Martin Luther King Jr. was the most important representative of the American Civil Rights Movement, which fought for equal rights for all. He used nonviolent resistanceagainst segregation laws. He truly believed  that "all men are created equal" as he said in the famous speech he delivered during the march on Washinghton on August, 28 1963. King received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. He was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, on April, 4 1968 when he was just 39 years old. Move the cursor on the image below and some links will appear. Open them to get some information about M. L. King.STUDENTS' TASKRead the above information and watch the videos about M. L. King, then use Projeqt to prepare a presentation. You can add documents, links, images and videos.You can see an example of a Projeqt presentation of mine at the following link: https://projeqt.com/robertamartino/the-ant-and-the-grasshopper/aesops-life/g

I have been a blogger for nearly two years. I use my educational blog The Travelling Teachers  almost every day in my classes and my students are asked to use it at home.I have already written on this blog about the advantages of blogging in the classrom and  I propose again my Popplet mind-map about it below.Click on the image to open itAfter two years I can say that my students are more engaged than before, they are enthusiastic about using my blog both at home and in the classroom. Blogs support writing, reading, listening and even speaking skills. In the classroom (blended learning) we read some posts, translate them and comment on them. We watch some videos, listen to some songs or surf the Net through the suggested links. At home students can enter their reflections on posted questions, publish their own questions and share opinions. They are sometimes asked to study a particular topic on the blog at home and relate to the classmates and to the teacher about it in the classroom. (flipped learning).By blogging, we also reach some important goals concerning technology. Students exercise their digital citizenship and understand some ethical, cultural, and societal issues related to technology; they also learn to use some technology tools to increase their productivity and creativity; they improve their knowledge of other disciplines through the foreign language (CLIL); they use the English language both within and beyond the school and, in the end, they start becoming life-long learners by using the foreign language for personal enjoyment and enrichment. But I realised that something was missing... Students did not willingly leave their comments on the posts. An educational blog should improve the students' way of expressing themselves.  In fact being published, by leaving their comments, should be an incentive for many students. Even the most shy students should feel empowered and motivated by expressing themselves better in a written discussion than in front of a class.But, when asked to leave their comments on the posts or to answer some questions in a written form, my students felt intimidated. Absurdly, they preferred writing them on their exercise-book because they were afraid of my blog visibility (my students are young learners, unaccostumed to social networks and impractical in using social forums).How to solve this problem? I really wanted my students to write more. I decided to create a students blog to make the learners more active, more self-confident and more and centered on their own learning process.I created this image with Cacoo.The Michelangelo English Club was born, on an experimental basis, a month ago.It is meant to be a blog for the students of my classes, it will contain all their projects, works, reports and researches. The posts will entirely be written by the students. Learners will gradually feel more confident in writing posts and leaving comments because this blog will be their own, they will feel "at home".Of course we will continue to use my blog, as well. The "teacher blog" and the "students blog" will be closely related and... we will see what happens!

