I keep a close eye on what new enterprise gamification companies have to say; after all, I too am in the game and I want to see what my competition is writing. I am always disappointed (and surprised too) when I see the following texts, typically in the marketing text of a company that touts its sales gamification: "ignite competition". Come on! If competition was the only driver for sales gamification wouldn’t companies just be better off with a sales competition and good sized cash bonuses? Why spend time and money on enterprise sales gamification? The answer is that gamification isn’t about competition and motivation isn’t about cash bonuses. It is about engaging people with what Daniel Pink’s book - Drive: the Surprising Truth about What Motivates us - calls the "third drive". What is the third drive? It begins with monkeys and a puzzle. In the 1950s a scientist noticed that monkeys were engaged in puzzle solving even when there was no reward.  This was a surprise. They were supposed to only dedicate themselves to the task if it provided them a reward. A raisin, a banana. But no, "the performance of the task … provided intrinsic reward". When monkeys were offered raisins as a reward for solving the puzzles, they "actually made more errors and solved the puzzles less frequently". The introduction of an extrinsic reward seemed to extinguish the intrinsic reward; it was also a poorer driver of problem solving ability. Two decades later research found that "when money is used as an external reward for some activity, the subjects lose intrinsic interest for the activity". Rewards do boost activity, but their effects wear off soon and the longer term behavior is that of less engagement and motivation as was before. Pink argues that the assumption that individual performance improves with short term incentive plans and pay for performance is wrong. Not only do these schemes not work. They may even cause harm, and we have the science to prove this. Motivation can be intrinsic or extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation is the satisfaction of doing something better, with autonomy and a sense of growing mastery. Extrinsic motivation is doing something for a reward or competition. Yet many studies show that extrinsic rewards "tend to have a substantially negative effect on intrinsic motivation… when institutions - families, schools, businesses, and athletic teams, for example - focus on the short term and opt for controlling people’s behavior… they do considerable long-term damage". The book then tells the story of an experiment by Dan Ariely and others, in Madurai, India, to understand the effects of extrinsic incentives on performance. People were offered small, medium and large rewards for reaching performance levels when playing a game.  Small rewards were equivalent to a days’ pay, medium rewards were equivalent to about two weeks’ pay and a large reward was equivalent to about five months’ pay. What were the results? The low and medium rewarded groups performed about the same. But the highest incentives led to worse performance. The bottom line? "one cannot assume that introducing or raising incentives always improves performance". That’s why you should never think of enterprise gamification as a way to set goals or reward employees or drive them through competition. Think instead of how to use intrinsic drivers and how to use gamification to do just this. It’s possible. I will discuss what these are and how they can be achieved through gamification in later posts.

"Build it and they will come?" Does that work for enterprise gamification? That doesn’t work; if you build an enterprise gamification project and you don’t communicate it, they may not come… unless you’re about to distribute free ice cream. Communication is needed. When you launch an enterprise gamification project, you have to create credible and repeated communications with employees. That isn’t bad news. You should always consider your enterprise gamification projects as an opportunity to communicate with employees about your organization’s goals, rules of conduct, expectations, best practices and knowledge base.  This communication is both informative (make sure everyone plays according to the same rules) but it is also habit forming (always enter data into the CRM once you’ve completed a call). If you’re lucky, it can even impact corporate culture. Here’s what you can communicate: For sales, a sales enterprise gamification project can communicate how and what should salespeople sell, which offerings they should combine, how many times they are expected to touch a customer and what performance is expected. For elearning, an on boarding or training enterprise gamification implementation can communicate what pace of learning is best, which courses or learning items matter and (with quizzes) what knowledge level is required For customer service gamification an enterprise gamification project can communicate the interplay between various rep metrics, such as call handing time and problem resolution. Here are some key points about doing this right. Communicate your enterprise gamification project using the ACT + E model Here’s a handy acronym: ACT + E Audience:  craft your messages according to your audience. One size does not fit all. Content: invest the time to create content that is customized for your different types of users. Time: time game communications to tie in with game events (such as a fantasy sports game, a song contest and more) and organizational goals (end of quarter sales etc) Don’t forget the "E" - enhancement. All your communications should enhance the game narrative by extending it beyond the enterprise application. Even when the gamification avatar or mini-app follows the employee throughout the workday, the game related communication should extend it through messaging, images