I’ve noticed that every time I write about enterprise gamification - from it being the quantified-self for employee performance engagement through sales gamification, customer service gamification, social gamification and more - elearning always comes up. There are several explanations for why elearning always pops up when we discuss enterprise gamification: It works. Elearning works exceptionally well, by driving individual achievement through the use of completion game mechanics, feedback and recognition. Something about the pace, the rewards and the way in which most elearning material is pre-prepared trumps class-based learning. This has been recognized by many: the internet is awash with material about elearning for an amazing amount of learning scenarios: school, high-school, university, moocs, and the workplace. Enterprises need elearning. There are many instances where elearning is important to the enterprises’ success. Employees can become more engaged if they know their job better, elearning can serve to coach the poorer performing employees, policies can be communicated and new product introductions can be made. Elearning is best served on the side. In many cases, elearning is not the core activity for an employee, but an important aside. For instance, when a customer service agent has some downtime, emotional intelligence elearning or elearning about new offerings is a valuable addition. Combining elearning into daily work tasks is more efficient and results in more information retention. All of the above is why, in many cases, we see enterprise gamification projects where we first gamify various enterprise apps, from CRM to contact center and workforce optimization. The second thing we do is simple: we integrate elearning into the gamification project, because it works well. It also delivers a better ROI on both the gamification and elearning investment. Having said all that, here are our 7 ways to integrate elearning into enterprise gamification: Number 1: Micro learning Micro-learning breaks learning into small bite-sized pieces. A short video about a new product, a quiz about the sexual-harrasment policy, a presentation about how to overcome customer anger in a call center environment.  Made for this generation’s shorter attention spans, micro-learning is short and effective. Micro-learning is a curriculum that is accessible anytime and anywhere. In the enterprise, micro-learning makes life easier for trainers since they need to develop shorter chunks of training that can be delivered anywhere. Another important micro-learning benefit it that it gives employees a sense of autonomy and control. They can choose what to learn and when, giving a sense of self-direction which is important to employee satisfaction. Many believe that micro-learning also results in better information retention, since information is accessed when the user needs it to complete a task. To integrate micro-learning, decide on the model you will use to invoke it. For instance, you can gamify salespeoples’ learning of a new product that was introduced, or use micro-learning  as a pre-requisite to get to play a sales competition. Micro-learning can result in recognition (an expert badge) or simply as a way to earn more points and advance in the game. Micro-learning can also be integrated in a coaching scenario, where an employee that isn’t performing well, can be rewarded for training - with the goal of coaching the employee with the information they are missing to do their job well. Gamification can: Track the use of micro-learning and prove it took place Encourage the use of micro-learning through calls to action Provide much needed recognition and social proof for micro-learning Number 2: elearning as a form of on the job training Elearning that is combined into any gamification project is one of the most effective on-the-job training there is. For instance, a call center agent with poor customer satisfaction ratings can be directed to on-the-job training to amend that. A sales person that isn’t making enough new product proposals? Some on the job training about the new product offerings. It’s that simple. Number 3: Learning as a form of communication In many cases, we see enterprise gamification projects that are all about communication. Enterprises have a need to communicate objectives, goals and expected results. They want their employees to keep these in mind at work and balance their performance accordingly. Combining elearning can be an important way of communicating these expectations, such as the need to sell more of a certain offering etc. Sometimes, the communications around the gamification project can be as impactful as its associated behavioral change - communicating performance objective and then seeing how your peers work is an important form of social proof. Number 4: Integration with Learning Management Systems (LMS) Enterprise gamification is evolving into a top tier that is integrated across several enterprise applications. To cover the employee application path at the workplace, from the main app through social and knowledge sharing and into LMS, enterprise gamification must integrate seamlessly with these applications, to deliver a cross app experience. As a result, many gamification projects get their learning "feeds" from the LMS. The LMS is also impacted, through gamification analytics, as the results coming from gamification analytics indicate how employees respond to the content in the LMS, resulting in further optimization of the content and its delivery. Number 5: in-class gamification Gamification can be used in class-based training, by encouraging team participation - here’s a case study on using gamification in a class environment, where the choice of team incentives drove strong engagement with the materials. After all, no one wants to be the person which brings their team down. Number 6: on-boarding On-boarding new employees is a form of training and elearning that enables self-directed learning for new employees. We’ve written about it here. Number 7: refresher games Sometimes, there is a need for gamification to fit into a larger communication campaign - a refresher course in areas such as safety, sexual harassment and compliance policies. Using gamification to deliver these short refresher courses and integrating them into the on-the-job duties and calls to action is more efficient and engaging.