Europe is struggling to cope with a growing migrants flow. More and more migrants and asylum seekers are coming to Europe from Africa and the Middle East.First of all, we are going to try to understand what migration is and what it means today. Then, we are going to talk about multiculturalism and, of course, about multicultural society in Britain.Read the following articles, watch the video and answer the questions.READINGHISTORY OF MIGRATIONHistory of migration:http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistories.asp?ParagraphID=bbvMigration from the colonies to Western Europe since 1800:http://ieg-ego.eu/en/threads/europe-on-the-road/economic-migration/pieter-c-emmer-leo-lucassen-migration-from-the-colonies-to-western-europe-since-1800Migration to Britain:http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/familyhistory/next_steps/int_05_europe_01.shtmlMIGRATION TODAYSome articles explain what is happening in Europe today Migration in Europe today: The following article try to answer these questions:Why is EU struggling with migrants and asylum seekers? What has caused migrant numbers to rise?What is the EU doing about it? Are all the EU countries sharing the burden?http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-24583286These 5 Facts Explain Europe’s Deadly Migrants Crisis:http://time.com/3833333/ian-bremmer-europe-migrants-deaths/Multicultural societies in an historic perspective:http://ndla.no/en/node/89615LISTENINGMULTICULTURALISMMulticultural BritainWRITINGAnswer the following questionsUnfortunately, because of the migrants crisis, xenophobia and anti-immigrant attitudes have recently risen across the continent. What do you think about that?Do you live in a multicultural place? Is there migration from or immigration to your country? What is your opinion about multiculturalism? What are the pros and cons of a multicultural society?Watch the video above about multicultural Britain and write a summary.SPEAKINGRole-playIf we are travelling to a foreign country, we are all immigrants although we are going to stay there for short periods. In fact, as soon as we set foot in a foreign airport, we have to pass trough the Customs Office, show our documents and answer some questions.Watch the following video.  Imagine you are in a British airport, you and your class mate are respectively a customs officer and and a traveller. Invent dialogues like the one in the video, ask and answer questions like: What is your final destination?How long will you be staying in the UK?What is the purpose of your visit?Where will you be staying?Do you have anything to declare?English communication - Airport Immigration and Customs

A common questions that is asked to us by companies, which are in the early phase of eLearning adoption, is: What eLearning Course Content should they start with on their eLearning Systems? We have seen business organisations building eLearning  course contents covering variety of topics such as Induction, Company Culture, Work Ethics and Etiquette, Company Processes, Business Domain, Customer Awareness Programmes, New Product / Services Launch, IT Systems Training, etc. Is their any rationale to prioritise  development of eLearning Content for Corporate eLearning Initiatives? The answer to the above question is "Yes". Refer the eLearning Cost - Value Matrix diagram below: The matrix shows various Corporate eLearning Content plotted on Value and Complexity/Cost  dimensions. Value is typically seen in performance improvement, &/or savings in training costs. Arrows indicate possible movement of the content along either Value or Complexity/Cost dimensions depending upon the company / industry requirements. Typically, organisations early on their eLearning Lifecycle phase, opt for Compliance / Induction / Domain courses of Level 1 or Level 2 types and then move to more high value and complexity content.

Interactivity is an important element of self-paced eLearning courses. For effectiveness of delivery, it is extremely critical that learners are engaged in a manner that makes learning experience interesting and compelling to focus and learners easily grasp or understand the learnings. This is achieved by making learning courses interactive. A number of standards have been framed to define level of interactivity. One of the most widely followed standard is the one formulated by Department of Defense (DOD), which defines 4 levels of interactivity: Level I: Passive In this level, the learner acts merely as a receiver of information. The learner may read text on the screen as well as view graphics, illustrations and charts. The learner may interact simply by using navigational buttons to move forward or back through the program. Engagement Techniques: Learning Content consisting of Simple Text accompanied by Graphics, Illustrative Images, Charts, etc.; Navigation Buttons Level II: Limited Interaction In this second level, the learner makes simple responses to instructional cues. The eLearning includes learning activities listed in "Level I" as well as scenario based multiple choice and column matching exercises related to text and graphic presentation.  Feedback is given to the user responses either via audio or text. Engagement Techniques: Level I + Audio Narration Video Content, SCORM compliant; Use of Mouse-overs, capturing user input such as mouse click to move forward in the learning course; Simulations requiring learner to follow a process or procedure without any data entry e.g. Organizing objects in a group of objects, sequencing objects in the right order, etc. Level III: Complex Interaction In Level III, the learner makes multiple, varied responses to cues. In addition to the types of responses in Level II, complex interactions may require text entry boxes and manipulation of graphic objects to test the assessment of the information presented. Engagement Techniques: Simulations requiring learner to enter data into the fields, Scenario based branching logic where the learner experiences jeopardy for incorrect responses and their journey is predicted on their decisions, Custom animations where the learner has the ability to investigate Level IV: Real-time Simulations Real-time simulation creates a training session that involves a life-like set of complex cues and responses in this last level. The learner is engaged in a simulation that exactly mirrors the work situation. Engagement Techniques: Use of games and gaming technology, Real-life 3D simulations, Real-time collaboration amongst learners or learner and instructor to carry-out a simulation exercise.

