Don’t just gamify the sales funnel. Gamify the employee engagement funnel   engagement funnel Using the employee engagement funnel and gamification for business transformation When have you last used a real funnel?  A funnel with a conical mouth and narrow stem which is then inserted into a bottle and used to transfer liquid? I used one last week to transfer some olive oil from a gallon container into a smaller bottle I can use when cooking.  As I took the funnel out of the utensil drawer it struck me how rarely is it used in the kitchen and how often it is used (and abused) as a business term. Real funnels are used to moderate the flow of a liquid into a container. But as a business term they are used as a metaphor for a sales process where leads come in, go through a sales process and hopefully emerge at the bottom as actual sales. Managers are tasked with optimizing sales funnels and driving employees to sell more. As employees, sales opportunities or anything else pass from phase to phase on the funnel, their value to the organization becomes higher. I’d like to introduce the concept of the employee engagement funnel.  I believe that it is closely tied to sales success. The employee engagement funnel doesn’t have a lot of employees coming in and less qualified and able employees coming out of the other side. It is not a turnover funnel nor a funnel made to find and select top performing employees. This funnel symbolizes how employees are made aware of corporate goals, learn about the corporation and change the way they do their job. Eventually, the process makes employees more aware and helps them do better. As employees go through the engagement funnel, the organization needs to offer different tools for each stage in order to optimize the process. Even simple awareness of the engagement process makes employees better. Employees learn what the organization wants and what they need to do to take part in it. They will know, for instance, that the company wants to sell products, know the company’s products, and how to execute the sales strategy. As they travel through the funnel employees become leaders that will create engagement for others, and ambassadors that will help other employees become better. The employee engagement funnel begins with awareness - making the employee know what corporate goals are (such as growing sales for a certain product). This leads the employee into the second phase - onboarding - training or learning (e.g. about the potential customer benefits of a product).  If both these phases are completed successfully, the employee is able to do a better job - he is engaged.  However, this doesn’t signify the end of the process. Employee engagement can go further - into becoming a leader (leading employees as they go through the engagement funnel) and even becoming an ambassador (bringing new employees into the funnel). Gamification accelerates the engagement funnel Gamification should take center stage in driving the employee engagement funnel.  In the past few years, enterprise Gamification is becoming richer and better suited to drive sustainable change in enterprises. This new era of enterprise gamification goes beyond badges and leaderboards. Instead it uses compelling game mechanics such as narratives. Here’s how gamification plays out in each phase of the employee engagement funnel: Awareness (Know):  although no one will admit it, many companies don’t do a great job of making employees aligned with corporate goals. While management is measured through key performance indicators (KPIs) that are aligned with business goals, employees are often forgotten. Therefore, the first goal is to make sure that employees are aware of the corporate goals and how they relate to their day to day job. One of the best ways to do this is to use gamification to drive specific calls to action and communicate behavioral goals to employees. Onboarding employees (Learn). Good onboarding and corporate training practices give the employee the tools required to do a good job. Gamification used during this process should focus on completion rather than competition, so the sense of a job well done will pervade the employee’s self-esteem rather than unnecessary competition that is sometimes overly encouraged with the false sense it may create performance improvement (actually it can alienate employees) Engagement (Act/Do). This is where thoughtful gamification comes in, taking employees across all enterprise systems and motivating them to do well through clear calls to action and encouragement of improvement and individual goals. At the end of each period, further awareness of how employee activities are tied to company goals is encouraged. Internal Leadership development (Lead). At this point employees know their job and are rewarded for doing well, relative to their past performance, and not as a disconnected sales goal. At this stage, employees can evolve into local leader-heros. Leaders help others improve and lead their teams. Corporate ambassadors (Viral expansion)- these employees become corporate ambassadors, communicating and acting upon the company’s vision both internally and externally, resulting in better customer interactions, customer satisfaction and better business for the company. Typically, ambassadors pull new employees into the employee engagement funnel, growing the ranks of engaged employees, in a viral expansion.   In this sense, perhaps not all employees can become ambassadors. But thinking of the employee engagement funnel as a process in which employees are not "lost" like leads that don’t end in sales, but rather employee energy is redirected (like liquid) into becoming a company ambassador empowers employees and promises better outcomes for all. This is a first post of three on the employee engagement funnel. The next posts will discuss how to optimize the transition inside the funnel.

