michigan State University. Internationally recognized in the fields of goal setting and profit improvement, as an author, consultant, and speaker. Chuck’s best selling books The Game of Work, The Better People Leader, Scorekeeping For Success, Managing The Obvious, and The Four Laws of Debt Free Prosperity have been labeled management “must reads.” He is a contributing author to the best selling Chicken Soup for the Soul series and quoted in an additional two dozen books. He is a founding member of the School of Entrepreneurship, Brigham Young University, Marriott School of Management.

The Game of Work’s client list includes many Fortune 500, as well as other nationally and internationally recognized firms. Companies that have successfully utilized and implemented Chuck’s unique concepts include Pepsi Cola, The Chicago Tribune, Nordstroms, The US Air Force and Postal Service, Boeing, Marker Bindings, Molina Healthcare, Coca-Cola Consolidated and International Paper. Over one million executives, managers, and supervisors on five continents have been exposed to Chuck’s ideas on feedback, scorekeeping, goal setting, coaching, choice and accountability.

Gamification for Performance Management

Mario Herger Design Tips , , ,

Introduction

While businesses spend billion of dollars every year to evaluate their employees, the outcome is disappointing. The data that performance evaluations are done and promotions based on are lacking in detail, extent and objectivity. No wonder that instead of a meritocracy we see people being promoted based on their networking and socializing skills.

World of Warcraft players on the other hand know very well how they and their fellow players are doing. The player stat sheets clearly indicate their current status and achievements, and tell them how to advance. A game played by 10 million players has more data on its players than billion dollar companies about their employees. But this is about to change with introducing gamification to Human Resources and into all aspects of a company.

Let’s take a look at how companies are doing performance management today, what the actual goal is, and what some companies have done by introducing gamification to this process.

Current Status

Traditionally performance reviews are scheduled to take place every quarter or once a year. The review is done by the employee’s line-manager and, sometimes, additional appraisers are added. The problems of course are:

  1. Defining the goals at the beginning of the period and adapting them during the period, when goals and strategy change
  2. Keeping track of achievements and evaluating them
  3. How to bring achievements in the equation that were not part of the original goals but were done anyways

The first issue requires flexibility that allows adapting goals and then proper communication and agreement with the employee. The second issue is just keeping track of them. There is not one way to record achievements; some may be documents (study written), some money in the bank (deals closed), others simple emails from clients or colleagues who wanted to thank you for your help. A manager’s challenge is to access the channels and compile the information. Some channels may never be accessible, like the emails that thanked your employee.

A solution could be to go with crowdsourcing feedback and recognition. Eric Mosley, CEO and co-founder of the employee recognition solutions company Globoforce, mentions five steps to improve that process[1]:

  • Capture achievements throughout the year.
    With social recognition, individual and team achievements and successes are captured at the moment they happen throughout the year. Employees better understand what performance is desired on an on-going basis while managers can see first-hand an employee’s true performance, behaviors and influence.
  • Widen the input circle beyond a single point of failure.
    By leveraging feedback from across the organization, managers can expand the singular viewpoint of traditional performance reviews to include positive feedback from co-workers and peers alike. These ongoing reviews provide a more accurate collection for how individuals are performing within teams and across departments.
  • Use inspiration, not obligation.
    Social recognition is the epitome of effective reviews: they’re truly inspired, not forced by antiquated performance review processes. When peers give reviews of each other via recognition, it’s due to the strong performance they witness. It’s a purer performance evaluation and not diluted by a check-box mindset.
  • Expand accountability for reputations and careers.
    By incorporating feedback from peers across the company, you lessen errors for how an employee’s performance and career is judged and nurtured. For most companies, the performance review is an anchor for documentation. By rounding it out with recognition, you are creating a more complete assessment around employees’ reputation and work performance.
  • Empower employees to create a performance mosaic.
    With relationships and workflows extending beyond immediate teams and divisions, management and HR can create a performance mosaic to appraise true company performance. This social graph of the true performance of individuals and teams develops as employees and peers recognize one another.

