Going from good to great in the workplace often means employing gamification to motivate your workforce. Pay and perks or plain supervisor authority aren’t enough: you need to stoke people’s internal fire with drive and purpose. Gamification, the use of game mechanics to alter behavior is a great way to do this, since it taps into the deepest drives that make us human: the need to do well, to feel a sense of purpose and to understand the story we’re in.   There are many gamification offerings; some use the old school points and badges. Others use more modern approaches, using narrative based games that tie seamlessly into corporate applications. But in this post I want to take on offline, old -fashioned and timeless games and apply them to workforce motivation. All they require is a pen, paper and some sticky tape, yet they are bound to make performance better.   This idea popped into my mind when I was visiting a call center.  I noticed this raffle (pictured here) used by one of the managers. I was suddenly reminded of the power and beauty of the offline games I used to play with my pals as a child: raffles with tiny crumpled notes, intense games with elaborate point counts and leagues. I remembered the triumphs and immense sense of drive and fun these games had.   So to pay tribute to the power of games that don’t happen on a screen, I decided to list five ways to gamify work, for free:   Pat on the back games One of the main ways to motivate people is to thank them for a job well done. In this game, played once a week, employees and managers participate together. Each employee pats someone on the back and mentions what for. Once several rounds are played, the pats on the back are counted, and a winner is announced. Take care not to reward your top employees alone. Make sure to reward people for different metrics (pats on the back for different reasons) or measure different metrics each time. This way, employees remain motivated to win a game that is played weekly, with different rules each time.   Pay it forward Get a larger box and many smaller boxes to nest in it. A matryushka of boxes. Each box contains notes depicting behaviors that represent the values of the company.  The first to play opens the box and gives the note to the person (in the team / floor / etc.) which he thinks best represents that  behavior. The receiver keeps the note and opens the next box, and so on. The winners are those with the most notes. This game promoted recognition of team efforts and helps employees clearly understand how corporate goals should be aligned with on the job daily activities and behavior.   Stick figure games This involves putting up a certain character (a mascot, a stick figure etc.) - cut into several pieces, like a puzzle. The character can be made of paper, of magnets or cardboard. The goal of the game is to assemble all pieces into a complete character. All pieces are received by the players once they meet a certain goal. However, the two last pieces can only be received if goals are exceeded. Stick figures can be displayed on the wall of fame or next to the employee’s desk.   Card collecting This game works best for onboarding new employees. Employees collect cards for each new person they interact with in the organization, just like kids collect baseball cards.  Additional cards are given for participation in workshops, courses, quizzes and reading materials. Cards are required to fill an album, reflecting the learning path the employee underwent when joining the organization.   Raffles Set a goal for employees, measured by a certain metric. Every time the goal is met, they get a ticket for a raffle. Once a period, have a raffle and distribute the prizes. The best prizes can be shared with co-workers (such as food and beverages). This spreads the fun and instills a sense of teamwork. While top-achievers usually collect more raffle tickets, the randomness of the raffle lets the medium achievers win as well, motivating the top 70% and not the top 5-10%. Hey, everyone should get a chance to win!  