and use of media. Don’t forget the rules! Announcing an enterprise gamification project with fanfare, bells AND whistles isn’t enough. By setting game rules, you are really communicating with employees about the behavior you expect from them. Game rules that seem intuitive to you - even obvious - since you know what the expectations of the organization are - may be completely counter-intuitive or plain unknown to your employees. Set the rules out. Make sure they can be understood. Not doing so is risking people second-guessing your gamification goals and even arguing they are a cosmetic and non-integral addition glued on top of your enterprise apps. Don’t just communicate game rules, as in constraints, requirements, awards etc. Make sure to invest your time in an eye opening tutorial to make sure the players understand the game, the interfaces, and how it interacts with the enterprise applications they are using. Communicating the launch with a splash One of the things we like to do at Gameffective, is to create a launch video - like this one. Narrative based gamification - using game narratives such as sports, song contests, city building and more - offers a lot of opportunity to create a fun and splashy video announcing the game. This certainly enhances the game experience. Here’s an example of a launch video we ran. You can guess that the theme was car racing: Hand in hand with the video, make sure to launch the game tutorial and make sure it is viewed and understood. Don’t launch before the game rules are clear. Weekly communication We work in weeks - with the weekends in the middle. Gamification projects therefore are typically measured on week-long intervals- in many fantasy sports and other narrative settings we recommend beginning anew each week, so that people feel they have an opportunity to do better. For all these reasons it follows that communication should be weekly. Invest the time in creating a customized email newsletter to all game participants. Send it on a weekly basis. The weekly newsletter extends the game experience beyond the gamified platform. It should include the following: Recognition - recognition is one of the things that motivates employees to keep improve themselves. The newsletter should include recognition for outstanding players, competition winners and those who have improved the most during the week, relative to their past accomplishments. Reminders on pending actions - it’s all about behavioral change, right? Behavioral change happens best when habits are formed. Reminders on pending actions will help the player achieve their goals in a more consistent way and assist in ensuring compliance, opportunities for success (even if there was some slack during a specific period) and to form habits. Progress reports / game statistics - people want to know how they did and how they compare to the average. We found that the ability to view personal performance side by side with team benchmarks motivates better performance. It works better than sending out lists of all people ordered by achievement. Personal performance feedback - this communication creates a routine of continuous self-improvement. Stay Social Social communications are important. Celebrate team wins, team improvement and team goals. Make sure to recognize people (through pat on the back games) for helping others, or for contributing knowledge or expertise. Let everyone know how their team mates are doing.  Make sure to include social communication in the weekly newsletters/digests. Remember the employee engagement funnel In a series of previous posts, we’ve communicated the power of the employee engagement funnel. In short, 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. 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. Communicating enterprise gamification projects is to take the first step in the funnel - make people aware that something exists and bring them along. Celebrate! When using a fantasy sports or song contest theme, make sure to have the weekly event as celebratory as possible, calling people to join in. Celebrate winners on an individual or team basis.  

I’ve been reading "the small BIG - small changes that spark big influence". Its authors, Steve Martin, Noah Goldstein and Robert Cialdini are basing its central premise - small changes can have BIG effects - on research insights from neuroscience, cognitive psychology, social psychology and behavioral economics. The book’s theme is to focus on the small insights that have a BIG effect - the smallest changes in how you use "persuasion science" that have the BIG effect. Persuasion science, when you think of it, is not that different from research based deep thinking about that elusive quality: employee motivation. And no one argues that remaining motivated in a customer support or customer service setting is not simple. Customers yell at you, you are constantly tracked and measured, and the work requires patience and perseverance in the face of repetition. In a call center scenario you may be simply ignored or yelled at. One of the book’s most telling examples is about a call center. Before we go into what works to motivate call center employees, let’s examine conventional wisdom about customer service or call center gamification. A quick google search yields many recommendations - all of which are contrary to what science says. For instance, many gamification vendors recommend contests with vacations or monetary rewards. But that doesn’t work - and fiscal-based motivation sometimes even raises the bar, setting an expectation for constant rewards and reducing productivity in the medium and long term. Financial incentives run the risk of setting a new and higher reference point for the future. Other suggest a competition between call center employees, forgetting that it takes time to become a good caller and