Corporate Performance Management is great for motivating managers. Gamification can do the same for employees, who often do not have a corporate performance management plan. Enterprise gamification can successfully emulate the benefits of  corporate performance management.    Performance management Imagine a trucking company. Let’s think about how its managers are engaged in meeting corporate goals. They are presented with a business strategy and goals. Let’s say the company has decided it should invest in better customer service, focus on a certain region and resolve a history of safety issues that are mostly related with too many hours of driving. Additionally, the company would like to better control its fuel expenditures by having trucks rest during rush hour traffic. For over a decade, many enterprises have practiced engaging managers with corporate business strategy and goals. Managers undergo a process to acquaint them with the business strategy (often achieved with the use of learnification strategies) after which KPIs and targets are set, together with scorecards (to provide feedback) and recognition mechanisms.  Management achievements are then reviewed discussed and rewarded in ritualized quarterly business reviews and more.  This process of translating the business strategy into measurable goals for each manager is crucial to a well-functioning enterprise. Now let’s think about the non-managerial employees in the trucking company: the drivers. They are also tracked and measured- but they are presented with simpler goals, quotas perhaps. For instance, they are told how their customer service was perceived by customers. Or they are penalized for safety breaches. Or their work hours are managed so they don’t drive during rush hour. They certainly have some mileage quota they are measured by. However, these rules, presented as a series of "do" and "don’ts" and thresholds may have a suboptimal effect - since they don’t communicate corporate objectives well. We must ask ourselves whether the trucking company can do a better job at driving its employees’ performance. Could it achieve a better outcome if it used tools that are closer to corporate performance management? The answer is positive. Actually, I spoke to a trucking company today. They are considering gamification, on drivers’ smartphones, to drive the same value. They are using gamificaiton to help employees understand corporate objectives and better perform. They realized this was a need since in their business, just like in many others, KPIs do and cannot stand alone, but rather require difficult balancing. Driving many hours to serve customers better can create safety issues. So, instead of presenting a stiff set of rules, the company decided to gamify truck drivers’ performance in a way that is similar to corporate performance management for its managerial levels. In this case, business alignment is represented by game rules, which, in turn, provide a clear call to action. Combining this with narrative based gamification (using sports, for instance, as a metaphor) makes this fun and challenging. This also lets the company combine sporting event style scoreboards, to provide real time feedback, and encourage improvement and accomplishments. Using the sports narrative, the trucking company integrated races, games and competitions, together with leaderboards and other gamified public rituals (such as fantasy sports gamified narratives) to provide employees  the recognition they deserve.   You can combine fun and business objectives together, to achieve higher employee engagement and better alignment with corporate objectives.  

Foursquare’s recent changes can give us excellent hints about what works and what doesn’t in enterprise gamification design. Remember Foursquare? In 2009, Foursquare launched a location based social network that allowed you to "check-in" at various venues, turning "life into a game". The service was initially limited to certain metro areas, but after it opened, it reached 10 million users, which enabled the company to raise $ 50 M in 2011 at a valuation of $ 600 M. Foursquare was a hit. One of the core drivers behind the craze to check-in using Foursquare and not competing services was Foursquare’s use of gamification. Gamification is the practice of using game design elements to reward behavior in a non-game setting. It can be used to reward interaction with a service, such as Foursquare, or to reward a desired enterprise-related behavior as in Enterprise Gamification for employees. Foursquare gamified check-ins, letting users get points for certain activities (such as checking into a new place), get badges for checking in and even get mayor status, if a user checked into a certain venue on more days than anyone else in the past 60 days. However, social networks caught up with location based check-ins and Foursquare’s status eroded. Its enormous popularity tapered off. Recently Foursquare separated its check-in service into an app called swarm and the new Foursquare, which "learns what you like and leads you to the places you’ll love". Earlier Foursquare even ceased its famous points and badges system, the drivers of its immense popularity in the first place. This is what