The 2014 FIFA world cup is making everyone at GamEffective half dazed. Did The 2014 FIFA world cup is making everyone at GamEffective half dazed. Did you see what the Dutch team was up to? Did you stay up half the night to see the third game of the day? and how Gamification can help you ?     How Gamification Can Leverage Your Employees’ Fascination with the FIFA 2014 World Cup The 2014 FIFA world cup is making everyone at GamEffective half dazed. Did you see what the Dutch team was up to?  Did you stay up half the night to see the third game of the day? Once in a while grand sporting events mesmerize everyone with the narrative beauty of Greek mythology and great performance of professional sports. At these intersections of sports, global competition and unforeseen results, work seems, well, less interesting. Ever since the FIFA 2014 world cup began I am trying to figure out what glues millions of people across the globe (including myself) to the TV. What’s more interesting is that the people following the world cup are a diverse set: their passion for soccer (or football, depends on your nationality) crosses countries, social status, gender and age. The reason the world cup is so engaging is because it has many elements that appeal to the basics of human nature, and to our deep affinity for games, competitions and narratives. Here’s what’s compelling in the FIFA world cup: Competition: the world’s best 32 national soccer teams all compete for one coveted world cup. A Game: this isn’t just a competition, this is a game with rules and clear metrics - goals Narratives: the world cup lasts for a whole month. Each national soccer team builds its own narrative during the world cup - the underdogs, the failed champions, new and old fashioned game tactics, the heroic efforts and the shameful losses. It all melds into one experience that is memorable, emotional and compelling. Team based: the competition isn’t personal. The Spanish team even proved that a team of stars isn’t enough and that it’s all in teamwork… A continuous effect with a sense of advancement - the FIFA world cup lasts a long period of time, resulting in an experience of intensity and continuity. Belonging - people root for the teams they care about and the ups and downs of the teams move them emotionally. Surprises - if the best team "on paper" would always win the world cup wouldn’t be that interesting. Part of the interest comes from the surprises and even the effects of luck and coincidence on a personal or team level. Fun - last but not least, following the world cup is a lot of fun   All this can be used to motivate employees. You can choose a gamification platform to do this: we offer gamification themes that combine fantasy sports and therefore many of the reasons that make the world cup compelling in the first place. These let employees compete against their colleagues, company benchmark or their own target. The combination of a weekly event, the game and league is engaging. But back to the world cup. Are you forced to wait patiently till it’s over? Do you need to live with the fact that employees are compelled by the world cup and less by work? I have some good news for you. You can use the World Cup to create a mini-world-cup themed gamification contest that’s fun and great for business. Fantasy sports are a great way of getting employees super involved, and of communicating company targets and goals, together with the importance of team plays. Mixing fantasy sports with the 2014 FIFA world cup is a great way to mix the pleasure of the games with the business of work. Here’s how you do it: Have each team/employee prioritize their favorite national teams at the world cup. Decide on a metric for the week. The team or individual with the best score gets their first choice and so on, down the priority list. Getting a team you don’t like can be a great motivator… Track the games each week. "Winners" get a small group prize: food, an outing together, time off. Send out fun emails tracking every team’s progress; organize joint viewing if possible. You can also distribute tiny flags - attach them to emails etc. At the end of the second week, re-allocate teams based on performance. To get the favorite team at the end of the world cup, you gotta work hard… Choose the metric for the next week - and have each team/person get a new team to "sponsor" according to that metric Eventually, one of the teams/individuals will win the world cup. Celebrate.   By Guy Fogel, Customer success manager at GamEffective  

I recently overheard an interesting conversation between two friends that are triathletes. One of them was very excited about an upcoming race: he’s in better shape than last year, he said, he’s hoping to get to one of the top three results for his age bracket. The other friend, who has just begun training a year ago, on doctor’s orders (he was in bad shape before that) said "I’m into completion. Not competition". smart city narrative Many enterprise Gamification deployments emphasize competition and leaderboards. Yet sometimes giving employees a sense of completion works better As a Gamification designer, this struck me as conveying a much ignored insight about motivating employees. Not everyone wants to be at the top of the Leaderboard - that doesn’t mean they are losers or lazy - for these people it’s also about the journey. Sometimes, as we all know, poorly designed Leaderboards can even be de-motivating and ignore the real growth and attempts made by the non-top-performers who are nevertheless performing exceptionally well. Companies should take that into account. Motivating with Leaderboards alone, focusing on fostering competition doesn’t work for everyone and shouldn’t. Strive to give your people a sense of completion. What is a sense of completion? A sense of completion is the satisfaction you usually experience when a job is well done. Clean dishes. A 10 K run. A well-mowed lawn. An organized office. From a Gamification point of view, completion indicators are the game mechanic that gives you the same feedback - you did well. One of the best-executed examples? - The profile completion bar on LinkedIn. Add a picture, a career objective, more details about your past experience - and the bar moves closer to 100%. Get to 100%, or even 80% and sense completion. Would have LinkedIn motivated you to the same extent, if you were just pushed to complete your profile more than your other LinkedIn connections? I doubt it. Knowing that your profile is 100% is better than knowing