risking discouragement and an increase in the already high turnover rates in this industry. Conventional wisdom about customer service and call center gamification forgets people’s inner work life, a term coined by professors Amabile and Kramer from Harvard Business School: "People experience a constant stream of emotions, perceptions, and motivations as they react to and make sense of the events of the workday". Inner work life is the real stuff behind a sense of motivation and a sense of disengagement. The small Big book descibes an experiment by Adam Grant, a professor at the Wharton School of Business. He set out to show what happens when employees are reminded of the higher order stuff: the significance and meaning of their work. His premise was that if people can see why their job was important, they would be more motivated and more productive. Grant selected a university office that was tasked with contacting alumni and asking them to donate to the institution’s scholarship funds - a call center of sorts. Employees received "stories". Some stories were about what they gain from the job - salaries, hours worked, bonuses ("personal benefit" stories). Another set of stories was about how students are enjoying the scholarships and what that enabled them to achieve ("task significance" stories). There was also a third control group that received no stories. Employees in the "task significance" group managed to get more than twice the number of weekly pledges, doubling the amount raised for scholarships. That’s a small BIG thing: exposing employees to stories that make them twice as productive. I love this story. I also think there is a lesson here: it runs against a lot of today’s conventional thinking in enterprise gamification. And it should not. Take care to integrate "task significant messages - such as customer kudos and satisfaction  - into the gamification communications you are using with employees. It will make a difference.

Today, in a world full of information, media and communications - it’s really hard to stay focused. It is even harder to use persuasion to influence behavior. Enterprise gamification is about using game elements to influence employee behavior. What most people miss, though, is that it is also a great platform for employee communications, which further enforces persuasion and can encourage commitment to behavioral changes. Enterprise gamification, with the right calls to action and communication, also provides us with the behavioral cues that reinforce behavior. This post is inspired by "the small BIG - small changes that spark big influence". The book’s authors, Steve Martin, Noah Goldstein and Robert Cialdini argue that making a small change (the right change, based on neuroscience, cognitive psychology, social psychology and behavioral economic) results in BIG effects. Thinking about persuasion (the book’s authors talk about "persuasion science") is based on the premise that people may be willing, in theory, to do something - help an old lady cross the street, diet, vote or change work-related behavior. But this willingness needs persuasion - first people need to agree to undertake a behavior. People also need cues - reminders to do the right thing. One of the underlying principles of persuasion science is using social proof. Social proof means that we are more likely to act if we believe others are doing the same. This post will show how using enterprise gamification, for sales, customer service, call centers, eLearning and more, is a great  way to create social proof and increase the likelihood your gamification project will succeed. Using social proof to go with the crowd. The book tells the story of how, in 2009, Britain’s tax collection agency decided to try a small BIG change to its tax collection letters. In the past it had informed people their tax payments were delinquent, told them what are the fines and interest they are risking. But in 2009 it decided to add a sentence - one sentence. That sentence resulted in a dramatic rise in collection. What was that one magical sentence? A simple statement of how many people actually do pay on time. Why is that so persuasive? Because it gives social proof - people shape their behavior by the behavior of those that surround them. This is not motivated by a simple desire to be like everyone else. Social proof is driven by strong human needs - to make accurate decisions quickly, to be approved by others and to think well of oneself. Use gamification communication to drive social proof: don’t use a competition to show who completed a challenge first. Do show how many people already completed a challenge, how many people manage to have high first call resolution rate or how many people follow up with an email after a sales call. Using social proof to against the crowd: sometimes a desired behavior can be encouraged by using people’s desire to not go with the crowd. Sometimes using people’s desire to disassociate themselves from a group works better. You don’t want to smoke if I prove to you that smokers are lazy. Cool kids don’t want to adopt geeky behavior. Communicating something negative about people who do not perform a certain action would make people more likely to perform that action, especially in social settings. Use gamification communication to drive social proof: drive information about behaviors that should be avoided: call center reps that did not complete a certain eLearning stage were less successful at a certain task, sales people that did not complete CRM records sold less etc. Above all, remember that enterprise gamification is a great tool to communicate goals, objectives and best practices. You can also think about using the social proof principle to make sure that enterprise gamification, when used to communicate, makes the right points that drive persuasion and commitment.

