Update: we’ve published a fairly extensive white paper about enterprise gamification for CRM. You can download it here or read the blog post… or do both! Here’s the post: Is your CRM perfect? Can you click a button and get a pipeline that will easily turn into an accurate sales forecast? If your answer is yes, you’re one of the lucky few. Managing the sales pipeline based on the data present in your CRM is tricky, and it’s not because your sales people do a bad job or because something is amiss in your CRM. It is because of these 6 bad habits that wreck your ability to manage the sales pipeline based on the data in the CRM system alone. 1: over or under forecasting One of the great issues with pipeline management is an over or under statement of the size of the sales opportunity. There are a ton of reasons for this. A sales person may be inexperienced, may want to buffer their forecasts, fudge them or aggrandize their importance. They may also just forget to update the number. 2: no lead housekeeping Many sales people, when happening on a duplicate lead, gingerly skip over it. They don’t think they should do anything about it.  In a perverse way, this actually makes sense. The sales person wants to sell and not be a data entry person. The lack of the ability to do tabular data entry in some CRM systems also means that fixing duplicate leads is time consuming. But duplicate leads skew estimates, don’t give the right data about your lead generation efforts (did the last campaign generate 40 or 80 leads?) and generally mess things up… 3: Letting information become stale Clean up dead leads, contacts, create meeting and opportunity updates? Many sales people skip this altogether, making data go stale. 4: Keeping leads where they are Even if a sales person can’t make use of a lead, they may not act to share with a colleague that can serve that lead. The lead is then effectively lost. 5: Deals are never lost When an opportunity cannot close, its status should be changed to "closed-lost". Sales people will avoid doing this. They may want to hide failure or be overly optimistic. 6: "updating the CRM isn’t for me" Most CRM systems don’t support tabular data entry - and no one likes the repetitive task of updating records one by one.  Remember: sales people hate data entry. The bad news is that CRM pipelines obey the law of "garbage in - garbage out". CRM is a data repository for anything customer - prospective customers, current customers and customer issues post-sale. But if the data isn’t good, pipelines aren’t either. Ask a sales person about this and they will have one answer: I was hired to sell, not to enter data and clean up records on a CRM. And even if they do all the data maintenance jobs they need to do, they still lack the buzz that drives their actual sales activities, where they are going for the rush after the deal is closed. The good news is that you can fix this The trick? Use gamification to ensure that data is good - and that pipeline management is easier. This isn’t about "classic" sales gamification - leaderboards for top sellers. Gamification today isn’t just about sales competitions - it is about creating a sense of completion and mastery (think the profile completion bar in LinkedIn). Enterprise gamification today is used to implement processes - on top of enterprise applications such as CRM. What’s more, gamification works best to encourage the less complex, simpler tasks, like data entry. You can use it to encourage lead sharing, information updates and correct forecasting. You can even give out points for prompt notification when a deal dies.  Think about gamification for good housekeeping - good CRM housekeeping.  Don’t use it to "encourage better use of CRM". Set game rules that reward and drive people for changing the bad habits that matter - be they stale information or lead sharing. If correct forecasting is a pain point, set game rules that can fix it. The game rules you choose should communicate what’s important (read this post about whether gamification is the new corporate performance management). Take care to think about balance when you set game rules - good housekeepers that are bad at selling shouldn’t "win" the game. Whatever points people collect can be translated into a fantasy sports game or song contest. Points can also be rewarded on a team basis, if team work needs to be improved. The main lesson here is that gamification can fix bad CRM habits, but for it to succeed, set the goals that matter and game rules and mechanics to reflect them. Hopefully your next pipeline forecast will improve.