Each enterprise software vertical has its most quoted statistical factoid. Here’s a fictional one - "in the year 2525 every enterprise will implement a zillion micro-services". The world of enterprise gamification has two oft-quoted statistics, and they are quoted all too often. Statistic number 1: employees are not engaged The first often-quoted statistic is that about 70% of employees are disengaged. This statistic (available here as measured by Gallup) is often followed by an attempt to estimate the economic costs of such disengagement - at the hundreds of millions of dollars, or mote. Gallup’s recent release says that it "recorded employee engagement at 31.5% at the end of 2014, which was the highest reading since 2000. The current year-to-date average is 32.0%." This means that 68% of employees are disengaged. While Gallup concludes the numbers are rising, they are "slight progress …the majority of the nation’s employees still fall into the "not engaged" category." Statistic number 2: 80% of gamification projects will fail The second most quoted statistic about gamification comes from Gartner. In late 2012, at the top of the hype cycle about gamification, Gartner came out with a press release titled "Gartner Says by 2014, 80 Percent of Current Gamified Applications Will Fail to Meet Business Objectives Primarily Due to Poor Design". I’ve seen this number quoted many times. Today, I believe gamification is taking off in the enterprise.  Large enterprise players, such as Verint, Infosys, SAP and IBM are investing in gamification. But what is really unmistakable is the interest large enterprise companies are having in gamification and the willingness to address employee engagement by thinking deeply about gamification, without the fallacy of taking is as a form of "fun" or "videogame" veneer on top of work. But Gartner was spot on in making that 2012 forecast, because the gulf separating good gamification design from poor gamification design is far and wide. In 2012 some of the emerging views of gamification were indeed overly simplistic; the industry is still dealing with their ramifications today. But what’s really interesting is the vision Gartner had , voiced by Brian Burke, its research vice president (and author of a 2014 book about gamification) which I wholeheartedly agree with: The challenge facing project managers and sponsors responsible for gamification initiatives is the lack of game design talent to apply to gamification projects… Poor game design is one of the key failings of many gamified applications today." "The focus is on the obvious game mechanics, such as points, badges and leader boards, rather than the more subtle and more important game design elements, such as balancing competition and collaboration, or defining a meaningful game economy. As a result, in many cases, organizations are simply counting points, slapping meaningless badges on activities and creating gamified applications that are simply not engaging for the target audience. Some organizations are already beginning to cast off poorly designed gamified applications." By the way, if you’d like to, you can read the original Gartner report here (it’s free, but requires registration). Gamification: designing employee behaviour In a section discussing gamification for employees - known today as enterprise gamification, Gartner made some prescient forecasts and presented a compelling analysis. I’d like to highlight this and show how it has evolved since 2012: 1. Gamification isn’t just about competition. The currency of gamification isn’t about "outwitting and outlasting" anyone, as some reality shows have programmed us to think. In general, the currency of gamification isn’t triumphing over others. Gartner got that correctly, in a space that was teeming with announcements about employees competing against each other for badges. Here’s what Gartner had to say: "Gamification uses the currencies of social capital, self-esteem and fun overtaking extrinsic rewards as motivations for improved performance" Looking at the state of gamification today, I think Gartner were spot on regarding the dwindling importance of competition. Today, everyone recognizes that social proof plays a big part in gamification - we want to be like others - and gamification mirrors the actions of our fellow employees, prompting behavioral change. Self-esteem is also a driver- a need to feel mastery at work - but what today is becoming most salient is that gamification is becoming a form of the quantified self. Tracking performance and measuring it have been proven to be a powerful motivator, and many gamification platforms are today even forsaking the nomenclature of "gamification" and using "performance platform" or "fitbit for work" to make this point about gamification. 2. Gamification isn’t about top performers either In 2012 Gartner said that "competitive games will play less of a role in employee performance being displaced by collaborative games that are designed to maximize business outcomes, rather than rewarding a few top performers". And indeed, in 2015 we see the rise of modified leaderboards which are designed to motivate the middle 60% and not highlight those people that always stay at the top. You can read about best practices for leaderboards here and about how team incentives work better than individual ones. 3. Gamification is about feedback One of the most interesting - and less conspicuous -  aspects of gamification is that it collects real time feedback about our performance, and then delivers it in real time, giving us constant feedback that is immediate in its ability to coach or remedy behavior. We’ve written about this here - reviewing the importance of feedback to things like sitting up straight or working a cash register. Gartner got this right, too: "Employee performance feedback will move from being top-down and periodic (often annual) to being social, peer-based and real-time." The importance of immediate feedback shouldn’t be underestimated. Instead of hearing, at the end of the week, that you didn’t perform well, you get immediate feedback on how your’e doing, how it compares to your benchmarks and past performance and to your peers. This constantly aligns behavior expectations and tells you if you’re in the red or in the green. This, in fact, is the quantified self, and it creates well-being, since you always know where you stand and (as we will soon show) what you should do next. 3. Gamification will change performance management Today, even the annual review and setting performance goals and measuring them are changing, with the advent of companies like betterworks, which promotes the objective and key results method used by Google, Linkedin and Intel, in which employee performance objectives are set in a transparent way and are constantly assessed and revised. We also wrote about gamification as a form of performance management for lower level employees (here’s our post), and we believe that is the right thing to do. Gartner forsaw this too: "In knowledge work, such as project management or product design, emergent game structures will be more common than scripted games. In emergent games, players are provided with the goals, tools, rules and space to play… the outcome cannot be defined, but the goal is defined. Extending this approach for complex goals that require multiple players, self-organizing teams can be formed to