Advances in web and mobile technology, have led to innovation in education models to address challenges of increasing costs as well as to meet the requirements to enhance quality of education. Following are some of the latest developments in education models: Online Learning: Education institutions are increasingly resorting to Self-paced learning as well as Virtual Classroom modes of eLearning, (which together are termed as online learning) to enhance quality of education imparted to their distance learning program students. Self-paced learning enables students to set the pace of their learning, while virtual classrooms gives them access to the faculty for interactive learning. Unlike in the past, education institutions no longer have to invest in expensive V-SAT technology & multi location classroom infrastructure to implement online learning. Students too can access online learning at the time & place, and using devices (laptop, desktops, tablet pcs as well as smart phones) of their choice. Flipped Classroom: In the conventional model of learning, students undergo lectures from tutors in the classroom followed by self-study outside of the classroom prior to taking tests & exams. In Flipped Classroom model of education, however, students, first study the theory / concepts related to the course through self-paced online learning course content. Later, in the classroom then students learn the application of these theories / concepts through case studies / problems. This technique is increasingly adopted and is found particularly effective in professional / management education. It makes the process of teaching - learning highly productive and effective. Blended Classroom: Blended Classroom model of learning uses online learning as a complementary tool. Here, learners undergo classroom learning first and then typically apply the learnings at their workplace. Follow-up sessions then typically are conducted in virtual classroom mode to address difficulties and challenges faced in applying learnt topics / theories at the workplace. Sometimes, Blended Classroom model is also referred to mode of learning, where courses are delivered using both Classroom and Online Learning technology together. Social / Collaborative Learning Social / Collaborative Learning involves large number of students forming a community and helping each other to learn the subject / topic. Social / Collaborative learning have always been existed in pre-Internet era. However, it was limited by geography. Internet has allowed learners across the globe to connect with each other and social / collaborative learning has taken many forms. MOOC - Massive Open Online Courses MOOCs are an implementation of Online Learning, typically self-paced courses in the form of pre-recorded videos or virtual classrooms with unlimited participation by learners / students. Due to the large numbers of students involved, this model leverages not only social / collaboration elements in learning but also assessments. Assessments could either be automated tests / quizzes involving multiple choice objective questions, or manual carried out by peers in case of subjective questions.

I have seen a number of organisations spending a lot of time & money in first implementing an expensive eLearning platform & building eLearning Content and then only a few months or years later wondering why their eLearning initiative hasn’t met expected success despite having the world-class system. There are normally many reasons for the eLearning initiatives that contribute to the failure. However, the most common question that is encountered while diagnosing the failure is, whether was it the system or the eLearning Content that was responsible the failure. eLearning system is the delivery mechanism to deliver the eLearning system. It helps the organisation to administer the learning and has to have at least the following features such as: - Ability to set-up eLearning courses- Ability to configure exams / quizzes / tests - Ability to view the eLearning Content - Ability to participate in Virtual Classrooms - Ability to undergo exams / tests - Ability to distribute notes / documents regarding the course content - Ability to manage users - Ability to track the performance of the learners While on the other hand eLearning content: - Has to be relevant - Has to be of the right duration - Has to have the right of interactivity - Has to be engaging in terms of the style of presentation As long as the system performs and content meets the above requirements, eLearning initiatives should have a fair chance to succeed. Both the elearning content and the system are important pieces of the the overall eLearning puzzle. So, when it is asked what is important, the content or the system, the answer is not easy. Very generically speaking, when I evaluate the relative importance of the system and the content, I take the help of Herzberg’s two factor theory of Motivation and Hygiene factors. According to this theory, motivators are those factors, the presence of which motivates people and absence demotivates, while hygiene factors are those factors, presence of which may not motivate people but absence certainly demotivate. For me, in the context of eLearning, the eLearning System is the hygiene factor, while the Content, the motivation factor. So, the organisation has to invest time and money to make sure that content is relevant, creative, and engaging for the learners, while for the system, not just functionality but also other non-functional requirements such as the following need to be given attention: - User Interface: Is it really user friendly and cheerful? - Navigation: Is it simple and intituitve - Multi-device support: Is system easily accessible from all the types of devices? - Performance: Are the system response times acceptable to the learners? - Availability: Is the system available uninterrupted for the learner?