<>Using car racing in gamification? Some people think that using narratives in gamification is a gross over-simplification. We don’t. Let’s begin with a bold statement: narrative-based gamification is the next big thing in game design for enterprise gamification. It is not about applying narrative "cosmetics" on top of enterprise applications. It is about more than that, about a real use of the ability to fascinate and engage humans with games that include stories. But narrative based gamification isn’t just about more compelling game mechanics. In many ways, it can contribute to a better result in terms of the results of gamification. It can be used to better communicate corporate goals, help employees master nuanced corporate objectives and work behavior and even encourage learning. Let’s look at car racing. At this point you may be questioning my logic. Aside from the valet parking kid whizzing around in the Mercedes S-class of a rich restaurant patron, who else car races at work? And even if you are willing to suspend disbelief at using a car racing narrative theme in enterprise gamification, you still ask yourself what it is all about. Do customer support reps or call center employees talk on the phone while trying to veer their car away from the deadly side of the road or from dropping down a canyon? Since GamEffective is a narrative-based gamification company, working on many enterprise gamification projects with our GamEffective system, I thought I’d just show you what narrative-based gamification actually is, so you can see it for yourself. First, let’s think about a call center. Typically, employees in these environments are already motivated through two simplistic game mechanics: leaderboards and points. In most scenarios, in an effort to explain what is important and encourage behaviors that aren’t at the top of mind of service reps, employees get points for activities (all game mechanics are made to drive activities - the secret sauce is to make this engaging and compelling). Since points are calculated (and in some scenarios are used for bonuses, compensation and more), a leaderboard is composed, showing who’s on top, who’s in the middle and who is at the bottom, reflecting performance at a certain point in time. Leaderboards are double edged swords. Seeing the same name of the same top performer at the top may be encouraging for that person’s runner up, and maybe even for the third or fourth place. It can also be incredibly discouraging for all the rest - they may feel they will never get a chance to excel. Leaderboards also give no context - how is a person doing compared to their previous week? How are others in their professional level or experience? With all that said, let’s examine the first leaderboard in a car racing narrative. <>Gamification Example   Meg, our sales rep, using the GamEffective platform, checks her status on the gamification avatar that is connected (with no coding) into her enterprise applications (learning, crm and more). She seems to be doing well… or is she?. With 648 points, she is already ahead of her monthly target. She seems to not be so far behind the leader in her group ("vendor leader" here). Note that the leader is not named. Their achievement is used as a personal benchmark Meg can use, and not something personal. Additionally, she can see the result achieved by the worldwide leader. Additional indications and benchmarks can be used here in addition, such as her group’s performance benchmark and more.   What can Meg do to improve, though? The race narrative shows her where she is at, just like a leaderboard would, but with better nuance and balance. This is where learning matters. Gamification can and should be used to encourage learning, regardless of where is started - in CRM or a customer support center. In this case, the race narrative gives Meg the opportunity to dig deeper into the significance of her results and improve them actively, rather than do nothing and stay passive. In real car races, you have a place you can take a brief break and make sure your car is fixed: change the tires, fix the engine. The Pit Stop. Meg’s gamification console has a pit stop, and it includes information and activities that are tied to Meg’s performance, that can help her do a better job. She can take a literal break from the race, and see how she can do better, re-enforcing a point of view that is about improvement and not about letting the less than stellar performance of the past pull her back. Let’s look at her pit stop.   The pit stop’s metaphor is a dashboard, with five gauges showing Meg’s performance on various levels. Her outbound and sales performance are both in the red zone. That isn’t great. But is she supposed to feel down and out or can she be made aware of her situation and try to improve?  No. She should be driven towards improvement. On the other hand, her CSAT and AHT - Customer Satisfaction and Average Handle Time - are good. However, a flashing service light indicates she can do something about it - get more training, gain a better understanding of her results, do some simulations and more. Suddenly, Meg isn’t encouraged only by the blunt (and sometimes discouraging) stick of competition. She can also have successful "completion" experiences. At this point Meg checks her activities page, available at the same place. She can check messages, and watch reports for some of the metrics she’s expected to achieve. Some of the reports can give her insights as to where exactly she isn’t performing well enough. She can also engage in pure training activities, such as watching presentations, going through simulations, courses, going through quizzes and more. Narratives give metaphors that allow for a nuanced and balanced communication with the employee, showing them what’s important, how, where and what can be done about it.  They can also engage employees in stories of improvement and learning, available at any step of the way.  

"I’ve discovered the best business model" someone told me yesterday. "You have people signup so you can send them a report telling them where they messed up. After they get the report that tells them what they are doing wrong, you sell them a service to fix it". "Imagine!" he went on to say, "You could get really rich by indicating the faults all humans have and then suggesting how to fix them". Thankfully, there is no such service to pinpoint humanity’s flaws, complete with suggestions on how to fix them. I suspect such a service it may be too judgmental - after all, what makes us human is the things we aren’t that good at. The service my friend was referring to is Hubspot’s Marketing Grader. Since GamEffective relies on its website for marketing, I submitted my email address into the Marketing Grader. I then got "graded". It then struck me that Hubspot’s marketing grader isn’t just a lesson about a great business tactic (tell people what they do wrong and offer them the tool to fix it). It’s a lesson about how to provide feedback to employees - and also includes valuable lessons for enterprise gamification. Here’s how: Grades are clear and numerical As you can see in the picture, our site got an 83. This number is neutral. It doesn’t say what grades other people’s sites get and it doesn’t set up a comparison with them.  It’s positive and fact based. Good game design in enterprise gamification should use the same principles when telling employees how they are doing compared to themselves, their targets and their peers. Focus on personal mastery and not on competition The marketing grader compares the site to a clear set of goals. Not to others, not to a leaderboard. Many employees crave a sense of mastery and completion. Using competition centric game mechanics and feedback ("Joe is better than you") creates frustration and discouragement. Using neutral measures promotes a positive dialogue and can even form habits and new, positive, behaviors. How grades are measured is clearly set; expectations are clearly set, too Each grade in the marketing grade is explained. This shows how expectations can be set - by employers, managers and game rule administrators in an enterprise gamification project. Setting the rules clearly also sets expectations and justifies "grades". There is always an opportunity to learn Good gamification always ties into training and learning. Drilling through the marketing grader gives you the learning opportunity to improve your site. Tying learning into gamification of CRM or customer support works similarly. Feedback is ongoing You can always make improvements and check how you’re performing on the marketing grader. Employees, in any gamification environment, should have the same ability to clearly see the rules and to see how they are doing. This ongoing feedback helps adjust behavior and prevents misunderstanding and frustration.