Good customer service is at the heart of any business, and businesses that have incorporated it into their culture are truly exceptional: think of Southwest Airlines or Zappos. Recently, we have been taking the time to think more about Customer Service and Gamification. We feel that customer service gamification in call centers is so much more than giving employees rewards for completing basic activities;  it is certainly more than driving employees with a variety of competition-centric game mechanics. Why is that? The answer is simple: simplistic gamification of customer service tasks has nothing to do with delighting customers or customer service employees. That’s why I began reading Steve Curtin’s "Delight Your Customers - 7 Simple Ways to Raise Your Customer Service from Ordinary to Extraordinary". Curtin writes about "old fashioned" service industries: restaurants, hotels, supermarkets, taxis and sports clubs. While enterprise gamification is typically about how to place digital game mechanics on top of enterprise applications -  a long cry from the realities of the service industries Curtin describes - I thought that the common sense, non-digital approach Curtin has can teach us a lot about what customer service gamification should aspire to be. Job Essence vs Job Function Curtin begins with a great distinction between two elements of work: Job Function: the duties or tasks associated with the employee’s job roles Job Essence: the employee’s highest priority at work If you ask a waiter what they are supposed to do in their job, they will typically describe their job function: clearing tables, taking orders, serving food. Most often, they won’t mention their job essence at all. But job essence is important. In this case it is to provide service that will keep people coming back to the restaurant. Job functions (clearing tables, collecting payments etc) are what is needed to make the restaurant’s service work. After all, guests won’t be coming back to a restaurant where they eat at dirty tables among mountains of discarded plates and napkins. But job essence is what will really make restaurant patrons come back - the feeling they are valued customers that are listened to and even, to some degree, cosseted. Customer Service Job Essence The job essence of customer service, says Curtin, is that customers should be delighted, so that they will recommend the company’s products or services, buy them again and be less inclined to be wooed by the competition. Without the focus on the greater goal - the job essence -  both the customer service rep and the customer experience are stuck in a transactional service experience that, at best, leaves the customer unimpressed. It also causes the human provider of the service - the customer service rep - to feel their work is repetitious and unrewarding. As employee engagement levels drop, service does too.  Experiencing customer support as repetitious "factory work" is a bane of the call center and customer service industry. Gamification should be about job essence AND job function So the lesson is that enterprise gamification for customer service should focus on both the job function and the job essence. Focusing on job function means tracking what matters Track average handling time (AHT), first call resolution (FCR) and more. Gamification of the job function provides service reps with powerful feedback about their work and guidance how to do better. It helps them balance their work - balance short handling times while still resolving customer issues (or else, short AHT goals can be made by "gaming" the system and not trying to resolve customer issues). But gamification can be used to do much more than just make "factory work" better. Acting robotically, like a human manufacturing machine cannot work in a service environment. We’re not made to be delighted by machines but rather by humans. This is where job essence gamification enter the game. Take a person whose job is to bag groceries at the supermarket. They can bag the groceries, and hand them to supermarket patrons. But what if they did the same thing but also offered to carry them outside, or help with a cart? In that case, the supermarket patron would feel noticed, and the service experience would improve. But job essence doesn’t work when job functions are ignored. Striving to delight a customer but forgetting job function (resolving the problem the customer actually had) won’t work. Curtin says that job essence- delighting the customer - is what delivers better service. And the news is that is costs nothing. Using job essence to create happier employees Gamification can be used to clearly communicate job essence. If gamification measures it - for instance measuring positive customer feedback - it matters. You can gamify those "random" acts of kindness that constitute great customer service. Curtin says that job essence can and should be communicated: through modelling, feedback, pre-shift meetings and more.  Although job essence is mostly voluntary, outside the realm of the job function, relating to the anticipation of customer needs, paying attention to detail and displaying a sense of urgency, it can be gamified.  Just like customer stories can help encourage employees to perform better, gamification can work to enforce job essence. Think about "karma" points for exceptional service, the recognition of exceptional service and the resulting positive communication loop that will encourage employees to go the extra mile. What’s more interesting is that communicating job essence will make employees happier, because it attaches a meaning to what it sometimes repetitive work. Food for thought Next time you think of customer service gamification, remember that game rules should go beyond job function and include job essence. Not focusing on the essence is an expensive mistake. It means that the employee is transaction focused, treats the customer like they’d never come again, forgetting that the goal is to have the customer come again. And again.