achieve the goal." 4. Gamification as a form of script for work In the 2012 Gartner describes two forms of gamification - for knowledge workers (emergent games) and for lower skilled employees. It then introduces the idea of the scripted game: "In low-skilled jobs, such as service desk analysts, scripted games will present workers with specific tasks and rewards to be completed, and workers will be motivated with social recognition within the workgroup and mastery of the tasks — while there are large risks in using scripted games, they can also be useful in motivating low-skilled workers" In this, Gartner forsees the future of gamification. Workers will be motivated by mastery (a job well done) and by social recognition (since extrinsic drivers don’t work; intrinisic motivation trumps extrinsic motivation). The interesting part is the use of the word "scripted". Scripted means that employees are directed towards the next behavior (next best action) and not just by a competition to do something many times, or perform many actions over and over again. This idea is used by us today. We’re using it to introduce micro-learning and just in time learning in games, to show the "next best action" to employees and to direct them to the right courses of action. This works to get salespeople to work better with the CRM and directs customer service employees better. 5. Gamification is changing corporate culture If you’ve been following till here, it becomes obvious that the result is a change in how corporations and employees interact: a change in corporate culture stemming from a different understanding about what motivates employees and how to motivate them. This isn’t a culture of "fun video games" as could be argued in 2012, it is a culture that views the alignment of goals between employee and employer with a new way of thinking. Gartner got this right too: "Current top-down, command and control management approaches are being replaced by game design skills. Successful managers in the future will be great designers of games … that are designed to achieve specific business outcomes" "Organizations should seek to clearly define the organizational objectives of employee-facing applications, understand employee objectives and focus on where the two overlap. Applications should be people-centric and enable employees to be successful in achieving their objectives — where they are aligned with organizational objectives". So, where is gamification today? Hype? or Plateau of Productivity? In 2012, according to Gartner, gamification was at the "Peak of Inflated Expectations", just before the "Trough of Disillusionment".  However, Gartner was never dismissive of gamification. It just thought it would take people some time to get it right - failure that comes before success. Where is gamification today? Based on the demand I see in the market, the market is ripe. I hope we get to Gartner’s "Plateau of Productivity" soon, because, just like Gartner, I am convinced that gamification has the potential of being truly transformational.    

We are all in a state of constant learning. Whether on the job, at school, or when keeping up with the latest technology - learning is one of the most fundamental tasks we have. Yet learning, especially in the context of work, isn’t always that enjoyable. Learning something new, regardless of how important it is, can be an extremely difficult task. While at school, if we weren’t really in to a certain subject, we could hang low during those specific lessons and do just enough to get by. At work, it’s an entirely different story. Performance is greatly dependent on acquiring new skills, such as increased adoption of enterprise software, the use of knowledge management systems and more. It is also a factor of knowledge - emotional intelligence in dealing with customer complaints or product knowledge when offering new solutions to customers. Bridging the desire to learn and the motivation to do it In these situations, where learning is vital but motivation may be low, gamification technology can assist us greatly in achieving our goals. Firstly, gamification can really help with increasing motivation. Learning is always a journey, but sometimes it feels like you’re actually walking in place. By using completion game mechanics, gamification can assist in illustrating the progress that is taking place, and in giving the user a true sense of how far she has come since starting her journey towards this new body of knowledge, whatever it may be. Using mechanics such as badges, points, levels, and progress boards, users can monitor and exhibit how far they’ve come, as well as how they are doing in comparison to their coworkers and friends. People have a natural tendency to want to improve and learn new skills, but they aren’t always sure what the best way to achieve that is. Gamification offers just that. By breaking up the learning process into manageable sections that the user can take in without feeling overwhelmed by the breath of the subject that he is attempting to learn, gamification allows for a steady improvement and learning experience. Peer-learning, tutoring and mentoring Learning is so much more enjoyable when it is done together with others. Gamification offers solutions that can enable the employees in your organization to connect with other learners - read this case study about Microsoft -  ask questions, debate topics and motivate each other to keep on improving. Learning can be presented as a team challenge as well - people are more motivated about working to achieve team challenges than individual ones. Gamification can also connect those who are mastering new skills with those in your organization that already have a good knowledge of that specific skill. Some organizations we’ve encountered have coaching systems, where veteran employees help newer ones to master new capabilities, tying into the fact that gamification serves as a great tool to coach performance. Leading the way in gamified learning Several organizations are leading the way in integrating gamification in to learning processes. One of the most veteran ones is Khan Academy, which has been using gamification mechanics more or less since its inception. Users collect energy points when they complete lessons and view videos. Students on the platform are also provided with statistics and analytics about their progress and improvement. Duolingo is another great example of how gamification is used to assist in learning a new skill (languages, in this case). The Duolingo experience is designed like a lighthearted game full with trophies, cute characters that pop up and encourage you to continue your language learning journey, and a scoreboard where you can see how you’re doing in comparison to your other friends who are using the platform. Simple elements of goal achievement and curiosity are taken advantage of, as the more advanced lessons "open up" only after you have already completed the earlier ones, and cannot be accessed otherwise. In enterprise gamification, elearning activities are combined with general gamification, regardless of whether it is a sales, customer service or other gamification. You can read more here. Gamification can greatly assist the learning process. Whether within an organization or for your own benefit, these simple mechanics can help those who are trying to improve and learn new skills reach their goals.  