Which New Year resolution works better? "I will lose 3 pounds" or "I will lose 2-4 pounds"? A study published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology found that weight loss and improved fitness are among the top ten 10 New Year’s resolutions. The study also reports that just 8% of these New Year’s resolutions succeed. Using science to set employee goals What type of goals should you set for employees - both as a team and as individuals? In our daily lives, we set goals for well-being - read more books, lose weight, eat more vegetables. At work, setting goals is a staple of work life. We communicate our goals to superiors and peers and take the time to set goals for employees. When thinking of goals, we tend to focus on the one number: the number of pounds we want to lose, the number of calls a sales rep should make, the number of training courses an employee should complete. But focusing on one number can be wrong. Recent research shows that people are more likely to reengage (i.e. decide to continue pursuing a goal over a period of time) if the goal is a range and not a single number. Researchers tried to answer the question "would a consumer be more likely to reengage a goal of losing weight if this consumer were to set a goal of either a weekly single number goal or a weekly goal that would fall into a range of outcomes?" It compared high-low range goals and single number goals. Goal setting should inspire accomplishment and flow How we set goals influences our behavior; this is driven by feelings of accomplishment. Research on accomplishment shows that the sense of accomplishment is achieved by the perceived attainability of the goal and the perceived challenge of the goal. High-low goals influence perceived attainability and challenge of the goal and thus the feelings of accomplishment and interest in goal re-engagement. High low range goals provide two single salient reference points vs just one reference point for the single number goal. The low range is what is attainable and the high range is what is challenging. The single number goal is "all or nothing". And that is the problem. If the goal is easily attainable then it is discouraging or too easy. The high-low range creates the challenge - to achieve the higher goal - and leaves us in a state of challenge. On the other hand, it doesn’t discourage us if we cannot make the higher end. This is very similar to the concept of flow - which is a state known to be associated with engagement and performance. Flow is the place where there is a balance between the skill level and the task. It does not occur when the challenge is too easy or too difficult. Difficult tasks cause anxiety. Too easy tasks cause boredom. When the task (or goal) is just right, a state of heightened focus and immersion occurs: flow. Remember goal science in your next enterprise gamification project Goals play an important role in enterprise gamification. Sample sales gamification goals are to make more outbound calls, complete CRM reporting on time, close more deals. Customer service gamification goals can be to reduce average handling time (AHT) or increase first call resolution (FCR). Set high-low goals that create a sense of achievement and that can result in flow. And next year, don’t promise to lose 3 pounds. Set a goal of 2-4 pounds.