it took you three years to get to 100%, while your connections completed theirs, two years ago… Completion touches many points in the lives of employees. For instance, a new employee, set on acquiring skills and knowledge within their new workplace isn’t necessarily interested in a Leaderboard. They are definitely not motivated by it. Yet the employee will greatly benefit from many milestones that signify completion - of a course taken, of a certain knowledge transfer, of a key skill acquired, of the first time they managed to do something well on their own. That’s why at GamEffective some of the training and employee on-boarding game narratives use completion-focused narratives, such as a Smart-city (build a city)/FarmEffective (Build a farm) and more. Additionally, avatars that track employees shouldn’t always show how they are doing compared to others; show them how they’ve progressed by themselves. Completion game mechanics give people a sense of personal achievement. They also have no losers - and guarantee that no one will get lost in the process. In cases where employees can set their targets, the sense of completion will also arise from a strong sense of commitment. Completion is also independent of other employees’ timelines. Change management is also a scenario where Gamification should focus on progress and completion and not competition. When gamifying the onboarding process of a new CRM software or an internal social network, or an innovation and knowledge collaboration system, the point isn’t about competition. It’s about completion of the transition into a system. An additional nuance in game design is the difference between measurement and completion (for an excellent description, go here). Measurement measures how well you’ve done - compared to others. For instance, in Candy Crash, you’re rewarded not just for completing a level, but on how well you did that compared to others. Completion is more autonomous, focusing on the completion of the level and not on how well it was done - compared to others. Sometimes measurement is best; sometimes completion is better. Completion isn’t the same for everyone and it shouldn’t be. That’s why we advise managers to be able to set different, individualized completion indicators and benchmarks for different employees. This rewards people for realistic targets of learning, training and task completion. It lets them experience the job satisfaction that comes from the sense of a job well done. Use that satisfaction; your employees deserve it.

How the Aleph venture capital fund is encouraging "karma" through pay it forward gamification. We all want to be part of a better society. When thinking about employees, a corporate culture or the business environment we’re in, we’d like people to do good deeds regardless of whether they will be reciprocated, earning "good karma" (the quasi-buddhist take) or actively engaging in "Pay it forward" (the less buddhist take). Pay it forward is a great concept and has the power to create re-occurring cycles of good deeds. The idea is simple - when someone does you a favor and you cannot repay them, you can repay some else, that also needs a favor or a good deed done. This creates a sense of good luck and a ton of positive vibes. Encouraging "pay it forward" in the corporate world has real benefits. Imagine an employee who, upon joining the company, receives support, informal mentorship or just a few great tips from another employee. Imagine that new employee paying it forward a year later, to a newly joined employee. That’s a workplace everyone would like to part of. We’ve even suggested a pay if forward game a while ago, in this post. What about Karma? According to Wikipedia "Karma means action, work or deed; it also refers to the principle of causality where intent and actions of an individual influence the future of that individual. Good intent and good deed contribute to good karma and future happiness…". Karma in the workplace sense is doing good deeds for the sake of doing them. That’s why reddit uses Karma Points. It uses them to reflect "how much good the user has done to the reddit community". Reddit explains how karma is created: "the best way to gain karma is to submit links that other people like and vote for…".  Actually my favorite part in the reddit Q&A is the answer to the question "why should I try to accumulate karma?". The reddit Q&A appeals first to the game and leaderboard lust in all of us, responding with the question "why should you try to score points in a video game?".  Only then it advises you to "look at things from a less competitive and more altruistic perspective… don’t set out to accumulate karma; just set out to be a good person, and let your karma simply be a reminder of your legacy." That’s why I was delighted to see an attempt at gamifying karma - or gamifying pay it forward. In a post titled "Add Good Karma to your Life", Eran Shir from Aleph VC announced yesterday a beta for an app that seeks to get people to pay it forward. It’s directed at the ecosystem of Israeli entrepreneurs so that startup founders can help each other. What other name could the app have but Karma? Karma is a "A mobile app dedicated to entrepreneurs who want to help each other, Karma is not another social network or about growing a volume of users. We’ve built Karma to give members of the startup ecosystem a way to ask for help, give help and share knowledge. Karma is about value and access, not vanity" One of the principles behind karma is a Pay it Forward Economy. He’s how Shir describes this: "Pay-It-Forward Economy - We help each other out of the goodness of our hearts, but sometimes incentives can be useful to get the ball rolling. That’s why we’ve added a pinch of gamification to Karma. Helping others and referring them to others will award you with Karma points. Karma has a leaderboard, where we celebrate the most helpful members of the community and some of the functionality of Karma, e.g. the breadth of audience to which your requests reach, will be dependent on your Karma points status. At Aleph, we will also provide unique ways for you to redeem your Karma points e.g. office hours and invitations to special events. Down the line, we envision Karma points becoming a currency and forming the basis of our pay-it-forward economy". Karma is in beta. I’ve registered for it. The next post in this series will hopefully include some (anonymized) screen shots and some take aways about gamification of a pay if forward economy using leaderboards.

