eLearning and gamification are the perfect match. Not only can gamification greatly support training and on-boarding; it fits any gamification effort from sales to customer service. In fact, we can’t name even one gamification process we’ve deployed where there wasn’t some eLearning seasoning tossed into the mix.  eLearning - using micro-learning nuggets - is the perfect choice for on-the-job training. You can use it to prompt event-based learning and to make sure that employees know about what’s important, and how to do it. This free guide combines the insights from our extensive blogging about elearning and gamification. We hope it presents the readers with a  holistic understanding of the best ways to integrate learning (and learning management systems) into any gamification project: The game elements and game narratives that work well for eLearning gamification How to use event-based eLearning How to grow eLearning program completion and information retention Using micro-learning Integration with learning management systems New hire onboarding; and much more You can download this new guide here.

When I first saw the trailer of the latest animated Disney/Pixar computer-animated fantasy-comedy Inside Out, I knew I had to see it — something about the tagline "we all have little voices in our heads," the question "ever wonder where all those emotions really live?," and the billboard "a major emotion picture’ instead of motion picture. The movie is an incredible portrayal of how our minds work. It shows the great extent to which we are driven by emotions and the peculiarity of the human mind.  Watching his own daughter grow up, Pete Docter (who wrote the script) got the idea to make a movie set in the head of an 11-year-old little girl, Riley Anderson, where five emotions try lead her through her life, as do ours. Getting in Touch with Emotions While a movie can’t incorporate the full gamut of our emotions, "inside-out" made its choices. There’s Joy (a happy little Tinkerbelle-esque character illuminated by an aura of light and always the star), Anger (who literally blows fire out of its head especially at the site of broccoli), Disgust (a green-tinged, teenage-like figure), Fear (a pencil-thin character that passes out at every opportunity), and Sadness (the blue, tear-drop shaped, uber-practical voice that accidentally turns one of Riley’s core happy memories into a sad one getting herself and Joy hurtled out of headquarters). Joy and Sadness  spend the rest of the movie trying to get back to help Riley who is left to her own devices with Anger, Disgust and Fear at the helm. So, basically the movie is a view of the world inside out. Joy has been the strong force through Riley’s early days, but when she is uprooted from her Midwest life because her father starts a new job in San Francisco, things fall apart. As Joy and Sadness try to fix things, the importance of Sadness becomes more evident. The Game Console Riley’s emotions live in Headquarters, the control center inside her mind, where they help advise her through everyday life. They are stationed at a type of game console and watch Riley’s world via a big screen. Riley isn’t the only protagonist with her own console - her mother and father have theirs too and the interplay between theirs is often hilarious — picture a group of middle-aged ladies sitting around a console trying to get the attention of the father’s emotions, who run their command ship like army generals and are caught red handed watching a match rather than focusing on the emotional issues at hand, such as Riley’s first day at her new school. The adventures of Joy and Sadness remind us very much of a game, as they navigate millions of Riley’s long-term memories going from Imagination Land, to Dream Productions, to Goofball Island, and more and watch in dismay as many are destroyed before they can get back to headquarters in time to help. Gamification Inside Out Gamification — the use of game mechanics to bring about a certain behavioral change - is about bringing about reactions that can be intensely emotional. Riley’s emotions try things, fail, get up and try again. They learn from their blunders and improve along the way. That’s also a great point about games - where you learn along the way how to master the game rules and constraints. Gamification should work similarly, not punishing blunders and learning. Gamification should also tie into a sense of accomplishment and mastery, as well as the autonomy to act. People need to work with their instincts and their innate drivers. They need to be allowed to make errors and to thrive on the fuzzy good feeling of a job well done. Just like with game mechanics, Joy and Sadness have bite-sized, achievable missions along the way; they have many chances to try again and improve their position; they can go back and fix things to reach their ultimate goal. They also get real-time positive enforcement from each other for one and from their friends still back at headquarters, who are also doing their best to help — and doing one’s best is what gamification strives to let employees focus on. In fact, having the mind as characters instead of the actual person or the brain, is a genius idea for a game itself. The bottom line, and of course one of the movie’s messages is that when you feel good, bad, or sad, "never fear, they’re all in your head!"  