One of the benefits of elearning is the ability that it gives to learning & development administrators to monitor learning by learners. One can not only track the progress of learning by learners but also analyse the response of the learners to the content. But for this to happen, the eLearning content and eLearning system need to communicate with each other. Multiple standards evolved over last 2 decades to faciliate this communication. The most popular standards have been AICC and SCORM. Following is a quick overview on these standards: AICC AICC standard was the first such standard and was developed by Aviation Industry CBT Commitee. AICC, an international association of training professionals, was formed in 1988 to develop guidelines for aviation industry to evaluate, develop and deliver Computer Based and Web Based Training.  AICC came up with the 1st interoperability specification CMI001 for Learning Management Systems (LMS) in 1993, which were revised subsequently many times as the technology evolved. The last specification, CMI-5, was released in 2010. Although AICC, was fairly popular, over the period its adoption declined due to larger acceptability SCORM standard. Interestingly SCORM was derived from an updated version of CMI001 in 1999. AICC in December of 2014, announced its closure and passed on its documentation of CMI-5 to the ADL (Advanced Distributed Learning), the body that has developed SCORM. SCORM SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) was developed by ADL, an institution part of US Department of Defense (DoD) formed in 1999 by a presidential order in order to meet following objectives: Identify and recommend standards for training software and associated services purchased by Federal agencies and contractors. Facilitate and accelerate the development of key technical training standards in industry and in standards-development organizations. Establish guidelines on the use of standards and provide a mechanism to assist DoD and other Federal agencies in the large-scale development, implementation, and assessment of interoperable and reusable learning systems. SCORM is is a collection of standards and specifications for web-based electronic educational technology i.e. e-learning. It defines: communications between client side content and a host system (called "the run-time environment"), how content may be packaged into a transferable ZIP file called "Package Interchange Format." SCORM is XML based and has its roots in AICC. Though Various versions of SCROM: SCORM 1.0 (released in Jan 2000) SCORM 1.1 (Jan 2001), SCORM 1.2 (Oct 2001) and SCORM 2004 (Jan 2004, Jul 2004, Oct 2006, Mar 2009),  were developed and released, SCORM 1.2 even today remains to be one of the most popular and widely followed standard.  x-API or Tin-Can ADL released x-API (Experience API) or Tin-Can in 2013. x-API or Tin-Can, which addresses many issues associated with SCORM and is a webservices based standard. We will see SCORM and x-API specification in more details in later blog entries especially for the benefit of technology professionals. Recommendations: If you are a learning and development professional responsible for eLearning initiative within your company, following are some of the key recommendations that you should follow while : 1. Please make sure that your system as well as content (and also authoring tools) are compliant with at least SCORM 1.2 standard. 2. Please also make sure to define your reporting/MIS requirements before you start building particularly your eLearning Content. Based on the reporting requirements, the content needs to be coded with the appropriate SCORM specified code, so that the necessary data can be communicated to the LMS by the eLearning Content at run time. This data is stored by the LMS to generate the required MIS/reports.