There is one constant: everything is subject to change, whether we like it or not. In order to optimize organizational performance, companies must be able to change. However, in many cases employees and managers find it difficult to embrace change, and the transition can be experienced as stressful or impossible. In organizations, constant changes in the workforce (millennials), in underlying technologies, business fundamentals, strategy and processes need to be managed. The move from the current context into a new context becomes a necessity. As more changes occur, employees should be given more performance feedback on the changes that need to be made, creating the need for a continuous improvement process. Gamification is uniquely suited to organizational change management. Here’s how: What is change management? Change management is about transitioning into a desired future state. Change is a structured, multi-phase process, from defining the vision for a change, to creating a strategy to effect it and motivating the actual change. Motivating the workforce is essential to change management, but not trivial to accomplish.  This is where gamification comes in. Comfort zones and habits matter. People dislike change. Yet, as change cycles are becoming shorter and companies need to react quickly, being able to carry out change and transformational processes becomes strategic. What is gamification? People play games for many reasons. Gamification, the use of game mechanics to influence performance and create accountability, isn’t play or a game, but uses game techniques to influence behavior. These game mechanics satisfy basic human psychological needs: a sense of competence, autonomy and relatedness. While brownie points, frequent flyer miles and other forms of consumer gamification have been around for years, these simplistic programs rely on extrinsic reward. Gamification uses the "third drive" - intrinsic motivation - which is a much stronger driver of long term engagement. It also uses sophisticated game mechanics and takes a long term approach to behavioral changes and employee work-habit creation. Gamification - through its power to communicate goals and give real time feedback about employee achievement - is an ideal tool for Change Management, enabling smooth structural change. Gamification is a powerful tool of transformational change. It can be used to support better user engagement and feedback, giving powerful indicators of process improvement.  For instance, to change work habits, gamification can help explain the change, through gamified elearning, support the change, form habits and drive engagement. Gamification and change management as a continuous process In the past, change management was a planned process, with three phases: unfreeze the organization, change it; and then refreeze the new configuration. However, as changes become more frequent an alternative approach is process centered, where organizational change is continuous and evolving. In this approach, the organization constantly needs to adapt to an unpredictable and rapidly changing environment. The focus isn’t just on one grand change to be implemented and then frozen, but on many small adjustments that can produce significant change over a relatively long period. In this aspect, change management is a subtle process that is ongoing, a pre-requisite for a healthy organization that can detect and react to changes in its environment. The gamification toolkit for change management Gamification can drive transformational journeys for the workforce, whether a post-merger culture change or a re-alignment of processes and habits. In all these cases the gamification efforts is centered on adoption. The decision to invest in a new platform or system is usually driven by technology.  Yet the question of how people will react to this change is not taken seriously. Even if there is a structured process - training, awareness and briefings - people forget a lot of what they were taught by the time the system goes live. In this instance, gamification can motivate people to perform new activities over and over again, for on the job learning.  Doing things over and over again forms habits. At some point the new behavior stops being new. It just becomes "business as usual", the most appropriate way to behave in the organization, which, in turn, affects corporate culture. Gamification and transactional workforces Today, gamification works well for the transactional workforce: whether it is customer facing employees, or back office knowledge workers. Some of them don’t even work for the company, they are what we call "the extended workforce" - contractors or part of managed services. These jobs can be repetitive, but the performance differences between employees are great. Helping more average performers become top performers can have a very positive impact on the organization. As the workforce changes, and more jobs become automated, you need to shift people’s talents to different avenues. In the past, transformational journeys took three years. Today they need to happen quickly, using gamification. What type of adoption is required for change management gamification? In consumer gamification - frequent flier miles or similar campaigns - gamification has an impact on performance even if less than 5 or 10 percent engage with it. However, in organizations, anything less than 75% engagement with new systems or processes isn’t enough for change. That’s why gamification for change management means good game design and not a game mechanic slapped on top of an existing system. Another difference compared to consumer gamification is that organizational change gamification should be longer running. Quick adoption wins are needed, but longer term engagement needs to made, as well as having the gamification for change management there for any additional change management needs in an environment of continuous improvement.