Getting Software Adoption - and Remedy Adoption - Rolling with Gamification We typically discuss gamification in the context of changing performance and culture in a company. But sometimes gamification is about getting the software adoption ball rolling. Because - guess what - when you have enterprise software and no-one is using it, you first need to get adoption right before you talk about change management (BTW - here’s a post we wrote about gamification and software adoption). That was the case for a large customer of ours. They wanted to implement Remedy BMC IT in their organization. There was one catch: employees didn’t use it. Luckily for them, we had an enormously successful gamification implementation. You can see the actual results and project ROI here. We thought we’d share some of the methods we used: Reminders Just like any app or service that is looking to create more traction with its users, we knew that simply reminding our user target base (the employees, in this case) of the existence of the software, would already be a step in the right direction. We started a simple email campaign, sending employees teasers about the game that was about to start. This rapidly evolved into: Explanations about the intricacies and rules of the game Updates about user milestones Reminders about how much time was left before the game ended and more. The result? an immediate jump in adoption post-emails, and a hugely successful last minute push for participation. Habit Formation We understood that in order for users to engage with Remedy through gamification, we needed to do more than to get them to use the software here and there. We needed to form habits - one of the main objectives of any change management initiative.  We set up a gamified, fun narrative which works well for knowledge management and eLearning scenarios: City Building. The goal was to build a city. The more articles one had, the more city assets (such as buildings etc) they had. If an article was useful, it also contributed to the city’s growth. We implemented both individual and team challenges, and also added external game communication. Usage rates went up. Long-term view So, although we were measuring a short-term uplift in user engagement, we also wanted to make sure that the software would be used several months down the line and in the future in general. This means that at a certain point in time, the purpose of the gamified solution shifted from being about adoption, to being about performance. It’s a great tool to allow employees to see how they’re doing, how they rank in comparison to their colleagues as well as in comparison to their own past results. Gamification can also be used for knowledge sharing between the different employees, as a means of accurate monitoring and feedback for managers, and as a great encouragement tool which allows you not to "miss" any of the employees who are having more of a difficult time. Our results: Gamification ROI This is where it becomes interesting. We saw: X7 time increase in usage rates (654 articles created by 121 employees). 69% of the articles created during the gamification project were created by game participants. Employees that participated in the game created twice as many articles than those who didn’t. In the knowledge sharing department, articles were marked as useful 836 ties. All in all, this was a total change in the attitude towards the Remedy software in the organization. What we’re even happier about, is that months later, the situation has stayed the same and users are still engaged. You can see the results infographics here.

Adi Ben-Nesher, an Organizational Development Consultant at Accenture, is a change management visionary with considerable experience in deploying gamification as part of the change management toolset . We met with him to discuss his views of gamification in transactional employment environments, adoption and change.  Gamification for the Transactional (and Transitional) Workforce Q: Can you talk about the verticals in which you implement gamification? A:  Gamification is easier for workforces that are mostly transactional: sales, customer service, technology service desk or a field workforce. Some of them don’t even work for the company, they are what we call "the extended workforce" - contractors or managed services - so employment isn’t a necessity. Actually, according to our research some of these jobs might even disappear in the next 4-5 years because the work will be done automatically by some type of machine or robot. Think about associated press, they have a robot that writes a lot of their articles, not by journalists. Think about bank tellers, what added value do they actually provide today to a customer coming in to the bank? If you just want to withdraw money or deposit, you can do it with a machine and most of the transaction is done electronically. So, as the workforce changes, you need to shift people’s talents to different avenues. Once you’ve identified that, you need to make that shift very very quickly.  