For this blog post, we interviewed Dr. Eran Gal, a Learnification expert. Dr. Gal has over sixteen years of experience with enterprises, helping them define, set and accomplish goals, as well as publishing research papers and lecturing at the Holon Institute of Technology.    We asked Dr. Gal to share his insights about what motivates employees, what types of gamification work better than others and what obstacles a company might confront when implementing gamification. Since Dr. Gal is an e-Learning expert, the focus of the interview was on Learnification. Learnification means using Gamification techniques for the purposes of training or employee on-boarding; the use of game mechanics promotes learning, review of materials and encourages a sense of completion. It also provides clear calls-to-action during the process of learning, and is more effective than traditional methods. By creating inherent incentives to learn, implementation of learnification projects promotes better employee knowledge and satisfaction. What is your definition of Gamification? Gamification is the use of game-like motivation mechanics in order to produce employee engagement in certain procedures. My focus is the procedure of learning for the purposes of training employees. The industry is moving from basic competitive games between individuals to more elaborate role-play games, which require team-work and cooperation. These gamified elements mimic complex real-life processes. What do you think is the main challenge of Learnification? Every Learnification model that exists today has to reinvent its relevance to the organization. Employees today are younger, tech savvy, self-conscious and have a lucid picture of where and how they want to be positioned in the future. The organization on the other hand is productivity biased and needs Learnification to support its goals; it cannot allow the Learnification process to become a disconnected, stand-alone process. So that’s why gamification is becoming more social and team-oriented? Social and team gamification come from the understanding that the individual can’t accomplish many corporate tasks, including learning and training, alone.  Many companies discover that when an employee has to go through their long training procedure all alone, the company has to invest significantly more, both moneywise and time-wise. In contrast, when the organization creates a social environment (with exists anyway in a company) for an assignment or a process and instructs individuals to work together, as a team, the odds of success are much greater. This fact is old news by now. Employee motivation has two parts to it: One aspect is that the employee should be having fun, enjoy himself and be interested in the process; the other, is that the employee must feel that the process genuinely contributes to their day to day work, that it has an added value to getting the job done. The game element is therefore very significant, if done correctly. It is what makes people more engaged and more aware of the process. How would you describe employees’ willingness to participate in the process of Learnification? The question is "participate in what". What is the experience of the employee? Is it an experience of an assignment that has to done, or one of play? Is it external to the work process or interwoven with it? The issue is definitely whether the employee sees the process as relevant to their work. The other element, equally important, is for the manager to recognize the process as such. In the case that one of these conditions is not met, we may encounter antagonism, a cynical attitude or a lack of cooperation. In this case, even if you wrap it up with organizational tools, the process is doomed to fail. So the most important thing is to apply a process which is relevant to the employees and improves the organization’s performance. For example, implementing some sort of knowledge collaboration that the worker will either produce or use or both, should support the employee’s work routine. The best way to create knowledge collaboration is gamification. You must produce relevance, but nevertheless, you must wrap it in a way which will make people emotionally attached to the process. It depends on how well you design the gamification solution. Nowadays, if you design a solution which is too obvious, it quickly wears out. A gamification solution which is continuous, personal and intelligent has a chance of surviving and lasting for a longer time as a useful corporate tool. If you were to advise an HR Manager or Sales Manager to purchase a gamification platform, what would be most important for him/her to look for? The system has to live in the organization: it has to be integrated easily, in the technical sense. Then, it has to fulfill a vision the organization wishes to enhance. It has to express a specific goal - to motivate employees to participate in a learning process, or evaluation process, on-boarding, improve KPIs etc. The manager would have to make sure that the system provides the right tools. In your experience -where is gamification is most effective? Gamification works great with informal learning procedures. Obviously, in courses and in formal training the employee is bound to learn; but throughout the everyday work routine, the effectiveness of gamification is significant to the learning process. When I have to get out of my routine, it has to be for a good reason: it has to be interesting, or fun, "to see how I perform", "how I perform compared to others". This is where the social element comes into play and makes a difference in the quality and quantity of learning. Games are often driven by competition and yet call for team work. How would you balance competition vs. cooperation? The question is what is more important for the organization. To improve performance, more competitive elements are required, where individuals compete with each other. When the target is a common goal, or a vision, then games involving team work have to be chosen. The decision has to optimize the organization’s productivity.  