We recently deployed our gamification platform to encourage adoption of a knowledge sharing platform implemented by one of our customers. Before gamification, the knowledge management platform wasn’t used much by the workforce (customer service employees spread across countries and continents). The goal of the gamification implementation was to form new habits of creation and consumption of knowledge management content. The narrative used was city building - more articles meant more assets, and articles that were useful contributed to the city as well. Both individual and team challenges were used, as well as external game communication. The case study results were presented as an infographic, which we wanted to share with our blog’s readers.  

Wellness.  Can we even imagine what that meant when cigarettes were not considered a health risk? Being productive. What did that mean when office work was performed with a pen and paper, and knowledge workers had libraries they referred to at work? Technology doesn’t only change the way we communicate, maintain our social circles or retrieve information. It changes the way we understand ourselves. It creates new emotions, new pleasures and pains. It profoundly affects our innermost personal and work lives. What is the next thing that will effect a similar change? Activity trackers are redefining how we understand ourselves and our achievement The way activity trackers benchmark our personal performance and communicate it to the world is one of those points where technology impacts our lives. Gamification - or at least gamification 2.0 (also known as performance gamification) - is a key part of this future. The meteoric rise in popularity of wireless-enabled wearable products, such as those by Fitbit and Jawbone - activity and wellness trackers -  has brought us with one of those points where technology impacts how we think of ourselves. Initially, before wearables, the quantified self meant self-knowledge through self-tracking with technology. You were supposed to tell what the effect of the foods you consumed - or any other activity - had on your wellness.   But as wearables have gone from unsophisticated pedometers to state-of-the-art insight-engines, the very concept of ‘health’ has been demystified and broken into activities such as eating, sleeping and moving, by quantifying each and every one of these activities. Suddenly, tracking miles a person has run becomes a truly satisfying activity, a combination of achievement, control and even exhilaration. Data shows that Fitbit users take 43 percent more steps than non-Fitbit users. Jawbone users tracked over 150 million nights of sleep last year, making it the largest sleep study in the history of humankind. Self tracking as a form of intrinsic drive Daniel Pink made an important point in his book "drive" - the "third drive" - intrinsic motivation, is the best and most consistent driver. Dan Ariely validated that too by showing that people work harder for intrinsic motivation than for extrinsic rewards, such as money or competition. What activity trackers do is quantify intrinsic drive, benchmark our performance and drive us to do more. Instead of letting us guess how well we did or did not do, it shows us objective measurements, and these drive us to achieve more. Activity tracking is transforming social proof Every time you see someone post their run results on facebook you can see that activity trackers are also used to communicate achievement. By doing that, people are seeking the recognition of their efforts, but are also creating social proof that pulls more people into the activity tracker circle. Activity trackers for work But is this new toolset - tracking performance for self-motivation - applicable at work? The answer is yes. Tracking performance  is applicable, and some pioneers have begun adopting it, mainly through performance gamification. Here is why the concept is a powerful one, and how it marries well with gamification. Frequently Quantifying Performance: Gamification and activity trackers frequently quantify performance which is tracked transparently, objectively and in real time. These are some of the core benefits behind gamification. This means that an employee is not working according to a fuzzy feeling they did really well last week. It means that they actually have the real time data and benchmarks at their fingertips.  it also means that that employee’s manager is also evaluating him/her objectively. One of the new game mechanics we’ve begun using is "green day-red day" reflecting whether there was a good or bad day for the employee, as a form of self reflection and an ability to take the commitment to make the next day a better day. Turning Big Data into Achievable Insights: By tracking employee performance through gamification of enterprise apps, employers can easily see what’s working and what’s not and optimize work for employees. Sincerity and Social Support: The impact on the quantified self of a network of supportive friends, colleagues, or one’s family, is momentous. Jawbone users who lost the most amount of weight had 11 percent more teammates. The same principles apply at work. When employees see their goals on a gamification app, set clearly and transparently and based on objective measures, they are more likely to achieve them. Additionally, the fact that performance is shared with peers increased the employee’s interest in achieving these goals. Until now, managers have been hampered in their ability to track work progress, convey powerful insights about employees and have a strong basis of facts about the work being done. Wearables can measure and track many aspects of health — from calories to steps, hours slept, minutes active, saturated fats — but what about measuring and quantifying work? Do you also think that gamification is a form of performance tracking to create intrinsic drive?  

In many cases, gamification projects are really about using gamification for change management. The goal is the adoption of new behaviors to create new habits. For instance, driving adoption of and contributions into a knowledge management system. This was exactly the case when one of our customers called us. They had problems getting a cross-continent team of customer support specialists make use of a knowledge management system: they wanted to gamify the use of the knowledge management system, and reward people for creating and consuming content on it. We chose a city building narrative, designed the game and were ready to go. There was just one problem: the knowledge management  was hardly ever used by anyone at the company. Why would people log into it now? This problem is actually common in using gamification for change management or adoption. The answer to the problem is fairly simple:  just like mobile app and web-based app providers have many strategies of reminding users to use their systems using a variety of customized messages, gamification can make great use of email for communication. We’re written about how communicating enterprise gamification projects makes a difference and better align corporate goals with employees’ understanding of their roles and their expected behaviors. Now we want to share how the use of email can drive employees to get excited about gamification and get reminded about gamification until the project really takes off. Here are some examples of an actual campaign we had: 1. Creating expectations with teasers   2. Stating the rules of the game:     3. Giving progress notifications   4. Giving reminders throughout the duration of the project:   Want to see what the results of the knowledge management gamification project were? check them out here!