Gamification of Performance Evaluations

While crowd-sourcing is not necessarily a gamification technique, Australian startup Wooboard[2] allows employees to thank each other for work they have done. By sending a (whimsically named) “Woo“ and tagging it with a category (categories are maintained by management and reflect the core-values and activities the management wants to encourage), the standalone system enables peer-recognition, records that information, and shows how often employees have been wooed for following the company’s core values.

What if you even go beyond crowd-sourced achievement gathering and extend that to the determination of each employee’s bonus? That’s what the US-based gaming and entertainment company IGN [3] is doing[4]. Employees themselves decide who should earn more bonuses. The system is called “viral pay“ and twice a year every employee receives “Tokens of Appreciation“ which they can distribute to other employees. The rules are simple:

  1. All tokens must be distributed
  2. You cannot distribute them to yourself
  3. And the CEO is exempt from receiving tokens

While nobody knows who gave the tokens to whom, IGN posts a list of who got how many tokens. Employees reward each other for helping out and going the last mile. That system motivates others who have not received as many tokens this time to be more helpful the next time.

This concept of course is not unfamiliar to IGN. That’s how loot in many videogames is distributed. Teams, guilds, battle groups who beat the boss (such as a dragon), distribute the awards amongst each other depending on their contributions. Lee Sheldon, video game designer and associate professor at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, started his own video game design classes as a video game, where students formed teams of five and had to distribute the loot amongst them according to their contributions in the team projects[5]. Fears that students would distribute them equally turned out to be unsubstantiated. The students knew exactly how much each team member contributed and awarded accordingly.

A technology that can be used for such a crowd-determined bonus round is Bonus.ly[6]. Each team member receives a monthly allowance for granting bonuses, and can then praise and grant small peer bonuses to their colleagues. A crucial factor to make a peer-to-peer bonus working is keeping them transparent. In a failed example from the General Services Administration[7] the bonus-rewards were not transparent (only the recipient and the giver knew about the amount), led to rigging the system, and violated federal governance standards.

Thus a gamified performance review would rely on better data. And as we’ve mentioned the gamification score extensively, a performance review wouldn’t even be required anymore, but would surface in a different form: as a career planning and advocacy session.

Spanish company Gamifik[8] offers a mobile solution for continuous 360-degree feedback. This helps HR to identify problems early rather than at the end of the period.

ROIKOI[9] offers a gamified mobile app that lets co-workers rate other co-workers using peer voting to rate people in the company. The voting happens anonymously and the results are displayed through a ROIKOI-score on a leaderboard.

With these examples the first companies are on the way to create a fairer and more objective way to evaluate employees and thus motivate and engage them better.

About the Author

MARIO HERGER is CEO, founder and partner of Enterprise Gamification Consultancy LLC[10], a strategic consulting group focused on gamification, innovation, social business, and intrapreneurship in the enterprise. He had been Senior Innovation Strategist at SAP Labs in Palo Alto, California and Global Head of the Gamification Initiative at SAP where he had worked for 15 years. He is the author of a number of gamification books, including Gamification in Human Resources[11].

[1] Crowdsource Your Performance Reviews http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/06/crowdsource_your_performance_r.html

[2] http://www.wooboard.com

[3] http://www.ign.com/

[4] At IGN, Employees Use A “Viral Pay” System To Determine Each Others’ Bonuses http://www.fastcompany.com/1801532/ign-employees-use-viral-pay-system-determine-each-others-bonuses

[5] Lee Sheldon, The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game, Course Technology, 2012

[6] https://bonus.ly/

[7] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/wp/2013/05/17/watchdog-says-awards-for-gsa-executives-were-excessive-system-lacked-transparency/

[8] http://gamifik.com/en

[9] https://www.roikoi.com/

[10] http://enterprise-gamification.com/

[11] http://www.amazon.com/dp/1500567140