Check out our new white paper: best practices for customer service and call center gamification.  We’re focusing there on the use of gamification to engage customer service employees, balance service, satisfaction and issue resolution and increase training and onboarding. You can also read about how to use enterprise gamification to better manage customer service and call center environments: Balancing AHT, FCR and Customer Satisfaction Creating balanced leaderboards across customer service channels, teams and individuals Recognizing exceptional service Using performance updates for immediate feedback, recognition and continuous improvement On the job elearning, training and customer service onboarding. After all, we want to make customer service employees engaged and committed. Go here to download the white paper.

Sometimes, we go to so much trouble to recruit the right people for our customer contact centers, that we forget the importance of onboarding — helping newbies make it through those first nerve wracking days on the job. If done right, though, onboarding can put new employees on the fast track to productivity, and much more. It certainly takes the sting off those first days on the job and is likely to keep employees happier and more engaged. Why is onboarding needed? Onboarding is much more than speeding up the initial time it takes an employee at a call center to learn how to do their job; it’s also more than orientation. It presents companies with a meaningful opportunity to engage employees, convey to them the larger corporate picture — brand, goals and culture, and even reduce turnover. Using onboarding to familiarize employees with job essence: customer happiness, as well as with job function: the tasks required to do it, quickly gives them a sense of success and accomplishment. In fact, some companies are so convinced of the importance of onboarding that they even engage with potential recruits through pre-boarding programs. Both onboarding and pre-boarding  are excellent grounds for enterprise gamification. Gamification: the secret sauce Gamification has nothing to do with playing or mobile app video games. It has everything to do with applying game mechanics to enterprise gamification applications and it is a super effective way to communicate with employees, encourage behavior changes, and boost performance. Many people erroneously relegate contact center and sales gamification to the simple use of competition scenarios — such as leaderboards, badges and contests — where actions like ‘first call resolution’ are rewarded. While competition can work well for motivation (only if the pitfalls of discouragement and temptations of gaming the contest are removed), other game mechanics reward completion and as such are ideal for elearning, training and onboarding. That is why call center onboarding is a classic use of enterprise gamification, due to the latter’s compatibility with training. In other words, gamification is an excellent way to encourage people to carry out certain tasks (such as completing details, watching a presentation, or taking a course) and to reward them with a good feeling of personal satisfaction and accomplishment. Some recommended tips and tricks: 1. It is all about ‘beginner level’ You may not realize it, but 99% of the people reading this have experienced game onboarding. A good example is any digital game you ever played, be it Candy Crush Saga, Angry Birds, or Temple Run, where you kick off play at an easy, beginner’s level. The secret behind the success of these games is that they tap in to the habit-forming, innate desire to win quickly and to do anything possible to experience the cues that signify  that one has completed a level. Each beginner level refers to a core ability (creating sets of three or more candies, using a slingshot to launch birds at pigs, jumping over objects to escape demonic monkeys) and players enjoy the satisfaction that they are independently mastering a skill. Onboarding is the same. If one could transform those frightening first work days into an easier and more rewarding ‘beginners level,’ onboarding and training would be far more successful, especially in the long-term. Don’t underestimate the emotional value of those quick wins: it is habit forming in that it. These habits will be key to job performance. Quick wins also ensure that employees are trained one skill at a time, and that a sense of mastery and autonomy ("I know how to do this well!") is achieved, driving employee engagement and satisfaction. 2. E-learning experience If you were a new contact center employee, would you prefer your training to come in the form of a huge file dumped in your lap by HR, which you are supposed to read, or one that engages you with quizzes, rewards you for reviewing materials, and uses team work to show you how to apply them? Well, gamification has an amazing ROI compared to rote completion of these educational materials, regardless of whether they deal with product data, communication channels, conveying empathy with customers, or handling problematic callers. Since it rewards learning by emphasizing completion of small chunks of learning tasks, employees tend to complete many more tasks compared to just looking at printed material, videos or presentations. 3. Team onboarding Another way to optimize onboarding through gamification is to create team-based competitions around learning the training material and completing tasks. Encouraging teamwork between new hires, sharing a similar stressful and challenging experience, has highly successful results. We’ve seen that reaching 100% of course material completion is definitely doable. 4. Onboarding… and ongoing Contact center onboarding should not be limited to the first days on the job and then end abruptly, say after the first week of hire.  In fact, several contact centers we have spoken to, placed new employees in the customer service channels that are less complex, such as social networks or email, where there are no immediate responses to deal with. With time, employees move into more intricate customer service channels, such as answering calls and dealing with technical problems, which require more knowledge and experience. Outstanding results can be achieved by integrating training with the new hire’s workday and splitting up onboarding for each customer service channel. Add gamification into the mix — such as using training as a qualification, solving a challenge, or a team contest, and one just might have the key to training and onboarding that creates employees armed with the skills and education they require in order to integrate and excel. Gamification and onboarding go hand in hand. Take the opportunity to create a lasting good first impression with employees and provide them with the knowledge and skills they need to succeed.