If we take a look back at our 10 most popular blogs over the past year, it’s clear that the face of enterprise gamification is changing - and for the good! Gamification was always about bringing out the best in employees but the "how" is changing and our blog posts try to capture that. We thank you for your feedback and shares, it motivates us to work harder on more blog posts you’ll love to read throughout 2015! (1) Our top post of 2014: Can Gamification replace corporate performance management?  While managers are usually given  access to corporate performance management (CPM) with measurable goals, ritualized reviews, rewards, and basically a lot of back slapping that brings them up close up and personal with business strategy, non managerial employees are not exposed to CPM. While they’re surely being tracked and measured, and they know it, management should also provide them with the full picture of corporate objectives and not just a demotivating list of ‘do’s’ and ‘don’ts!’ Solution? Enterprise gamification can successfully emulate the benefits of CPM for non-managerial employees. (2) Talking about successful gamification, we raised another extremely interesting question in his blog — Can Competition in Gamification be Discouraging? The LinkedIn Example — and judging by its popularity, we’re not the only ones that think it is interesting. When one actually thinks about it, LinkedIn’s "profile completeness bar," taps into the intrinsic satisfaction we derive from completing something, rather than motivating us through competition. Make no mistake, there are competition drivers at play — have we had as many Linkedin views as our connections or are we just unpopular (oh horrors, who’d want that?), and enterprise  gamification rightfully relies on competition based game mechanics. What do we learn for our purposes? In the work place, we need to make sure that gamification elements encourage employees without making them feel worthless or over-challenged. Hence, to improve performance you may want to aim for the fuzzy feeling gained from completion. (3) The Quantified Self Is the Future of HR examines how the fitbit or nike fuel concept can be applied to gamification along with new methods such as "Objectives and Key Results" used by Google, Intel and now popularized by BetterWorks. It also examines the concept of employees’ inner work lives and ties it all back to gamificaiton. (4) Ok, so if you’ve been paying attention, by now you’ll probably know the answer to this question posed to our readers: Completion vs Competition: Which is better for Enterprise Gamification? This takes the idea of the completion-centric enterprise gamification deployment one step further. Not everyone thrives on competition, in fact an emphasis on competition and leaderboards may sometimes be de-motivating and ignore "the real growth and attempts made by the non-top-performers who are nevertheless performing exceptionally well." Hence, managers should set individualized indicators and benchmarks for different employees, reward learning, training and task completion, and allow employees to experience the satisfaction that comes from the sense of a job well done! (5) Pay it forward and Karma points: Good Deeds Gamification, hit a note with readers and with us. While the "pay it forward" expression (a recipient of a good deed returning the favor to others instead of to the original benefactor) has been around since 317 BC, it was  popularized by Robert A. Heinlein and Catherine Ryan Hyde’s 2000 novel and movie "Pay it Forward." Nowadays, there is even an organization and a world movement dedicated to the idea. It makes perfect sense that encouraging "pay it forward" as well as "Karma" - has real benefits in the corporate world as well. The reddit and Aleph VC examples of using the concepts in gamification are truly worth this read, as well as the application of "karma" to enterprise gamification, especially in the context of learning management systems. (6) Step back in time and discover some gamification techniques that still work, don’t happen on a screen (can you believe it?), and are absolutely free! From back slaps, to stick figures and good old fashioned raffles, Five Free Gamification Ideas: Motivate your employees the old-fashioned way, is a fresh approach to putting some fun, and more importantly, recognition, back into your organization. (7) The Marshmallow Test: Why Trust Matters and What It Means for Employees, actually warns us that when using rewards and gamification to encourage willpower (delayed gratification) among employees, trust is essential, so "keep the rules of the game honest and fair" or "you’ll create a game that rewards cheaters!" (8) Using the Employee Engagement Funnel and Gamification for Business Transformation, takes a fascinating look at how to use enterprise gamification to create awareness of corporate goals, resulting in higher employee engagement.  The employee engagement funnel is about awareness - letting employees in on the bigger picture of corporate goals etc.; creating onboarding and corporate training practices that actually provide the tools to do a good job. The result? some employees will become corporate ambassadors who help others become engaged and better employees, in a viral expansion. (9) You won’t find it in Wiki - yet, but read GamifiKAIZEN! - Gamification and Kaizen - using gamification for continuous process improvement, for his illuminating idea that combining gamification with the Kaizen Model - that gradual changes are more effective than extreme changes, and the PDCA Model (Plan, Do, Check Act) - that enables the implementation of such gradual changes, may be one of the best ways to improve process and performance! (10) Last, but certainly not least, we were all extremely proud of the results of our Yahoo! gamification case study - "How Yahoo! increased its customer service KPIs by 10% in two weeks’ time," and were delighted by our readers’ response. It discusses how we gamified Yahoo’s customer service, across geographies and teams, to create a lasting and sustainable improvement in KPIs. Thanks for your support throughout the year, and we hope to bring you more excellent reads, unique perspectives, and some great ideas to keep your employees motivated and engaged through 2015 and beyond!