Basically, different parameters can achieve different results. The optimum is to apply game mechanics in a way that challenges the most employees, in a manner that fits their abilities. You can build a game mechanic with an essence of sharing. This isn’t simple, because competition is perceived as an individual issue and not as a unifying force. When you build a team process, you have to group-motivate the employees. You have to be very aware as to what are the connecting dots between the people. I never witnessed cases in which competition was so harsh, to the point it was destructive. However, it is important to monitor the process constantly in order to do damage control, or motivate on the spot. Additional sophistication can be profiling of the participants and choosing the parameters accordingly, so no-one would feel left out, or that he or she doesn’t stand a chance since the same people always win. During the process prizes, bonuses, or change parameters can be added, in order to keep everyone engaged. How do you address the gap between the customer (enterprise) that purchased a gamification solution, and the employee who is the end user? When implementing a system, you must make sure it doesn’t treat the user (the employee) as a constraint. The programmers of the game must bear in mind not only the benefits to the organization, management, etc. but think constantly of the end user and how they are going to benefit from it. What is the KPI from the user’s point of view? There is never complete correlation, but it should be attempted. Where do you stand with prizes and material awards? It is a very problematic issue. I know cases where real prizes, whether an i-Pad or a dinner, brought the competitive component to undesirable levels. At the end of the day someone gets a prize, and if you are not that person, it damages your motivation. If I compare motivation to a locomotive, in some cases it runs so fast, that it could end up derailing. I have witnessed undesirable behavior while people tried to gain points. I know of people logging in with different names to send various emails to promote themselves, or other manipulations. Basically, the person running the show should know if prizes are right for the specific company or whether they can generate exaggerated competition. It could be something material, but in that case it should be turned back to the team. Something like a joint dinner, or another collective activity. The thing to remember here is that a non-material reward is a reward nevertheless. However, it is important to be very clear about the reward. It should be designated and announced prior to the process; it should be something significant, out of the routine, which everyone in the organization acknowledges.   Many thanks to Dr. Gal Eran for taking part in this interview.          

By Corinne Geri: As is the popular custom these days, I too was challenged to have a bucket of ice water thrown over my head. The Ice Bucket Challenge, sometimes called the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, is an activity involving dumping a bucket of ice water on one’s head or donating to the ALS Association in the United States. The challenge dares nominated participants to be filmed having a bucket of ice water poured on their heads. Not one to back down in the face of a challenge, even the kind to require a change of clothing, a bucket was quickly located and filled with bags of ice and… cue the camera! So while I was being submerged in ice cold water, rethinking my whole prepared-to-take-on-any-challenge-that-might-come-my-way strategy for life, I came to realize the power of social media when it is combined with gaming elements. What better way to increase engagement and virality than setting up a challenge (complete with an entertaining effect) and then asking people to post videos of their efforts in achieving the goal? Just take the plunge So what makes people pour buckets of ice over their heads? Well, for a start, celebrities are doing it. The internet is awash (pun intended) with the famous, queuing up to douse themselves in freezing liquid. And I won’t lie - if Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg opted to chill their brains, I am willing to follow suit. Having people of influence set a personal example is always a good motivator. Social media, accessible to every person with a bucket, makes it that much easier to convey your message in the hope that people in your circle will follow your lead. It also creates a sense of community, making you feel a part of something bigger. Let’s rewind for a second. What is the ice bucket challenge? Within 24 hours of being challenged, participants are to record themselves as a bucket of  ice water is lifted overhead and poured over the participant’s head. The participant is expected to donate $10 to the ALS association in the US if they have poured the ice water over their head and donate $100 if they have not. The cycle keeps going since everyone completing the challenge dares others to do the same thing. This may seem pointless, but all of the awareness for ALS because of the Ice Bucket Challenge led to the ALS Association raising  $ 41 million so far, compared to $1.7 million during the same time period (July 29 to Aug. 17) a year ago. Rise to the challenge Challenges are often great motivators. In this case, I was called to engage in a somewhat uncomfortable yet undoubtedly achievable task. This is the best kind of challenges - not a walk in the park, but still within reach. People should not get