Don’t just gamify the sales funnel. Gamify the employee engagement funnel   engagement funnel Using the employee engagement funnel and gamification for business transformation When have you last used a real funnel?  A funnel with a conical mouth and narrow stem which is then inserted into a bottle and used to transfer liquid? I used one last week to transfer some olive oil from a gallon container into a smaller bottle I can use when cooking.  As I took the funnel out of the utensil drawer it struck me how rarely is it used in the kitchen and how often it is used (and abused) as a business term. Real funnels are used to moderate the flow of a liquid into a container. But as a business term they are used as a metaphor for a sales process where leads come in, go through a sales process and hopefully emerge at the bottom as actual sales. Managers are tasked with optimizing sales funnels and driving employees to sell more. As employees, sales opportunities or anything else pass from phase to phase on the funnel, their value to the organization becomes higher. I’d like to introduce the concept of the employee engagement funnel.  I believe that it is closely tied to sales success. The employee engagement funnel doesn’t have a lot of employees coming in and less qualified and able employees coming out of the other side. It is not a turnover funnel nor a funnel made to find and select top performing employees. This funnel symbolizes how employees are made aware of corporate goals, learn about the corporation and change the way they do their job. Eventually, the process makes employees more aware and helps them do better. As employees go through the engagement funnel, the organization needs to offer different tools for each stage in order to optimize the process. Even simple awareness of the engagement process makes employees better. Employees learn what the organization wants and what they need to do to take part in it. They will know, for instance, that the company wants to sell products, know the company’s products, and how to execute the sales strategy. As they travel through the funnel employees become leaders that will create engagement for others, and ambassadors that will help other employees become better. The employee engagement funnel begins with awareness - making the employee know what corporate goals are (such as growing sales for a certain product). This leads the employee into the second phase - onboarding - training or learning (e.g. about the potential customer benefits of a product).  If both these phases are completed successfully, the employee is able to do a better job - he is engaged.  However, this doesn’t signify the end of the process. Employee engagement can go further - into becoming a leader (leading employees as they go through the engagement funnel) and even becoming an ambassador (bringing new employees into the funnel). Gamification accelerates the engagement funnel Gamification should take center stage in driving the employee engagement funnel.  In the past few years, enterprise Gamification is becoming richer and better suited to drive sustainable change in enterprises. This new era of enterprise gamification goes beyond badges and leaderboards. Instead it uses compelling game mechanics such as narratives. Here’s how gamification plays out in each phase of the employee engagement funnel: Awareness (Know):  although no one will admit it, many companies don’t do a great job of making employees aligned with corporate goals. While management is measured through key performance indicators (KPIs) that are aligned with business goals, employees are often forgotten. Therefore, the first goal is to make sure that employees are aware of the corporate goals and how they relate to their day to day job. One of the best ways to do this is to use gamification to drive specific calls to action and communicate behavioral goals to employees. Onboarding employees (Learn). Good onboarding and corporate training practices give the employee the tools required to do a good job. Gamification used during this process should focus on completion rather than competition, so the sense of a job well done will pervade the employee’s self-esteem rather than unnecessary competition that is sometimes overly encouraged with the false sense it may create performance improvement (actually it can alienate employees) Engagement (Act/Do). This is where thoughtful gamification comes in, taking employees across all enterprise systems and motivating them to do well through clear calls to action and encouragement of improvement and individual goals. At the end of each period, further awareness of how employee activities are tied to company goals is encouraged. Internal Leadership development (Lead). At this point employees know their job and are rewarded for doing well, relative to their past performance, and not as a disconnected sales goal. At this stage, employees can evolve into local leader-heros. Leaders help others improve and lead their teams. Corporate ambassadors (Viral expansion)- these employees become corporate ambassadors, communicating and acting upon the company’s vision both internally and externally, resulting in better customer interactions, customer satisfaction and better business for the company. Typically, ambassadors pull new employees into the employee engagement funnel, growing the ranks of engaged employees, in a viral expansion.   In this sense, perhaps not all employees can become ambassadors. But thinking of the employee engagement funnel as a process in which employees are not "lost" like leads that don’t end in sales, but rather employee energy is redirected (like liquid) into becoming a company ambassador empowers employees and promises better outcomes for all. This is a first post of three on the employee engagement funnel. The next posts will discuss how to optimize the transition inside the funnel.