Transformational journeys can’t take 3 years, they need to occur quickly. Gamification plays a critical part in how you do that transformation very quickly. Gamification for Transformational Journeys Q: How do you see gamification in the context of change management? A: Gamification is not a new concept. I mean, as a term, it has been around for about five years. At Accenture, se’ve been doing change management for over 40 years. It’s always about changing, making something new or changing peoples’ behaviors or activities. Actually you can say gamification is an old concept: brownie points, generals getting medals etc. Today, for the workforce, it is about giving challenges that you want to accomplish and then driving you through the journey to accomplish them, and breaking it in to very small chunks that are digestible. And giving you the right reward, which can be an actual reward or just recognition, for your achievement. So it’s not a new concept. However, in the last five years technology allowed us to have more details of how you can actually operate at work and given us tools to track that and analyze it. At Accenture we use digital technology to accelerate that process, so we usually use the accelerator next to the thing we are trying to achieve. We have accelerated adoption, when we are trying to do adoption of behaviors, or systems, or processes. We have accelerated culture change, when we are trying to shift culture change, or when we are trying to merge two or three different cultures together in to one or creating a new one. Sticks and Carrots? Q: What’s your metaphor for gamification? A: In performance management the metaphor is usually a carrot and a stick. So you have a carrot and that’s your reward, and you have the stick if you misbehave. The truth is that there is no stick. You will not fire someone if they refuse to use software or applications if they do their job. You can’t use fear to create motivation either. You can’t force someone to do something, and you’re not going to get rid of someone just because they don’t want to comply with something. This leaves us with the carrot. My objection is that the carrot is too healthy… It’s something for diet. It isn’t really motivating; a carrot gets you to only a certain level of performance. What you really need is a carrot cake, right? Q: So the stick is this illusion of control  over employees, control that doesn’t really exist. A: exactly. Rules for Success in Enterprise Gamification Q: What is special about enterprise gamification? Should it be long-term in its implementation? A: I think that when gamification is not designed correctly, when you just deploy a system without doing the thinking behind it, or when it is looked at as just another tool without seeing how it links to other aspects of the workplace experience, there is a chance that it will fail. I think that when you look at gamification, there’s a feeling that in consumer marketing it works, and in the enterprise it doesn’t. People seem to think that in the enterprise we don’t have gamification success stories, and I think there are a few reasons behind that. One is that many applications of gamification aren’t called gamification. We call it adoption, change journey but change management, but it is the same concept as gamification. Two, when you have an uplift of three percent in the KPIs relating to your consumer clients, it’s a great success. We’re talking millions of people and for a small investment you can a great change. In organizations, anything less than 75% engagement is considered a failure. If you didn’t capture 75% or 80% of your workforce, which covers the 15% of high performers and the 60% of the "frozen" (i.e. average performing) majority, you failed. You didn’t create a change. It didn’t stick. This means there are more challenges to running gamification inside organizations. It requires more thinking and better design. This also means that the gamification campaign is longer running and you need agility to change it as you go. In marketing campaigns running on gamification, it’s usually a very short term plan which is very focused on a specific product or a specific brand or a specific loyalty trigger. And as soon as it’s done, you move on to the next thing. In an organization you can’t afford that, you can’t run something and stop. Because of the inertia of the organization, projects must continue. That’s why enterprise gamification has to be something more sustainable, something which is more for the long term. You need something which can give you quick wins in the short term, show mid-term gains, and something that will put your organization in a better position in the long term.  