Vikram Subramaniam, VP Customer Experience at Elance-Odesk-Upwork, is a customer experience expert. We met with him to discuss his views of gamification and customer experience. Prior to Upwork, Vikram ran customer experience at Yahoo!. He also spent time in senior roles at Ebay, KPMG, and Netflix.   The three elements of customer experience Q: Your career was both on the product and customer experience sides. Is there a connection? A: Consumer companies are becoming experience companies. This is driven by three things: the marketing experience, the product experience, and then the service experience. The marketing experience is the promise and expectations made to the customer. The product experience is what gets delivered to the customer. The service experience is the actual relationship with the customer As all three elements converge, customers have come to expect a cohesive experience, from marketing through product and service. Consumers expect each one of these things to be equally as good. It just won’t do to have a great product experience alongside a mediocre service experience.   There is much more pressure on companies to be great on all three concurrently and right out of the gate. Customer experience has changed in the past 10-15 years. In the past, customer service was about waiting for the customers to come to us. This isn’t the case any longer. Customer service needs to be where customers are.  What that means is that customer service agents today have to be a lot more nimble, they have to be able to speak many different "languages" -  across many different communication channels.   And they have to be proactive. This also means that the training that customer experience agents need to go through isn’t focused  necessarily on how to solve the problem, but also on how to actually manage the customer. Because you’re no longer dealing with the customer in a controlled fashion, you have to be able to adapt to them, adapt to their needs on any channel, but also, you need to be able to balance changing priorities in the market. How to engage millennials at work: motivation and coaching Q: How do you see the entry of millennials into the workforce? A: Millennials are driven by positive reinforcement and a sense of fulfillment. It is a new kind of workforce. They want to be challenged every single day. Historically, customer service agents were given more negative reinforcement.  This isn’t the case with millenials. This means that the role of the manager is less about getting millennials to do work and checking on how they do it. The manager should focus on motivating and coaching. The manager needs to set challenges but also give millennials the tools to be capable to beat them. Another important element is to give millennials a line of sight between what they are doing and what the outcome for the business is - they want to know how their actions impact the world around them. I also believe that organizations expect their workforce to adapt quickly to changes in strategy and customer experience. This means that customer service agents need to have a framework which is enduring but with objectives that can be changed very quickly. So you need a set of rules, a set of mechanisms, a set of tools, which are already familiar to agents, and the ability to turn the dials in a particular direction, to get particular outcomes based on the strategy. Using Gamification as a Dial for Tuning Performance Q: Can you give an example? A: At many customer service operations, like Yahoo! where I worked, the customer service population - the agent population - is largely made of millennials. In our case, they were distributed across nine countries in four continents, and we also needed the ability to simply drive changes in strategy. We needed to find a unifying mechanism by which the agents remain focused on the customer, but also remain focused on helping each other. Gamification played a huge part in this. We wanted to move the agents’ focus away from the day to day mechanics of customer service process, to its actual outcome. We wanted to make sure that our agents had a real line of sight between what they did and the ultimate outcome which was making the customers happy. Gamification was the perfect fit for this, because not only is it very outcome oriented, it also creates a tremendous amount of engagement. Everything that the agents were doing was really part of a game, whether they realized it or not. Every time they answered someone’s question, they got points, every time they got a positive response on a CSAT survey, they got points, when they created content, they got points, when that content was used by the rest of the organization, they got even more points. The point is that each little thing was making customers happy. And when strategies change, we just change the weightings on the games, so the outcome, what you needed to do to win, became different. So the underlying mechanics of what they were doing didn’t change, but what we did was change the outcomes for them. And that allowed us to start navigating through multiple strategies until we were able to settle on what was the best for the company overall. One of the things that we did with gamification is, we didn’t really know the perfect balance between productivity and quality of service, but we kept changing some of the outcomes of the game, first we did it selectively then we did it more universally, so that we could experiment our way to the perfect middle ground. Q: why did you choose gamification at Yahoo!? A:. I had three challenges. First, I had a millennial workforce and I wanted a positive reinforcement mechanism for them. Second, I wanted to create a line of sight between what people did day to day and the real outcome. Third, I wanted to create a much easier way for people to learn, and to adapt to that, and to also collaborate. So when I put all of these things together, and I was looking for a mechanism that I could use that would address these three areas, gamification emerged as an option. Using Gamification to Accelerate Strategic Change Q: Did actually using gamification change your views of the practice? A: When we first started working with gamification, we thought that this would be a cool productivity tool or something to keep agents more engaged. We didn’t realize the flexibility gamification provided us. After a while we wanted to make customer delight a priority. Instead of going through the whole top down strategic change in the organization, we found that all we had to do was just tweak the game a little bit. The outcomes began to change within a couple of weeks. I then understood we had this mechanism to create organizational change across thousands of people, and do so much faster than I had ever seen before. Another important point is that the game itself became the performance management system. So what you did in the game had a direct influence on how our customers felt, had a direct influence on how you thought you were doing as an employee of the company. The outcomes of using Gamification: a Performance Management Culture Q: What were the outcomes of using gamification? A: There were three major outcomes. People were a lot more productive without obsessively worrying about productivity We also experienced better customer interactions that came naturally and weren’t forced. We also saw a deeper outcome, the formation of culture of performance management. To give and receive feedback, you didn’t have to wait for a quarter or year to pass. The game generated feedback every single day, and people knew where they stood relative to everyone else in the organization. Using Gamification Across Several Cultures and Continents Q: What is your experience in using gamification across several countries and continents? A: We launched gamification globally, but the underlying narrative, or the game, that people were playing, was changed based on the region. So for instance, in India we used Cricket as the underlying game that they were playing. In the US we used baseball. These things allowed people to kind of quickly relate to the game but the outcomes were similar across the regions.   