Corporate Performance Management is great for motivating managers. Gamification can do the same for employees, who often do not have a corporate performance management plan. Enterprise gamification can successfully emulate the benefits of  corporate performance management.    Performance management Imagine a trucking company. Let’s think about how its managers are engaged in meeting corporate goals. They are presented with a business strategy and goals. Let’s say the company has decided it should invest in better customer service, focus on a certain region and resolve a history of safety issues that are mostly related with too many hours of driving. Additionally, the company would like to better control its fuel expenditures by having trucks rest during rush hour traffic. For over a decade, many enterprises have practiced engaging managers with corporate business strategy and goals. Managers undergo a process to acquaint them with the business strategy (often achieved with the use of learnification strategies) after which KPIs and targets are set, together with scorecards (to provide feedback) and recognition mechanisms.  Management achievements are then reviewed discussed and rewarded in ritualized quarterly business reviews and more.  This process of translating the business strategy into measurable goals for each manager is crucial to a well-functioning enterprise. Now let’s think about the non-managerial employees in the trucking company: the drivers. They are also tracked and measured- but they are presented with simpler goals, quotas perhaps. For instance, they are told how their customer service was perceived by customers. Or they are penalized for safety breaches. Or their work hours are managed so they don’t drive during rush hour. They certainly have some mileage quota they are measured by. However, these rules, presented as a series of "do" and "don’ts" and thresholds may have a suboptimal effect - since they don’t communicate corporate objectives well. We must ask ourselves whether the trucking company can do a better job at driving its employees’ performance. Could it achieve a better outcome if it used tools that are closer to corporate performance management? The answer is positive. Actually, I spoke to a trucking company today. They are considering gamification, on drivers’ smartphones, to drive the same value. They are using gamificaiton to help employees understand corporate objectives and better perform. They realized this was a need since in their business, just like in many others, KPIs do and cannot stand alone, but rather require difficult balancing. Driving many hours to serve customers better can create safety issues. So, instead of presenting a stiff set of rules, the company decided to gamify truck drivers’ performance in a way that is similar to corporate performance management for its managerial levels. In this case, business alignment is represented by game rules, which, in turn, provide a clear call to action. Combining this with narrative based gamification (using sports, for instance, as a metaphor) makes this fun and challenging. This also lets the company combine sporting event style scoreboards, to provide real time feedback, and encourage improvement and accomplishments. Using the sports narrative, the trucking company integrated races, games and competitions, together with leaderboards and other gamified public rituals (such as fantasy sports gamified narratives) to provide employees  the recognition they deserve.   You can combine fun and business objectives together, to achieve higher employee engagement and better alignment with corporate objectives.  