I’ve recently done some reading resulting in great insights about the power of team-based incentives, and how their power is tied to social proof and a culture of transparency. In general, research shows that we’re hard-wired to strive more to achieve team objectives than we strive to achieve personal ones. In fact, organizations have a greater performance boost when a team incentive is offered as opposed to an individual one. But this magic only works given certain conditions. We will work harder given the example of our peers; but that depends on making performance information available in a transparent way. When performance information isn’t transparent, team incentives won’t work. Since transparency is a great "by-product" of gamification and since gamification should evolve to offer team challenges (encouraging cooperation) and not just individual challenges (emphasizing competition), I thought I’d share what I read. Team incentives work better and we’re hard wired to take them very very seriously Most companies and HR practices focus on the personal incentive. Do your work better and get a bonus for yourself. Yet research shows, as Prof. Eyal Winter argues, that team incentives work better. He uses two great examples to illustrate that we’re hardwired to be more respectful of things that are "dear to my friend than dear to me". One example is a mother exhorting her husband to drive more carefully when carpooling the neighbor’s kids and not their own kids, saying "Drive Carefully! They are someone else’s kids!" Another is caring more about a parking ticket you’ve caused your friend to receive than a parking ticket received by yourself. Or worrying you will scratch the paint of your friend’s car while not worrying that much about the paint of your own car. Yet, Prof Winter argues, this basic truth about humans is often ignored when incentives are designed in the workplace. I’d like to add that it is also forgotten when gamification is focused on individual competition rather than team achievement. He says: "In a 2014 survey of 350 publicly traded U.S. companies, 99 percent of the firms reported using some form of short-term incentive program, but only 28 percent said they use team incentives. Furthermore, 66 percent confessed that they are not even considering this type of incentive program". Winter says that team incentives work because we crave social gratitude - social acceptance - and are also motivated by our equivalent fear of social pressure. We don’t want our poor performance noticed or penalized by our peers. Some examples in Prof Winter’s article are a 14% better performance in a garment factory when team incentives were offered, a 20% increase in academic performance with team incentives and the case of Continental Airlines, which offered employees a mere $ 60 if its airline ranking grew (at a time of exceptionally poor performance), and succeeded in using these team-based incentives to turnaround its poor performance and become a leading airline again. For team incentives to work, we need transparency and social proof However, for team incentives to work we need them to work in a transparent environment. This makes sense: how do we know that others are working well if there is no way for us to see them work or for them to see us work? How can the power of social gratitude and fear of social pressure work without the transparency into what others are doing? If you can’t tell which team member worked hard for success and which team member was actually checking out their social network, the social powers that transform our behavior won’t work. This brings me to another article by Prof Winter: Transparency among Peers and Incentives. In this article he argues that transparent workplaces influence behavior. For instance, imagine a supermarket checkout line when one cashier can see how her peer is working hard beside her. Then imagine a checkout line where the cashier can’t see her peers. If you introduce a stellar performer into one of the checkout aisles, will they impact how others work? Winter mentions research in a grocery chain where "introducing a highly productive worker into a shift boosts the productivity of incumbent peers who are directly in the line-of-sight of the new worker". Winter says that software development teams in joint rooms are "are twice as productive as similar teams working in closed offices" and that "blue-collar workers who work jointly in small teams have a lower absentee rate than other similar workers who work alone". In this case, says Winter, seeing your co-worker work "enhances workers’ monitoring opportunities and makes the information about effort more transparent among peers" and adds that "A variety of aspects influence peer information in organizations. One is indeed the workplace architecture, i.e., the extent to which workers operate in the line-of-sight of each other. But the structure of authority and the organizational culture may be equally relevant." And to this we add just one word: gamification. Gamification is transparency. As we’ve written before, one of the by-products of gamification is objective data collection and transparency. Gamification requires the automatic collection of objective data about performance: sales people productivity, customer satisfaction for call center employees etc. The actual collection of the data, the decisions of which KPIs to measure and the consistent measurement have an inherent value - transparency and fairness. Employees are rated based on real, hard data. Employees understand this immediately, and their perception of the data as objective and transparent makes them feel the rules of the game are fair. Transparency doesn’t mean Orwellian gamification… In 2011 Disney decided to share - transparently - the performance data of cleaning employees. The LA Times’ coverage of this monitoring effort wasn’t too rosy: "in the basements of the Disneyland and Paradise Pier hotels in Anaheim, big flat-screen monitors hang from the walls in rooms where uniformed crews do laundry. The monitors are like scoreboards, with employees’ work speeds compared to one another. Workers are listed by name, so their colleagues can see who is quickest at loading pillow cases, sheets and other items into a laundry machine… Isabel Barrera, a Disneyland Hotel laundry worker for eight years, began calling the new system the "electronic whip" when it was installed last year. The name has stuck.  "I was nervous," said Barerra, who makes $11.94 an hour, "and felt that I was being controlled even more." Gamification should grow up. It’s time for team cooperation. Competition just isn’t enough. Gamification should grow up and move beyond competition, using the power of team incentives in its favor. Gamification, just like life, is about finding the balance between the individual and the group. Focusing on competition alone sends a signal that caring about how your peers do their job isn’t important. Effective team incentives are hard to design, admits Prof Winter, but this doesn’t mean that they should be ignored, since they hold the key to organizational success. Employees aren’t automatons that calculate their individual gains of working harder. They are social players with complex moral considerations and a respect for their peers. Cooperation based gamification and team challenges can sometimes address this much better than the simplistic "sales contest".  