World-class gymnast Dan Millman wrote in his 1980 book The Peaceful Warrior that "the secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new." What does this have to do with gamification you ask? Well, until recently, most organizations used gamification as a tool to motivate employees through competition - assuming that one’s primal needs to separate oneself from the rest are what drive motivation. Today’s enterprise gamification takes a broader and more modern view of human motivation, understanding that it goes beyond points, badges and leaderboards, and that intrinsic motivation is more powerful than extrinsic motivation. Gamification isn’t a magic potion that makes work mesmerizing. It is much more than points, badges and leaderboard… Research shows that using game mechanics which carry a meaning and provide a sense of mastery and autonomy can create super-engagement. The additional "new" here is that gamification can also change culture, communication and performance management. These are the less-cited results of gamification but we thought we’d list them. Using gamification "right" has a lot of other great, unintended consequences. Here are 10 that are perhaps less known, but worth their weight in gold: Objective data/Transparency: Implementing gamification requires automatic collection of objective performance data. Data about the productivity of sales people, call center employees, training and use of knowledge collaboration. Regardless of what enterprise app you are using as the basis for gamification, the actual collection of the data, the decisions of which KPIs to measure and the consistent measurement have value in and of themselves. Suddenly, you’re not rating employees based on what their managers say but based on real, hard data. The results can be surprising sometimes - showing hidden top performers. Additionally, employees understand objectivity and their perception of the data as objective and transparent makes them feel the rules of the game are fair. Gamification is simpler for managers: The same objective data that is integrated into the gamification app is also helpful for managers. It gives managers accurate and unbiased information about all employees — a single source of truth for performance tracking needs. Feedback: Once performance tracking is automated and tied into enterprise applications, periodic performance updates (we recommend measuring a person-team against their own benchmark and not in a leaderboard) become great feedback mechanisms. Automatic (and therefore objective) updates can be used to provide periodic leaderboards and other gamification feedback mechanisms. Whether these occur on a daily or weekly basis, they give constant individual and team-based feedback. They also leave hope for change - "if I didn’t do well today, I can do well next week." Feedback - and a lot of it - is the spine of many gamification benefits, since it tells people how they are doing. Recognition: Never underestimate how important recognition is for the happiness and engagement of employees. Gamification can single out top performers in certain segments, people who’ve progressed relative to themselves — and not just in comparison to others, top teams, and more (that’s why simplistic leaderboards are bad - they don’t recognize relative improvements). All in all, this gives the feeling that employee performance is noticed, appreciated and individual. Mastery: Mastery is the fuzzy feeling that "I am getting better at this" — a sense of progression that is provided by result tracking and comparisons that are inherent in any gamification solution. Mastery is learning something new and experiencing flow - described by the state where we feel in command of what we do, execute tasks effortlessly, and perform at our best. Flow was discovered by researchers at the University of Chicago. Doing well and sensing mastery are what underlie work related happiness. Gamification motivates everyone: Employees can work against personal benchmarks, get recognition based on their relative improvement, be rewarded for completing training tasks, and more. The important point is that if done right, gamification can provide clear progress reports to everyone, not just to the people at the top of the leaderboard. Gamification provides clear calls to action: By integrating with enterprise apps, gamification not only provides employees with immediate performance feedback, but guides them as to what they should do next. It is also great for new hire onboarding. Performance can be improved through using a series of steps that bring the employee on the path of improved performance. A sense of autonomy and choice: good gamification implementation gives credit to the fact that play is voluntary; while work is not voluntary and gamification isn’t play, good enterprise gamification implementations give users autonomy. Users can choose the path they wish to take - a training path, a balance between KPIs or doing the extraordinary thing that will earn them "karma" points. The ability to choose is a strong driver of engagement and motivation. Training: eLearning is on the rise and for good reason. Rather than shuttling employees to training classes, gamification can be integrated with on-the-job training that is available to employees during quiet times or when their performance is below par (as a way to earn points). ELearning is more engaging than reading papers and the use of quizzes simulations and other mechanics is very efficient and has better measurable results. Gamification drives balance: Often, employees need to balance conflicting expectations. For instance, customer service employees need to resolve issues fast and get high customer satisfaction ratings. By tracking many service elements and highlighting the need to improve and balance them, employees can do a better job at balancing short handling times with resolving customer issues. By tracking many KPIs gamification can help employees and the organization find the right kind of balance for optimal performance. Organizations have much to benefit from gamification, therefore stay focused not on "fighting the old, but on building the new" - a new culture and new performance and goal setting habits.