Foursquare’s recent changes can give us excellent hints about what works and what doesn’t in enterprise gamification design. Remember Foursquare? In 2009, Foursquare launched a location based social network that allowed you to "check-in" at various venues, turning "life into a game". The service was initially limited to certain metro areas, but after it opened, it reached 10 million users, which enabled the company to raise $ 50 M in 2011 at a valuation of $ 600 M. Foursquare was a hit. One of the core drivers behind the craze to check-in using Foursquare and not competing services was Foursquare’s use of gamification. Gamification is the practice of using game design elements to reward behavior in a non-game setting. It can be used to reward interaction with a service, such as Foursquare, or to reward a desired enterprise-related behavior as in Enterprise Gamification for employees. Foursquare gamified check-ins, letting users get points for certain activities (such as checking into a new place), get badges for checking in and even get mayor status, if a user checked into a certain venue on more days than anyone else in the past 60 days. However, social networks caught up with location based check-ins and Foursquare’s status eroded. Its enormous popularity tapered off. Recently Foursquare separated its check-in service into an app called swarm and the new Foursquare, which "learns what you like and leads you to the places you’ll love". Earlier Foursquare even ceased its famous points and badges system, the drivers of its immense popularity in the first place. This is what Foursquare says about its realization that its game mechanics were breaking down: "…When we built Foursquare, the game mechanics were meant to do two things: help you learn how to use Foursquare, and help make your real-world experiences more fun. We never set out to make a ‘game’…  Points gave you a way to measure how exciting your outings were; badges were to give you a sense of accomplishment; and mayorships allowed you to compete with your friends… even we were surprised by how much people loved them. Back in 2009 when we had 50,000 people using Foursquare, they were awesome. But as our community grew from 50,000 people to over 50,000,000 today, our game mechanics started to break down." Now Foursquare wants to move into the local search space, targeting yelp and google reviews for places such as restaurants. And to do that it needs users to create a lot of reviews, so it can offer meaningful reviews and compete in the restaurant search space. As a result, the company is introducing a new kind of status - expert. Expertise is a function of the user’s performance within foursquare and not outside of it (the opposite of the Linkedin influencer, whose expertise is external to the Linkedin service). This should encourage users to review more places and submit more tips, making the Foursquare service valuable. The story of Foursquare holds a valuable truth: Gamification mechanics are powerful and can drive user behavior; but the behavior has to contain an intrinsic value without the game mechanics. Gamification is not an end in itself; it is a design choice intended to drive real value. Foursquare is a prime example of gamification of a consumer service. What can enterprise gamification practitioners learn from it? Here are some that come to mind: 1. Gamification cannot drive long-term  behavioral change. Well, let’s take it back. As the CEO of an enterprise gamification company, GamEffective, I deeply believe that gamification can drive change. I’ve seen it happen with my own eyes. But the trick is that rewards aren’t enough; the activity or behavior promoted needs to have an intrinsic value. At first, people were going out of their way to earn foursquare badges and mayorships. But these rewards didn’t suffice in the longer term because once novelty wears off and the fun becomes yesterday’s news, users need additional value. In the enterprise space this means that employees can’t just be rewarded for anything - rewards should be for behaviors that have real value to the organization and the employee, not just for their own sake. This will create a virtuous cycle that will drive employees to continue with the behavioral change even when the gamification novelty has worn off.  This also means that gamification should reward behavior that has a real value for the company: if you reward contributions to a knowledge management system that no one uses, or reward employees for unnecessary customer visits, the results can be dire. Choose the desired behaviors you want to drive carefully; make sure they have a real meaning within your organization and that they reflect corporate goals. 2. Gamification works in content generation settings - but only to a certain degree. Content gamification works in scenarios such as restaurant reviews and knowledge collaboration systems - but it should contain an element of recognition. Rewards without recognition of someone as an expert won’t work in the long run. 3. Badges and points still matter - but to a lesser degree. Badges are still part of the game mechanics arsenal any gamification solution should include. But they should be used judiciously, when they fit and not as an all-around solution. Sometimes giving employees a sense of completion matters too, as I wrote here - badges are more competitive in nature, but can also be adjusted to reward completion. Foursquare is also doing that in its new Swarm application by notifying users when they’ve taken many runs or hooked up often with a friend. The balance between completion and competition requires thought during the game design phase. The use of narratives in game design are also a new game mechanic some vendors (such as GamEffective) are adopting, since they promote teamwork and the ability to balance several competing goals (such as good service vs quick service). 4. Not everyone can be a mayor; good game design gives them a good reason to try. Leaderboards and competitive game mechanics can work, but you never want to alienate the non-mayors of the world. Enterprise gamification leaderboards should be designed so that they reward people in context and give people a sense of achievement. To resolve issues with Mayorships, in which too many people were competing for mayorship, Foursqaure revised its system to "Mayorship 2.0". This is how Foursquare’s bog describes this. "We wanted to get back to a fun way to compete with your friends instead of all 50,000,000 people who are on Foursquare. With these new mayorships, if you and a couple friends have been checking in to a place, the person who has been there the most lately gets a crown sticker. So you and your friends can compete for the mayorship of your favorite bar, without having to worry about the guy who is there every. single. day."