Foursquare says about its realization that its game mechanics were breaking down: "…When we built Foursquare, the game mechanics were meant to do two things: help you learn how to use Foursquare, and help make your real-world experiences more fun. We never set out to make a ‘game’…  Points gave you a way to measure how exciting your outings were; badges were to give you a sense of accomplishment; and mayorships allowed you to compete with your friends… even we were surprised by how much people loved them. Back in 2009 when we had 50,000 people using Foursquare, they were awesome. But as our community grew from 50,000 people to over 50,000,000 today, our game mechanics started to break down." Now Foursquare wants to move into the local search space, targeting yelp and google reviews for places such as restaurants. And to do that it needs users to create a lot of reviews, so it can offer meaningful reviews and compete in the restaurant search space. As a result, the company is introducing a new kind of status - expert. Expertise is a function of the user’s performance within foursquare and not outside of it (the opposite of the Linkedin influencer, whose expertise is external to the Linkedin service). This should encourage users to review more places and submit more tips, making the Foursquare service valuable. The story of Foursquare holds a valuable truth: Gamification mechanics are powerful and can drive user behavior; but the behavior has to contain an intrinsic value without the game mechanics. Gamification is not an end in itself; it is a design choice intended to drive real value. Foursquare is a prime example of gamification of a consumer service. What can enterprise gamification practitioners learn from it? Here are some that come to mind: 1. Gamification cannot drive long-term  behavioral change. Well, let’s take it back. As the CEO of an enterprise gamification company, GamEffective, I deeply believe that gamification can drive change. I’ve seen it happen with my own eyes. But the trick is that rewards aren’t enough; the activity or behavior promoted needs to have an intrinsic value. At first, people were going out of their way to earn foursquare badges and mayorships. But these rewards didn’t suffice in the longer term because once novelty wears off and the fun becomes yesterday’s news, users need additional value. In the enterprise space this means that employees can’t just be rewarded for anything - rewards should be for behaviors that have real value to the organization and the employee, not just for their own sake. This will create a virtuous cycle that will drive employees to continue with the behavioral change even when the gamification novelty has worn off.  This also means that gamification should reward behavior that has a real value for the company: if you reward contributions to a knowledge management system that no one uses, or reward employees for unnecessary customer visits, the results can be dire. Choose the desired behaviors you want to drive carefully; make sure they have a real meaning within your organization and that they reflect corporate goals. 2. Gamification works in content generation settings - but only to a certain degree. Content gamification works in scenarios such as restaurant reviews and knowledge collaboration systems - but it should contain an element of recognition. Rewards without recognition of someone as an expert won’t work in the long run. 3. Badges and points still matter - but to a lesser degree. Badges are still part of the game mechanics arsenal any gamification solution should include. But they should be used judiciously, when they fit and not as an all-around solution. Sometimes giving employees a sense of completion matters too, as I wrote here - badges are more competitive in nature, but can also be adjusted to reward completion. Foursquare is also doing that in its new Swarm application by notifying users when they’ve taken many runs or hooked up often with a friend. The balance between completion and competition requires thought during the game design phase. The use of narratives in game design are also a new game mechanic some vendors (such as GamEffective) are adopting, since they promote teamwork and the ability to balance several competing goals (such as good service vs quick service). 4. Not everyone can be a mayor; good game design gives them a good reason to try. Leaderboards and competitive game mechanics can work, but you never want to alienate the non-mayors of the world. Enterprise gamification leaderboards should be designed so that they reward people in context and give people a sense of achievement. To resolve issues with Mayorships, in which too many people were competing for mayorship, Foursqaure revised its system to "Mayorship 2.0". This is how Foursquare’s bog describes this. "We wanted to get back to a fun way to compete with your friends instead of all 50,000,000 people who are on Foursquare. With these new mayorships, if you and a couple friends have been checking in to a place, the person who has been there the most lately gets a crown sticker. So you and your friends can compete for the mayorship of your favorite bar, without having to worry about the guy who is there every. single. day."