discouraged while trying to complete a challenge beyond their capabilities. At the same time, borrowing Roosevelt’s famous words, nothing worth having or worth doing was ever achieved without effort. The original goal of the bucket challenge was to raise money for ALS. While people might be reluctant to donate or simply unaware of the cause, they can be persuaded into doing so by being challenged. Watch me take on the challenge So now I’m soaking wet and can’t stop sneezing. But I’m also up there, with the best of them, sharing a wet smile with LeBron James, my fellow Ice Bucket Challenge participant. I have completed the challenge so now, my victory will be perpetuated on the web for all to see. And that is what social media does best - recognition. Making the world a better place, one droplet at a time Committing to a meaningful purpose is important for motivation and this challenge is the perfect example. Donating to charity and helping to raise awareness for diseases are without a doubt worthy causes. Don’t Try this at the office OK, so this had all been a refreshing experience, but how can I use the mechanics that seem to be working great in this challenge to do some good within an enterprise environment? First, we need to choose the challenge. Good choices can be doing something for the greater good and welfare at the company: participating in volunteer work encouraged by the company (and by doing the challenge getting the company to donate money to that cause), or doing something for the general welfare of the company, such as undertaking a clean-up or decoration activity that would make the work environment nicer or more fun (such as a sports facility).   Think of what can be the workplace equivalent to having a bucket of ice poured over your head. It should be fun! Don’t go into taxing those who haven’t participated with a worse task - they just won’t get the recognitions the others got.   Make a Splash Completed challenges should be published in the company’s internal social network (or newsletter, or widely-distributed email). Colleagues might be asked to vote for the best or most creative execution of the challenge, thus allowing employees that choose not to take on the challenge, to still be part of the game.   To sum up, this challenge proved to be enlightening as well as refreshing. All in all, not a bad activity for a hot summer day!

Can you learn something about social and knowledge collaboration from a venture capitalist? As a longtime enterprise gamification person I was doubtful at first. But now, with the Karma app my answer is a resounding "Yes!". This July, Aleph VC announced a mobile app called Karma. I wrote about the app’s focus on creating a pay it forward culture and its attempt at gamifying good deeds -  here. At the time the app was not available; the app was released on September 7th. This is a review of the knowledge collaboration and social sharing aspects of the app, all of which may come handy as great best practice examples for anyone interested in using gamification to encourage knowledge and social collaboration. First of all, for those that did not read our previous posts, Karma was created by Aleph, a venture capital fund. Venture Capitalists are interested in promoting knowledge collaboration - entrepreneurs and startups need an environment they can thrive in - and that environment has to be willing to share lessons learned. Otherwise, entrepreneurs risk learning stuff the hard way - although some of the knowledge may have already informally existed in the community.  When you learn stuff the hard way, some of the money invested by the venture capitalist is lost… see the reasons behind the necessity of promoting knowledge sharing? Anyone in the VC space can tell you that much of the advice, know-how and information sharing is done for "karma" - a good deed with no tangible benefit attached. People help each other within the venture community for many reasons - some believe in "pay it forward" - helping others as you were once helped. Some use advice to maintain a reputation, and some do it for its own sake.  Yet gamifying "karma" - just like using gamification for enterprise knowledge collaboration - can drive more adoption and result in more knowledge sharing. It is of great interest when people don’t know each other - and this is where gamification can work, by providing recognition and other forms of gamification satisfaction. The Karma App is a way of institutionalizing advice, making it simpler to access and having the results shared with everyone.  The app’s stated goal is to serve "Aleph’s entrepreneurial community, focused on helping the members of this community help each other. You can ask questions, request assistance and provide help to others". As we had mentioned in our previous post, the app uses gamification elements to reward those who help others.   Its inspiration is probably partially reddit, which has used karma points as a way to reward people contributing to its community. The Karma App is also a nice reminder about how well designed knowledge collaboration can work. Here are some takeways: 1. Remind people of the basics: good onboarding makes knowledge collaboration simple to grasp The first screens the user sees are those that remind him what Karma is good for. The "gives & gets" screen says "Karma is a community of entrepreneurs giving and getting help from their peers". There are several additional screens that ensure that whoever downloaded the app with some unclear notion of what it does will have a better idea of what it is about. This is a great approach when thinking of onboarding anyone on a knowledge collaboration or social collaboration system. State the importance of the system; explain how it works. 