Employee events - outdoor activities,  group lunches, holiday parties, and corporate events are important to-dos on the HR executive’s list. Their purpose is to motivate employees, encourage peer interaction and improve satisfaction, loyalty, performance and retention. Yet, not all employees feel ecstatic or motivated by paintball, having to reveal their yeast allergy to colleagues over lunch, or consuming egg nog at the must have holiday party. Nevertheless, research shows that peer interaction positively affects employee engagement. In fact, according the Corporate Executive Board, peer interaction drives employee engagement by 36 percent. Employers are well aware of this - they wouldn’t hold social events to start with. The interesting question is how offsite parties fare when compared to daily on-the-job interaction? CEB research shows that peer interaction that happens at work is more effective than peer interaction during extracurricular activities. Hence, while meeting for a barbecue at your team leader’s home is nice, interacting with peers at work on a daily basis has a more pronounced effect on boosting engagement and productivity - the "inner work life" that makes employees happy at work (see this link in the Harvard Business Review). On the job interaction can be driven by gamification. Many people think that gamification is only a way of driving the individual, however it is a very effective tool for driving positive peer interaction and engagement during work hours - through the promotion of positive team interaction. Following are 4 examples of how enterprise gamification can do this Gamify peer interaction in eLearning and awareness creation - Take a sales team as an example. If a new product is launched, everyone should know everything about its features, advantages, and differentiation. Why not use elearning gamification - with team-based challenges? Team based competitions shift the focus of elearning and internal product communication to employee interaction and even more importantly, on the job interaction. Find engagement leaders - use the employee engagement funnel - An employee engagement funnel is a figurative funnel  through which new, or unengaged, employees pass to become more engaged with the company’s goals and strategic drives. The latter stages of the funnel are based on peer interactions where employees become leaders or ambassadors who share their knowledge and skills with colleagues - making them aware of new offerings and interacting with them. Gamifying activities that consist of leadership in training and teaching others - on the job, both encourages this behavior and rewards it. And it is 100% on the job. Good deeds gamification - The problem with using competition-based leaderboards and badges to drive engagement and productivity is that not everyone thrives on competition and therefore, these activities may be counterproductive. In fact, they ignore and alienate the real growth and attempts made by the non-top-performers who are nevertheless performing extremely well. One way to overcome this is to use social gamification to encourage good deeds (helping with on-boarding, sharing materials, engaging with social networks and knowledge management systems). At the heart of this model is earning Karma points. One can use good old fashioned games to do this such as card collection — think kids collecting baseball cards — where employees collect cards for each person they interact with in a certain timeframe and then "fill" an album. Another great way is to use "pat on the back" games, where people are recognized for positive peer interactions. Gamification as a means of peer communication and recognition -Since enterprise gamification that uses the right calls to action and communication can influence employee behavior, it is an effective way to nurture peer interaction, drive motivation, and then reward it. This is the secret to achieving a win-win situation — even after the holiday party egg nog episode is all but a distant memory.