I’ve just finished reading Brian Burke’s book "Gamify - How gamification motivates people to do extraordinary things". The book is divided in to two parts - the first deals with what the value of gamification is and what makes it important, while the second part talks about designing a gamified player experience. Burke builds on his experience as an industry analyst in the field of information technology for enterprises, where he covered everything from enterprise architecture to gamification. In the book he gives  his view of what gamification is really about, what’s the right way to go about it, and what are some of the common mistakes to avoid when trying to implement gamification mechanics. Since Burke’s pioneering 2012 gamification report at Gartner was visionary and foresaw a lot of today’s enterprise gamification , I thought reading his book would be an interesting experience. It was and I highly recommend it. Gamification: It’s not about fun, it’s about purpose In the first part of the book, Burke argues that the goal of gamification processes is often misunderstood. Many employers think that gamification is about making work fun, or alternatively, about making employees more productive. In his eyes, all these attitudes are wrong. What gamification is really about is motivating players to achieve their goals. To put it 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". This may sound intuitive and quite similar to other reward programs we all are familiar with and may have even taken part in, but in actuality there are some major differences to point out. So, what makes gamification special? Unlike any other reward mechanism, gamification engages people in a way which is meaningful to them. While games aim to entertain the users and reward programs aim to compensate the users, gamification aims to motivate. As Burke states, another interesting way to look at this difference is by examining the role of money in the respective processes. While both reward programs and games include a transaction of money (you either pay for games or get a reward for performance or loyalty), gamification doesn’t include any such transaction. The organization paying for the service and the user have similar goals. Given that extrinsic motivation (even high monetary rewards) is less motivating than intrinsic motivation (see here), gamification provides the right currencies of motivation - social capital and self esteem - rather than the wrong extrinsic types of motivation. Burke then leads the readers to the understanding that gamification is a joint venture of the organization and the user brings with it an additional challenge - how to design an experience that will inspire users to participate. Finding the right solution for your specific audience Burke brings a wonderful story to exemplify how understanding these subtleties can assist in creating real change in people’s lives, and how it is imperative to the success of the attempted process. The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto is a children’s hospital treating thousands of kids with cancer. Since the hospital is a leading research hospital, the staff is constantly trying to assess the effectiveness of the various treatments they are trying, so that they can use the best therapies that minimize the pain for the children. In order to do this, the hospital needs to receive daily reports from the children about their current levels of pain. The problem is that since the children are in pain and are suffering, filling out their pain journals becomes an extremely difficult task. Without reliable reporting, the doctors can’t know which treatments are working. The hospital decided to design an app called "Pain Squad", where kids are enlisted as part of a special police force on a mission to hunt down pain. The app allows the children to progress through the ranks until they finally become chiefs. At the HQ, the children can see the badges they have earned as well as when they need to fill out their next report. The app was a huge success and enabled the hospital to make vast advancements in their research. Interestingly, when speaking to children in the hospital in an attempt to understand the app’s success, an unexpected benefit was found. Many of the children mentioned that the app gave them a feeling of control and management of the pain. It made them feel like they were part of the process and knew what was happening to them. This isn’t the first time that I’ve written about the importance of creating the right type of motivation and it’s relation to a sense of control. Several months ago, I found similar ideas in Daniel Pink’s book ‘Drive’. I wrote there about how competition and extrinsic motivation (rewards, money, etc) don’t always achieve the desired results, and even worse - can be detrimental to intrinsic motivation. The "Pain Squad" story is another great testimony to the fact that stimulating intrinsic motivation and getting your employees to act upon the things that make them tick, will get you better results while giving them a sense of control, autonomy, and better general well-being. Like with so many other things in life, being part of something which is bigger than yourself is a far more appealing reason to take part in something than any other.

Charlotte North Carolina expansion to support rapid growth of gamification pioneer July 1, Charlotte, North Carolina - GamEffective, an enterprise gamification company and a narrative-based gamification pioneer, announced today the opening of its US headquarters in Charlotte, North Carolina and simultaneously the appointment of its Vice President Business Development, Hadas Kasher, as its General Manager North America. Both announcements come just two months after the company announced it had received a $ 3 M round of funding from investors. This move signals the rapid expansion of GamEffective’s US sales, which is planning to hire sales and marketing personnel in Charlotte, and the successful deployment of its products by Fortune 500 companies. "2015 is certainly the year of enterprise or business gamification - the use of game mechanics to motive and drive employee performance" said Gal Rimon, GamEffective’s Founder and CEO "Judging by the amount of interest we see in the product and the budgets deployed by many companies, we see a maturity and understanding of what it takes to provide gamification 2.0 for the enterprise, gamification that works like an activity tracker for work and not just a points and badges generator with mindless leaderboards". Hadas Kasher leads the company’s business development and is now being appointed as General Manager North America. She held a variety of executive and managerial positions at Amdocs, Oracle and IB, with repeat success in guiding large, geographically dispersed programs of high-performance enterprise solutions to meet business needs. GamEffective offers a comprehensive gamification platform to support sales, customer service, social collaboration and employee training and elearning. The company is focused on the enterprise, and its platform uses game mechanics and game rules to grow employee engagement. GamEffective goes beyond badges or leaderboards and uses rich game narratives to give employees clear calls to action that encourage on the job mastery and leave lasting organizational change, reflecting corporate objectives and performance goals. GamEffective’s platform uses rich graphical narratives that range from fantasy sports to racing; and is easy to implement due to its no-code integration. Employee engagement is measurable, providing analytical insight into employee behavior and assisting employees in decision making - balancing corporate sales goals, for instance, with customer satisfaction. About GamEffective GamEffective (a.k.a BizEffective) is a next generation gamification company focusing on rich graphical narratives to drive skillful change in organizations.