2. Don’t just encourage people to answer questions; they should ask one too One of the first screens forces you to make your first request to the community. You cannot skip it and just browse other people’s questions. This forces people away from a passive involvement in the knowledge collaboration system - they can’t just browse around and see who asked a question. They must ask a question and become active - if they asked one thing they should probably also look for a question to answer. This is also a nice example of "show,  don’t tell" since it forces you to see for yourself how your question will be answered. This is how the Karma app states this principle: "Karma is a community dedicated to mutual help. We would like you to experience that from the get go, so go ahead and ask your first request." 3. Encourage referrals and introductions Knowledge collaboration is sometimes about directing questions to the right people. Community creation is an important goal for many knowledge collaboration scenarios.  That’s why the app encourages you to "introduce and be presented" stating that "when you don’t know the answer, but think of a group or person that might, refer the question to them. It’s just as valuable". 4. Reward contributions immediately Each action on karma - answering a poll, responding to a question - is noticed and earns karma points. 5. Use a leaderboard Karma points aren’t just personal. They earn social recognition which is reflected in a leaderboard, which is less about competition and more about recognition. 6. Karma points are made redeemable On Reddit, karma points exist for their own sake. They are not attached to any tangible benefit. In Aleph’s Karma, Karma points can also be redeemed - but the app doesn’t set a fixed value on them (for instance X hours equal one office hour session or an invite to a closed entrepreneurial event), but rather states they will be redeemed at some future time. 7. But you can keep the rewards undefined - just point to further interactions with the community. What I like about Karma points is that although Aleph promises they will have some value (probably not monetary and more to do with access and recognition) their future value is tied to interactions with the community, not to money or any other incentive that is external to the system.

  Liz Ryan, Founder and CEO of Human Workplace, tells us in a LinkedIn post that employee engagement is a scam. Here’s a quote from her LinkedIn post "The Employee Engagement Scam": "Employee engagement is a fake business term that cropped up about twenty years ago because consulting firms and software firms saw something new that they could scam leaders into measuring. Measurement is an addiction for fearful business and institutional weenies. They can’t stop measuring things because it makes them feel that they’re in control. When the measurements hit established targets, they feel cozy inside. Employee engagement is typically measured via a once-a-year employee survey. The employees get to fill out a survey to tell their management team how ‘engaged’ they are, as though ‘engagement’ were a real thing instead of a made-up construct devised to give HR people something to measure." Reading this, I had a surge of contradictory thoughts. Ryan argues that going for measurement of employee engagement - through anonymous surveys - is a bad idea that de-humanizes the workplace. She argues that HR management would be doing a far better job if they were to listen to employees’ engagement levels - by actually walking around and talking to them. I wholeheartedly agree. Managers should take the time and energy to sense first-hand what type of energy their organization has. Measurements through surveys are not the best way to get at the heart of the emotional connection people have with their workplaces. They may provide statistics, which are sometimes worse than lies. On the other hand, I also disagree with Ryan’s approach. Employee Engagement is important; the fact that it’s measured the wrong way doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. Engaged employees care about the organization they work in, understand it better and do more in it. They can create something that can’t be measured or mechanically induced: a snowball of energy and enthusiasm. In this way, engagement is an important consideration for any organization. As a founder and CEO of an enterprise gamification company - www.gameffective.com -  I view employee engagement as a core deliverable of all gamification efforts with several key questions in mind: are employees aligned with corporate goals? Are they changing how they work as a result? Are they working to engage additional employees? This is why I came up with the employee engagement funnel. It is about making employees aware of corporate goals and engaging them in learning and in getting others to align with corporate goals. The funnel is a step-by-step visual demonstration of how each employee goes through the process of engagement, beginning with awareness of corporate goals, going through training and learning of corporate practices or offerings and eventually leading other employees through the same path. Viewing employee engagement this way gives managers concrete things to relate to and doesn’t focus them on empty measurement: Are their employees aware of corporate goals, changes, new products, services and more? Are they aligned with corporate goals (see this post about whether gamification is the new corporate performance management) Do they care about sharing this knowledge with other employees? Here are the first and second posts I’ve written about the Employee Engagement Funnel and how it matters for employers AND employees. In this sense, I am a true believer in Employee Engagement.    

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.

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