The topic of gamification and its impact on employee engagement is "hot"; but what does it all really mean?  Is gamification a video game implemented in the work place, a new form of corporate performance management, a FitBit for work, or ruthless competition between workers? It is important to fully understand what gamification really before contemplating using it in your enterprise. I tend to agree with Brian Burke, Gartner’s research vice president and the Author of "Gamify - how gamification motivates people to do extraordinary things" who defines gamification as: "the use of game mechanics and experience design to digitally engage and motivate people to achieve their goals." The following five books  provide invaluable insight into exactly how and why gamification is applicable in the work place: 1:‘Gamify’ by Brian Burke Let’s start with Burke’s book. As mentioned, Gartner’s gamification expert explains that gamification is about motivating players to achieve their goals and not about making employees more productive or having fun at work. Burke is adamant that gamification engrosses people by creating motivation and meaning. In his words: "If the player’s goals are aligned with the organization’s goals, then the organizational goals will be realized as a consequence of the player achieving her goals." Burke also discusses how gamification can be tied to corporate culture. 2: ‘Drive’ by Daniel H. Pink Gamification is not about driving people by using monetary rewards or competition. Why not? Because money and competition are not real drivers or motivators of human nature.  Daniel Pink explains in his book that people are motivated by a sense of autonomy or mastery which he has coined the "third drive." Drive, he says, is an intrinsic motivation, the sense of "flow". Pink’s opinion is backed up by  scientific data and this fascinating book is full of interesting experiments showing that extrinsic motivation and rewards can actually impair an employee’s performance. 3: ‘For The Win’ by Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter This is another excellent read especially for those wondering about the power of gamification as a tool and how it is implemented. The authors contend that a business can be transformed through engagement and motivation by addressing issues like a game designer. They also back up their premises with real-life examples of various corporations from different industries using game thinking. In addition, they include a useful guide and structure for implementing gamification and when it makes the most sense to use gamification as a tool. 4:‘Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They can Change the World’ by Jane McGonigal McGonigal explains in her outstanding book the science behind why games are so good for us. She maintains that games make us more creative, more resilient, happier, and better able to handle change. However, before you go ahead and gamify all aspects of your life, McGonigal cautions that not only can some games suit some and not others, but also that too much gaming can be bad. What I also love about this book is her notion that games can be "hard work" and a concrete need that we have to fulfill. Gamification can only be a success if it touches these deep motivations within us.. 5: ‘The Small Big’ by Steve Martin, Noah Goldstein, and Robert Cialdini This book, as its name suggests, discusses how small insights can have a big impact. Note that the book is not only about gamification, but one of the inspiring stories within is that of an experiment by Professor Adam Grant from the Wharton School of Business. Professor Grant took as a case in point the university office responsible for fundraising from alumni. He studied how reminding staff of the greater overall goal, or outcome, of their actions — i.e. helping college students get scholarships, would affect their performance. He compared this to reminding them of their personal benefits, such as salaries, bonuses, etc. Employees with the greater or "higher goal" were much more productive. Bottom line, communicating the core of the company makes workers perform better. Gamification is the perfect tool to achieve this.   These books provide an in-depth look at the real meaning of gamification. I truly believe that by penetrating the fog of buzzwords around gamification and what it really is, is the first step in using this incredibly powerful tool correctly in the enterprise.

How Gamification is Engaging Customers and Employees Alike In this piece, Entrepreneur.com has a great overview piece of the current state of gamification. The article has a new and interesting definition of gamification, too: It’s the practice of synthesizing the best ideas from gaming, loyalty programs and behavioral economics, with the aim of driving user engagement over indifference. You can find the piece here: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/250093 Need Reasons to Use Gamification? This piece from Learndash.com is about the advantages of gamification for elearning platforms, and specifically for learning management systems. We too think that gamification and elearning go hand-in-hand. They explain how gamification can boost engagement, enhance motivation, improve knowledge retention, promote team building, and offer valuable feedback. It’s a great read, but to be honest, what really got me excited was the infrographic in the article. A Review of "SuperBetter" in the New Yorker Jane McGonigal, the author of "Reality is Broken" recently published a new book "SuperBetter" about turning life’s challenges into a game. The book has received an extensive review in the New Yorker, which is a worthwhile read. How Gamification can Transform Business Processes If you’re interested in some research being done about the state of gamification and how it will affect businesses in the future, check out this article in the Canadian Huffington Post. The article talks about the expectations people had from gamification several years ago, and how they haven’t all panned out due to different factors (spoiler - bad design has a lot to do with it). Another interesting nugget in the article is how different people are attracted to gamification and to games in general for different reasons, and what those reasons may be. What Works Better: Money or Gamification? Continuing with the research theme, an interesting article came out on the cio.com website, addressing what motivates employees. According to the research cited, the top gamification benefits include an increased desire to be at work and feel engaged, and an inspiration to be more productive. The areas in which gamification is used the most are team building, and training. The article concludes that monetary rewards are more effective, ignoring research that shows this is not the case.  