Regardless of where people played and what game they played, one thing was common: everyone wanted to win! Q: How do you see gamification 5 or 10 years from now? A: Five or ten years from now, gamification will just become the fabric of what we do. Gamification has existed in small ways before, but now it’s becoming enterprise class and being adopted in the enterprise in a much more enduring way. It is changing the nature of performance management, change how we think about managing people, and how people think about their own performance.

The Problem with Traditional Performance Management (and Traditional Gamification) The Corporate Executive Board published a great piece of research about the Employee Performance Paradox. The paradox is that traditional performance management - we can lump the traditional approach to enterprise gamification here too - is overly focused on individual achievement. The point is that today, individual achievement can only bring about half of the results enterprises need. The rest depends on collaboration, or, as the report says: "The era of the star individual contributor is, in most cases, over. Ten years ago, rulebased and highly linear processes meant that discrete, individual tasks drove business unit revenue and profitability… Fast-forward to today: work has dramatically changed and is becoming increasingly horizontal. Compared to just three years ago, today’s work environment is more interdependent and collaborative. Consequently, the impact of any one individual is masked and even limited by the effectiveness of the broader organization." This, in turns, brings us to the era of the Enterprise Contributor, an employee who doesn’t focus only on their individual achievements but also on how to achieve more with the collaboration of the enterprise around him/her. But what is preventing employees from becoming enterprise contributors? the performance paradox. The Four Performance Paradoxes Any workplace has some inherent tensions that employees and managers have to deal with. We want our employees to strive to excel and outperform their colleagues, many times in exchange for promotions and opportunities, but at the same time we want them to cooperate with their peers. We want to give our employees the freedom to be creative and make decisions, but we still want to have control over what they are working on and what is left off their task list. Withholding the power to decide how to direct the employee, while maintaining her autonomy can be tricky. We also request our employees to be collaborative and to work together with their colleagues. At the same time, it is important to us that work is still done quickly and efficiently. Many times, collaboration means longer processes which come at a cost to the quickness of the processes and the amount of time spent on each task. Finally, one of the most prevalent paradoxes in the workplace is that employees want to be financially compensated for assistance to their colleagues of other showings of heightened motivation, but research shows that financial rewards diminish intrinsic motivation in the long run. Although these problems have existed in work environments for ages, gamification may offer an interesting way to get around these problems, or deal will them in a better fashion. Let’s see how: Paradox 1: Cooperation ↔ Competition The ideal situation regarding this issue is one of "competitive cooperation", where cooperation becomes part of what makes a good employee. This way, employees are encouraged to cooperate and develop an understanding that promotions and opportunities are rewarded in part based also on how much an employee is a team player. In order to do this, organizations can use gamification mechanics such as group leaderboards, where not only individual contributions are taken in to consideration. Gamification can also be used to encourage knowledge collaboration, and to provide recognition for contribution to others. Gamification can be used to encourage team challenges that place a stronger emphasis on collaboration, ignoring gamification’s historical "winner takes all" approach. Paradox 2: Direction ↔ Autonomy One way to keep employees in the direction you want, while still allowing for them to have their fair share of autonomy, is by connecting them to the bigger picture. This is what Vikram Subramaniam, VP Customer Experience at Elance-Odesk-Upwork calls "Line of Sight" "We wanted to move the agents’ focus away from the day to day mechanics of customer service process, to its actual outcome. We wanted to make sure that our agents had a real line of sight between what they did and the ultimate outcome which was making the customers happy." When employees know where the company is headed, it makes it easier for them to make decisions that align with that general direction. Gamification can assist in this by directing employees towards the next tasks on their list, when they have completed the specific task they are working on - this is called next best action. It also communicates enterprise goals extremely well - see some tips for communication through gamification here.  As a new type of performance management tool, gamification ties objectives to performance, in a forward looking way that lets employees adjust their behavior and feel autonomous. Paradox 3: Speed ↔ Collaboration Collaboration is a skill that can be mastered and become much less time costly. As with other skills, this can be taught via gamification mechanics. Employees can learn how to effectively collaborate with one another through coaching and feedback, that can be integrated with gamification. Employees can also learn to evaluate for themselves why the work is slowing down and give solutions for this problem with no need for supervision. Paradox 4: Monetary rewards ↔ Intrinsic motivation Using gamification mechanics, it is possible to offer rewards which aren’t financial, but which still motivate the employee. As I’ve written in the past, the trick is to find goals and objectives which are meaningful to the employee and which are also aligned with the goals and objectives of the organization. These types of rewards can be a sense of accomplishment, a sense of mastery, recognition for a job well done, etc. It is known that intrinsic motivation works better than extrinsic drivers. The paradoxes mentioned here are bound to arise in any workplace. The interesting question is how these tensions are dealt with so that the energy rising from these "workplace paradoxes" can be navigated towards good, productive work. Hopefully I’ve been able to give you some ideas about how to do that here.