Sales managers often swear by the efficacy of using leaderboards. They will tell you how charting sales people on a leaderboard — be it manually or with enterprise gamification, sends numbers through the roof. However, can leaderboards really have such an impact  on sales performance? Granted sales people thrive on competition, however the problem is that leaderboards tend to be misused  with disastrous consequences. The good news is that once you’re aware of these epic fails, the damage is reversible and you’ll be less likely to repeat the same mistakes. So, how do you know if your sales leaderboards are doomed? Simply ask yourself if you’re doing these five  major mistakes:   Are you tracking the wrong benchmarks? You’re about to implement a simple sales leaderboard and figure that the KPIs you should be tracking are … well, sales. In other words, the leaderboard design you chose displays dollar or unit sales per person on the team. Think again. There are two reasons this is a bad idea: Firstly, gamification for sales teams should focus on encouraging certain behaviors — making calls, qualifying leads, meeting potential and existing clients etc. The aim is to generate more sales, however tracking actual sales does not motivate behavior. It also doesn’t reveal mistakes that your team might be making, therefore, the chance to correct them and change behaviors flies out the window. Secondly, leaderboards can be plain unfair and biased. If your leaderboard displays actual sales, they’re automatically favoring your experienced employees, because those less experienced usually land up with the smaller and less lucrative accounts. They’ll see the injustice and your much touted leaderboards will just fuel their frustration — at best. Are you endorsing the wrong behaviors? Leaderboards are essentially part of a game with rules, just like other gamification mechanics. Game rules are always open to deliberate misinterpretation by players who like to win. The unintended consequences are not pretty. Take for example leaderboards that track the percentage of sales forecasts met as the main KPI. Those who’ve achieved the forecast numbers in their sales deals should win. However, this  could engender the temptation to cheat — in other words, sales reps may keep sales forecasts low or perhaps  underestimate or "doctor" sales opportunities. Why would they do this? To get the first place on the leaderboard every time - without breaking a sweat. Another potentially noxious outcome from leaderboards is that a rep that was meant to close more deals or help others do so, could easily get carried away in just winning the competition, rather than being motivated by it. Are you overlooking the middle 60%? In an article titled "The Dirty Secret of Effective Sales Coaching,"  the Harvard Business Review states that sales and service organizations are investing increasing amounts of time and effort in improving managers’ coaching of reps. However, this coaching is basically useless when managers target the wrong reps, which according to the article, they do all the time. Why? Because, sales managers often favor the "tails — the very best and the very worst reps on their team." They engage with lower performers, because they have goals to meet and they favor their top reps, because it’s more exciting. According to the Review’s research, coaching only "laggards and leaders," and ignoring the intermediate 60 percent, has no impact on an organization’s bottom line results, since top performers don’t actually improve and bottom performers might simply not be suitable for the job — no matter how world-class the coaching may be. The crux of the matter is that the very 60% of sales reps being ignored demonstrated the highest performance gains when coached. Leaderboards present the same problem if misused. "Leaders" are just more driven by the intense competition of the leaderboards, which achieves nothing other than reiterating that they are leaders. The "laggards" just become increasingly aggravated and frustrated, so their situation doesn’t improve. However, what about those in the middle? Bottom line, to improve sales results, invest in helping the middle 60% improve and also share the fuzzy feeling of being highlighted by the leaderboard. Are you boring them to death? If you leaderboard excludes new recruits or the less competitive among us, it is discriminating. They won’t just miss out on the thrills being rewarded to others, but they’ll feel down right  dejected. Since the leaderboard shows the top brass in the team, sometimes others even drop off the  list — as if they’re not even worth a mention. Not good and not right! The negative outcome here is boredom and disengagement. Don’t fret, the situation is redeemable — just use more suitable game mechanics that involve more than badges, points and… you guessed it, leaderboards. Do you want a winning team or a few stars? The very term a "sales team" implies a group of individuals, be they sales development managers or account managers, who are meant to combine forces or work across product departments. Leaderboards, however focus on the individual. So, if its team spirit and cooperation you’re after, leaderboards can have the opposite effect. Rapid sales scenarios  require individualized competition, but if that’s not the case, leaderboards that compare teams and not just stars, help middle players shine through and with their team members. To leaderboard or not to leaderboard? If you answered "yes" to even some of the above, you’re probably wondering whether to ditch the whole leaderboard concept altogether with points and badges to boot.  Not so fast we say. Leaderboards can be an extremely effective tool to recognize achievement and encourage behavior. Just make sure that they are applied correctly with serious thought to the desired outcomes and behaviors (compare rookies with rookies and small account managers with small account managers), as well as to their structure (opt for teams competing against goals and benchmarks as opposed to going head-to-head with each other). Also, make sure there is no temptation to trick the system. Last, but not least, engage people in a game at which that they can win at least some of the time, especially if they’re in the middle 60%!