 

Oren Stern is Senior VP of Product Strategy at Verint. We met him speak about gamification and Employee Engagement Management. Gamification and the Employee Engagement Management Practice Q: How long ago did you start looking seriously at Gamification? A: About 2-3 years ago, in parallel to evolving our engagement management practice. Employee engagement is a significant differentiator for us, and is part of our general customer engagement optimization vision. Q: Are there specific verticals where you view gamification as important? A: Verint generally works a lot with B2C verticals, so everything from telecommunications to financial services, and even government. Employee engagement is important for any vertical, but especially when employees do customer facing work in a transactional environment. Studies show that more engaged employees drive more successful organizations with better business results. Q: Gamification has many flavors. Is there a specific flavor that fits with Verint’s vision? A: We like to see gamification as a better way to engage employees and to drive employee performance. The idea is to enrich employee interaction with customers. People who are really interested in what they do strive to provide a better experience for the customer. Gamification creates an environment where the employee feels that they’re more in tune with the vision of the organization and are focused on executing that vision. Q: So would you define gamification as a form of performance management for customer facing employees in a very transactional environment? A: I agree, but employee engagement is just as important where there isn’t much customer interaction. Think about back office operations and knowledge workers, such as a claim processing environment. The employees need to come in to work and have a sense of belonging to what they do and have a sense of interest and engagement. Gamification provides this platform. Q: Can you explain how gamification ties in to the different pieces of your customer engagement platform? A: Gamification touches several main areas of our business. At the core level, gamification touches Verint’s workforce optimization. Workforce optimization is focused on driving and optimizing the workforce in customer engagement centers, and sometimes outside of those in areas such as back office operations or branch operations. As part of workforce optimization we offer coaching, we offer learning, we offer performance management. Gamification ties into them, enhances them and provides a better end user experience. Another part of our business is the actual engagement management part, managing the last mile with the customer. Whether it’s chat sessions, or social, or even voice interaction in the agent desktop. When gamification is integrated into the agent desktop, you can incorporate more complex gamified experiences. The third one is "voice of the customer". Many organizations are starting to build ‘voice of the customer’ and ‘voice of the employee’ programs, and here we can use gamification to solicit feedback in a fun way. It also captures the voice of the employee, and makes the employee feel their voice is actually heard. Knowledge collaboration. It’s common to think about employee engagement in terms of the individual employee. Yet people work in teams. Gamification can drive knowledge management and collaboration between employees. If you create a game where you’re managing a team, and the scores of the individual employees add up to a team score, it drives collaboration and knowledge sharing. Gamification and Coaching Q: can you speak about gamification and coaching? A: Employee engagement needs to use coaching and learning as leveraging mechanisms. The idea is to measure employee performance, understand where there are gaps and then leverage coaching and learning to drive employee performance improvement. Gamification helps do this more effectively. First of all, gamification provides an understanding of where an employee has gaps and challenges. It also provides an engaging environment where these coaching sessions or micro-learning elements are offered to the employee, as part of the game. In many cases, employees are reluctant to take coaching or learning opportunities if they don’t readily see the value in it. When it’s part of a game, they often do so more willingly, better retain knowledge and better apply it to their work. Q: Can you speak about gamification and change management? A: Organizational transformation is always difficult. There’s a lot of resistance in the organization if you’re trying to implement a new methodology, or change the way you’re processing elements in your business. We deal with Fortune 100 companies. Moving their course is like moving a tanker, not a speedboat. The technology and systems we provide drive significant changes in the organization. Gamification can take a transformation program, translate it into measurable and manageable KPIs, and then create a game that drives that organizational transformation. When those goals change over time you can tweak them, you can add them in to the game, and change course. So if you think about it it’s kind of a self-feeding loop - you identify a challenge, you adapt your KPIs to that, you change the game to drive that, and then you see results and you can continue to tweak that and change the course over time, to get to those end results.   Q: where do you see gamification in a few years from now? A: Gamification is certainly evolving. When we started to look at gamification a couple of years ago, it was influenced by the consumer space and was more about fun and less about employee engagement. I think that the perception today is still that gamification is more about the fun factor, making work cool, and less about driving performance. But now organizations are looking very aggressively into finding more ways to engage with their employees. Millennials are changing how organizations need to communicate with employees. Millennials demand more, they want to be heard, they want to be more engaged in what they do; they leave otherwise. And so organizations leverage different mechanisms, such as gamification, which "talk" better to this younger generation, to drive employee engagement