Where should change begin? When looking to improve business performance through better employee productivity, managers tend to focus on either leaders or laggards.  The logic goes this way: if managers can "fix" those under-performers and/or manage to get even more from the top 15% percentile, they should be doing much better. But this approach doesn’t work, and a cold, hard look at the numbers as well as research brought by the Harvard Business Review, proves the opposite. If you want to move your performance results, move the middle, not the top or bottom performers. Looking at the numbers Here is an example. You manage 100 employees. 15%, the bottom performers, are each producing 10 productivity units a month (they can be sales, customer service issue resolution, backend processing items in the financial or insurance sector, etc). Your middle performers, 65% of the workforce, produce 20 productivity units a month. Your top performers (20% of the workforce) produce 35 productivity units a month. Now let’s do the numbers: Bottom performers produce 150 productivity units/month Middle performers produce 1,300 productivity units/month Top Performers produce 700 productivity units/month Looking at these numbers again: Your 15% bottom performers produce 7% of your performance Your 60% middle performers produce 60% of your performance; and your 20% top performers produce 33% of your performance. Where is the best place to focus? Managers’ intutition points them to the bottom ("if only I can get them to 15 units a month") or to top performers ("they are doing so well. can I get them to perform even better?"). But truth is that getting the middle to acquire the attributes of top performers is the best use of time and effort. Marrying capabilities and motivation To turn mid-level performers in to top-level performers, two things need to be addressed - capabilities and motivation. An employee needs to acquire new capabilities and to receive guidance as to how he can be better at what he does. But, giving an employee better training without addressing his potential motivation issues, can have an adverse, almost cannibalistic effect on the organization. After being trained and having acquired new-found capabilities, many employees seek better terms and leave for competing companies, together with the capabilities that the employer has invested in them. What they are missing is motivation. On the other hand, a highly motivated employee with a low skill and capability level can also be disastrous for the organization. This type of employee does not execute at a high level, and creates multiple "fires" which need to be put out by other employees. When all things are taken in to consideration, this type of employee, although he has the best of intentions, may be causing the organization more harm than good. So, in order to achieve the desired transference of employees from the mid-level group to the top-level group, both motivation and capabilities needs to be addressed at the same time. This is where gamification can and does have a significant role to play. Using gamification to "move the middle" Using gamification, "high performance" can be translated from an abstract concept, to a set of behaviors and activities which are the attributes of high performance employees. Using analytics tools, organizations are able to see what exactly makes high performers better than others. They can derive the knowledge, motivation, recognition and behavior that make up a high performer. After doing that, it is possible to recreate the "high-performing behavior" in other employees. Using narratives and games specifically designed for the organization, employees are encouraged to partake in small activities and behaviors which become their work habits over time (we estimate the time it takes to form habits in 30-90 days, as most change management gamification approaches). These habits have the potential to transfer mid-level performers in to the high performing category and have a substantial impact on the organization. Imagine the results when instead of having 20% high performers, the business would have 30% high performers - in this case a 7% jump in business results. Avoiding gamification design pitfalls Gamification can have major benefits for organizations, when done properly. But not taking the time to properly prepare and design your gamified solution, may have you scratching your head in several months, trying to understand why those benefits aren’t appearing. From my experience, some of these mistakes can easily be avoided. Firstly, it’s important to be willing to implement the program for the long term. Too many times organizations want to try out gamification mechanics for a short period of time, not understanding that in order to make a real shift in habits and in the culture of the organization, a substantial amount of time is needed. One way to avoid this is to plan your organizations’ strategy in a way that offers small short term benefits, in addition to the long term benefits you are planning for the future. Secondly, in some organizations change can be something that is faced with a lot of antagonism and suspicion. It’s important to be sincere and clear about the goals that the organization is trying to achieve. Therefore, we see that in many cases it is better to call the process that we are trying to implement in a name which conveys the goals in a more realistic way. Some examples we’ve seen used by organizations are "adoption processes", "change journey" and "change management". Most importantly, think of gamification as the "new performance management" - it helps employees by coaching them, providing guidance as to desired behaviors and most importantly, creating intrinsic motivation by communicating to employees how their behavior matters for the organization as a whole.        