This post is the second in a series of three posts, all dedicated to discussing the employee engagement funnel. You can read the first post in this series here. The employee engagement funnel, although inspired by the sales funnel, isn’t about choosing employees or promoting them. The employee engagement funnel is about making employees aware of corporate goals and engaging them in learning and in getting others to align with corporate goals. engagement funnel The funnel is a step-by-step visual demonstration of how each employee goes through the process of engagement, beginning with awareness of corporate goals, going through training and learning of corporate practices or offerings and eventually leading other employees through the same path.  In this respect, it symbolizes how companies can make employees into evangelists of corporate performance goals. This actually relates to a previous post, available here, asking whether Gamification can become the new corporate performance management. The employee engagement funnel is made of five sections: Awareness - Knowing. On boarding - Learning. Engagement - Implementing. Leadership - Influencing others. Ambassadors - bringing more people into the funnel This post will focus on how employees move from one section of the employee engagement funnel to the next - making themselves more valuable to the corporation and probably their internal job satisfaction and sense of worth and well-being. For instance, let’s look at the process of launching a new product. The immediate objective is to better address customer needs during the sales or service phases, so the customer gets access to the better product proposition that was just launched. To achieve that, sales people should master the solutions the new product offers so they could naturally and logically suggest them in sales pitches, as well as effectively use them when thinking about the product. Integrating the new product into the sales process does not happen overnight, but once the product is immersed in their mindset, sales people should be able to find creative solutions for their customers. They should not only rely on their own skills and expertise, but rather should benefit from other people in the company who were facing similar situations. Several years ago, while working in Sales for a Business Intelligence company, we were competing on a project with a global provider. Our chances to win this bid improved once we acquired a company with a product that had a crucial feature that could be part of an end to end solution. My relief at hearing the news of the acquisition and the resulting enhanced offering turned to disappointment when I learned that the sales people at my company didn’t even make it to the "awareness" level in the engagement funnel. That is to say, not only did they not encompass the product in their thought process and pitches, they were not even aware of its existence in our company. I then had to act to get the sales people into the engagement funnel, proceeding from awareness , through engagement and implementation. Let’s go through the stages of the engagement funnel and see how they apply: Awareness The top priority is creating awareness of organizational goals, or changes that the company underwent and that are relevant to employees’ jobs. Do all employees need to be involved? That’s an important question, since the answer would provide us with an idea of how to direct different messages to different audiences. From the point of view of organizational culture, awareness contributes to employees’ engagement, resulting in an improved workplace atmosphere. A great way to implement awareness measures is using Gamification for on-boarding, training and learnification. It is recommended to emphasize completion and not competition, to reward learning and advancement relative to oneself. On-Boarding Awareness doesn’t suffice since knowing something exists (a new product, in this case) doesn’t translate into the internalizing effort required to make use of the knowledge. That’s why the next step in the funnel is learning more about product features, pros and cons, product market fit, etc. The on-boarding phase is easily gamified. Using game mechanics that promote cooperation, especially when work requires cooperation (having several people collaborate on a customer proposal) is definitely worth considering. Engagement Obviously, the salesman has to obtain the relevant knowledge. It is a great start, but not enough. For the salesman to improvise when needed, come up with the right solution and utilize all the resources available to him from prior and recent learning, the employee has to add an emotional dimension to his commitment, that is, to be emotionally engaged. Emotional engagement usually helps doing new things takes an effort, and the intellectual effort can be motivated by emotions. Leadership Who are the leaders of the organization? Our first response would be mangers, but in reality leaders are those that are active around us and serve as a role model. The people  who encourage and promote common goals are leaders too. In the context of the engagement funnel, the leaders are the ones to help others pass from the awareness level to the engagement level. They demonstrate how to incorporate their acquired knowledge into their everyday work. They are those who are first to construct a customer offering that incorporates new features, products or services. In this stage, the best gamification is game design that strengthens team development, giving leaders more opportunities to influence others. Using a good Gamification platform will expose the more committed employees and will turn them to leaders in the engagement funnel. Ambassadors The ambassadors are evangelists of new corporate learning. They have the awareness, they are fully engaged, and possess the knowledge of how everything comes together. In this phase, ambassadors can create presentations and articles about their new knowledge, getting the message across corporate barriers, internal and external.  Gamification at this stage should reward ambassadors for their expertise and include game design elements that create recognition for expertise. To conclude, the employee engagement funnel is a framework that helps think about and implement the process of introducing new products to both the market and the workforce.  The engagement funnel combined with Gamification encourages employee learning and the accumulation of past and present knowledge. It rewards them for being more engaged and moreover, for bringing others into the process. The outcome of the process will be manifest not only in KPIs but in a change of corporate culture.