Gamification is becoming ubiquitous. It’s used in healthcare apps, social networking sites, and is considered a boon to any eLearning application for any age. It is doing well in the enterprise too; although it has descended from the top of hype cycle (where it was in 2012), demand in 2015 is healthy. Enterprise gamification has come of age. Enterprise gamification - the use of gamification at work, mostly for transactional workers - involves using gamification elements to grow employee engagement, drive the adoption of software and new employee behaviors and improve performance as a result. Whilst originally stamping a badge on top of an "accomplishment" or including a leaderboard was considered enough gamification to qualify, today it doesn’t always pass the mark. Foursquare’s evolution is proof. As the understanding of gamification evolves, the market is looking at more complex gamification implementations, including the use of narratives in gamification. These aren’t done with the goal of complexity per-se, but because there is a widespread recognition that gamification should go beyond simplistic PBL (Points. Badges, Leaderboards) and evolve into science-based program that can create a sustainable and long-term ROI for the business, altering employee behavior by tapping into employees’ motivations and knowledge base. Can’t you just use open source gamification in the enterprise? I see this question often - as in "I would like to add badges to my platform/system/enterprise app". Regardless of the question whether open-source is enterprise-ready or not (some of it is, some isn’t), I think this raises some interesting questions about whether a PBL system, or any system that allows you to stick gamification elements onto an enterprise app, works. This touches both on the practicalities of using gamification in the enterprise and on some must-have features gamification needs. It’s always about several (or many) key performance indicators (and apps), not just one. The essence of gamification is the real-time measurement and feedback of performance. The idea isn’t to measure one simplistic element (such as $$ sales) but many elements that constitute the habits one wants to instill in the workforce. Good employee performance is a function of many factors, such as (in the customer service case) - first call resolution, use of the knowledge based, average handling time and more. Measurement isn’t done for the sake of measurement. It really is used both to state what’s important, to set a transparent and fair metric for performance and for immediate feedback, so employees can correct their course. (it isn’t about competition). We’ve found that the use of open source platforms is sometimes lacking in the ability to track and measure more than very few metrics. Also, keep in mind that many enterprise environments include several systems, whose data should all be integrated into the gamification system. Additionally, good gamification in the enterprise always includes a good dose of learning - if the employee didn’t do well you can always expose him to morsels of learning (micro-learning) - and get better results overall. Design and game rules matter Gamification drives real results, but it needs good game design and the right game rules to be set in advance. Game rules set what can be achieved, whether the drivers are individual achievements or team performance, what learning is required etc. There is no one size fits all; that’s why we deliver our games using our success squad. There is a caveat here too: if game rules provide the wrong incentives, adverse consequences can happen. Gamification needs tuning One of the most interesting things we’ve heard about gamification lately was from the experience of Vikram Subramaniam, who was VP Customer Experience at Yahoo! What he told us was that when implementing gamification he tuned game rules - like dials - to get the right change management results. Open source gamification therefore doesn’t only need to support many metrics and rules; the way these elements interact should be tunable. Analytics and optimization Once game rules are established and the game is launched (we recommend thinking about communicating with employees to increase gamification adoption - see examples here and here) it needs to be optimized. You can’t avoid this step. Whatever game designers had in mind, real time employee behavior is different, and the resulting behavioral results need tuning. Tuning and optimization require analytics. Open Source Gamification - a Conclusion? I’ve listed some of the realities of enterprise gamification. I’m not sure all of them can and do work within the open source context. The main point to take from here is that enterprise gamification is about strategic change and performance management. The question isn’t about the technology that counts achievements and gives points or badges. The question is one of essence.