As the founder and CEO of an enterprise gamification company, I am always on the lookout for interesting research about employee engagement. I’ve written about how people care more about team challenges than about individual ones, about how to move the needle on performance and how intrinsic motivation, the "third drive", works. I love tracking this stuff: people like Dan Ariely are changing how we understand the world around us. In this post, I want to point out three truths that are sometimes overlooked, despite their enormous significance to employee engagement, employee performance and how motivation is fostered, through gamification and other efforts. It’s not about the cash: too much cash can actually be bad for motivation A lot of current thought in gamification is concerned with the fact that extrinsic motivation (beating others in competition, getting cash rewards) doesn’t work well and that the secret lies in intrinsic motivation. My favorite story here is an experiment performed by Dan Ariely in India several years ago. In some ways, its radical undercurrent is that maybe huge cash bonuses available in certain industries aren’t such a good idea… Participants in the experiment were offered small, medium and large rewards for reaching performance levels in a game. A small reward was equivalent to what one could make in a day (a day’s wages), a medium reward was equivalent to what could be made in two weeks, and a large reward was equivalent to what could be made in five months (five months’ wages). The results? The low and medium reward groups performed more or less at the same level, countering the belief that ‘the higher the pay, the higher the effort’. But the really surprising result is what happened to the performance of those with the five months’ wages incentives. Their performance was the poorest. Ariely and his colleagues went on to conclude that "one cannot assume that introducing or raising incentives always improves performance". This doesn’t of course mean that wages can be poor or low - wages should be fair. But expecting a wage increase or a bonus to increase performance isn’t the right way… People really do need meaning at work Another thing which is important to employees is the feeling that they are doing significant work. A psychological experiment shows how the feeling that one is fulfilling a significant goal, can have an important effect on the quality of work that they perform. Professor Adam Grant, from the Wharton School of Business, conducted an experiment to see how messages regarding task significance would affect the quality of work done by a university office contacting alumni to request donations. Some of the employees received messages which touched on the personal benefits that they were receiving from the job. Things like the salary they were being paid to do the job and bonuses they could receive for a job well done. A second group received messages about the impact that the scholarships that they were fundraising for would have and how these scholarships would enable students to achieve education and better lives. A third control group received no message. The employees in the task significance group were able to receive twice as many pledges and twice as much money for scholarships. They had the mental image of what they were working for in their mind, and it doubled their performance. This is a great example of how a really small change can have a huge impact on the productivity of your organization. When we talk about gamification, we call this "line of sight" - meaning that it doesn’t suffice to gamify activities to promote certain behaviors. You also need to create a "line of sight" between corporate goals and employee activity, so people know what they are looking for. Meaningless work attracts meaningless performance Employees need to feel that their work was not for nothing. In one of his TED talks, Dan Ariely tells the story of how he met a group of employees who had been working on a project for several years, only to be told that the project had been canceled. Following the lack of motivation and the apathy that the employees showed thereafter, Ariely was interested in understanding how doing meaningless work affects our motivation and desire. To this end he designed an experiment where participants were given Lego pieces and were requested to build Bionicle figures. For the first Bionicle, the participants were given $3, for the second $2.70, for the third $2.40 and so on. In the first group, every time the Bionicle was completed, the figure was put away and new Lego pieces were given to the participant to build another figure, if they wished to do so. In the second group, when the first Bionicle was completed and handed over, they were given new Lego pieces, but the Bionicle that they had assembled was taken apart in front of their eyes, so that if they were interested in building another Bionicle, it was done from Lego pieces which they had previously used. The results are quite amazing. In the first group, 11 Bionicles were assembled on average, while in the second group only 7 were assembled on average. Taking apart the Bionicles which the participants had already assembled took the meaning out of the work done and made it feel Sisyphean. When Ariely spoke to the group of employees who had just had their project canceled, and which he described as some of the most depressed people he has ever met, he asked them how many of them feel like the second group in the experiment. They all did, apparently. He then asked - how many had started arriving later to work every day? Everybody raised their hand. How many went home earlier than they used to? Everybody raised their hand. A sense of meaning is important to employees. One of the best ways of doing this is by giving ongoing feedback and guidance as to what has been done well and what can be done better. Gamification can be used in this field in two ways - both to help you monitor your employees’ progress and productivity and to allow them to see how they are doing for themselves. It is important to note that even though gamification mechanics enable employees to be fairly autonomous, there is still a basic need for feedback from employers, even if it is only to acknowledge the effort that is being made.