I’ve recently blogged about LinkedIn’s use of gamification in Wired’s Innovation Insights. Many of us rely on LinkedIn as a key HR, sales, career development and business tool. Some of LinkedIn’s ability to engage  its users is its elegant use of gamification elements - from completeness bars to competitive game elements that compare a LinkedIn user to their peers. All this makes the LinkedIn environment compelling to many people and results in their investing in making their LinkedIn profiles and the data in them. This raises, of course, the interesting question of whether competition - gamified competition as exemplified in the LinkedIn example - discourages or encourages users. More importantly, it makes us carefully consider the use of completion oriented elements vs competition oriented game elements. Here are some excerpts from my blog post there. You can read the whole post here. "LinkedIn wants you to complete your profile; profile completeness is an important goal since it makes the information about you interesting and valuable for other users, driving usage and powering LinkedIn’s monetization model. The basic information doesn’t take that long to provide, but most people are reluctant to invest the time it takes to complete their profile. How does LinkedIn get you to fill more information? Using gamification. The "profile completeness bar" appeals to the basic human satisfaction of completion. Even once you’ve gotten to 75-90% (including uploading a carefully selected picture), LinkedIn will try to appeal to your sense of mastery and competition to get to 100%, and beyond. Is there a "beyond 100%"? In LinkedIn, there is. LinkedIn came up with a new version of profile completeness: "profile strength"… even as you reach "All-Star" level, the circle (cup) is not never entirely full, insinuating that there is always room for updates and changes." I then conclude the post with a "it depends" - drawing the line between competition that may be disruptive within an enterprise gamification project and competition (and completion) done right: "When we want to implement gamification elements in the work place we have to make sure certain elements are being kept in order to encourage employees without making them feel worthless or over-challenged. It is important to ensure that the participants’ understanding that the final goal of gamification is the process going on at work (learning, improving sales, improving customer service, etc.) rather than the competition itself. Another means to smooth the competitiveness is to avoid pricey awards and concentrate on more symbolic ones, or reward with group prizes like a joint dinner, or other group activity."      

We just released a white paper about best practices in enterprise gamification project management. You can download it here. Here is an excerpt: "To give you a good sense of the project phases of an enterprise gamification project, we’ve decided to share our own project plans and charts. You can use them as a reference point for any gamification project you choose to implement, since it outlines the main phases in implementing a gamification project. The typical project, from beginning to actual launch should take 2-5 weeks, depending on the complexity of the process. This assumes that the gamification platform chosen is a no-code platform that can simply integrate across many enterprise systems. When choosing a gamification vendor, make sure you understand whether the IT integration effort risks lengthening the project or making it cumbersome, especially when the gamification project spans more than one enterprise system, meaning that employees will use it in the context of several enterprise applications. The main enterprise gamification project phases are (1) preparation (2) design (3) integration & setup and (4) testing and calibration. The preparation phase includes goal setting, player profiling, definition of desired behaviors and information analysis. The game design phase is where game elements and rules are set. The integration and set up phases include simulations, which, in turn, may lead to changes in game design. Testing and calibration extend from the launch phase and into the KPI and ROI analysis activities" To read more, download the white paper here.