This post is the second in a series of three posts, all dedicated to discussing the employee engagement funnel. You can read the first post in this series here. The employee engagement funnel, although inspired by the sales funnel, isn’t about choosing employees or promoting them. The employee engagement funnel is about making employees aware of corporate goals and engaging them in learning and in getting others to align with corporate goals. engagement funnel 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.  In this respect, it symbolizes how companies can make employees into evangelists of corporate performance goals. This actually relates to a previous post, available here, asking whether Gamification can become the new corporate performance management. The employee engagement funnel is made of five sections: Awareness - Knowing. On boarding - Learning. Engagement - Implementing. Leadership - Influencing others. Ambassadors - bringing more people into the funnel This post will focus on how employees move from one section of the employee engagement funnel to the next - making themselves more valuable to the corporation and probably their internal job satisfaction and sense of worth and well-being. For instance, let’s look at the process of launching a new product. The immediate objective is to better address customer needs during the sales or service phases, so the customer gets access to the better product proposition that was just launched. To achieve that, sales people should master the solutions the new product offers so they could naturally and logically suggest them in sales pitches, as well as effectively use them when thinking about the product. Integrating the new product into the sales process does not happen overnight, but once the product is immersed in their mindset, sales people should be able to find creative solutions for their customers. They should not only rely on their own skills and expertise, but rather should benefit from other people in the company who were facing similar situations. Several years ago, while working in Sales for a Business Intelligence company, we were competing on a project with a global provider. Our chances to win this bid improved once we acquired a company with a product that had a crucial feature that could be part of an end to end solution. My relief at hearing the news of the acquisition and the resulting enhanced offering turned to disappointment when I learned that the sales people at my company didn’t even make it to the "awareness" level in the engagement funnel. That is to say, not only did they not encompass the product in their thought process and pitches, they were not even aware of its existence in our company. I then had to act to get the sales people into the engagement funnel, proceeding from awareness , through engagement and implementation. Let’s go through the stages of the engagement funnel and see how they apply: Awareness The top priority is creating awareness of organizational goals, or changes that the company underwent and that are relevant to employees’ jobs. Do all employees need to be involved? That’s an important question, since the answer would provide us with an idea of how to direct different messages to different audiences. From the point of view of organizational culture, awareness contributes to employees’ engagement, resulting in an improved workplace atmosphere. A great way to implement awareness measures is using Gamification for on-boarding, training and learnification. It is recommended to emphasize completion and not competition, to reward learning and advancement relative to oneself. On-Boarding Awareness doesn’t suffice since knowing something exists (a new product, in this case) doesn’t translate into the internalizing effort required to make use of the knowledge. That’s why the next step in the funnel is learning more about product features, pros and cons, product market fit, etc. The on-boarding phase is easily gamified. Using game mechanics that promote cooperation, especially when work requires cooperation (having several people collaborate on a customer proposal) is definitely worth considering. Engagement Obviously, the salesman has to obtain the relevant knowledge. It is a great start, but not enough. For the salesman to improvise when needed, come up with the right solution and utilize all the resources available to him from prior and recent learning, the employee has to add an emotional dimension to his commitment, that is, to be emotionally engaged. Emotional engagement usually helps doing new things takes an effort, and the intellectual effort can be motivated by emotions. Leadership Who are the leaders of the organization? Our first response would be mangers, but in reality leaders are those that are active around us and serve as a role model. The people  who encourage and promote common goals are leaders too. In the context of the engagement funnel, the leaders are the ones to help others pass from the awareness level to the engagement level. They demonstrate how to incorporate their acquired knowledge into their everyday work. They are those who are first to construct a customer offering that incorporates new features, products or services. In this stage, the best gamification is game design that strengthens team development, giving leaders more opportunities to influence others. Using a good Gamification platform will expose the more committed employees and will turn them to leaders in the engagement funnel. Ambassadors The ambassadors are evangelists of new corporate learning. They have the awareness, they are fully engaged, and possess the knowledge of how everything comes together. In this phase, ambassadors can create presentations and articles about their new knowledge, getting the message across corporate barriers, internal and external.  Gamification at this stage should reward ambassadors for their expertise and include game design elements that create recognition for expertise. To conclude, the employee engagement funnel is a framework that helps think about and implement the process of introducing new products to both the market and the workforce.  The engagement funnel combined with Gamification encourages employee learning and the accumulation of past and present knowledge. It rewards them for being more engaged and moreover, for bringing others into the process. The outcome of the process will be manifest not only in KPIs but in a change of corporate culture.

I’ve recently blogged about LinkedIn’s use of gamification in Wired’s Innovation Insights. Many of us rely on LinkedIn as a key HR, sales, career development and business tool. Some of LinkedIn’s ability to engage  its users is its elegant use of gamification elements - from completeness bars to competitive game elements that compare a LinkedIn user to their peers. All this makes the LinkedIn environment compelling to many people and results in their investing in making their LinkedIn profiles and the data in them. This raises, of course, the interesting question of whether competition - gamified competition as exemplified in the LinkedIn example - discourages or encourages users. More importantly, it makes us carefully consider the use of completion oriented elements vs competition oriented game elements. Here are some excerpts from my blog post there. You can read the whole post here. "LinkedIn wants you to complete your profile; profile completeness is an important goal since it makes the information about you interesting and valuable for other users, driving usage and powering LinkedIn’s monetization model. The basic information doesn’t take that long to provide, but most people are reluctant to invest the time it takes to complete their profile. How does LinkedIn get you to fill more information? Using gamification. The "profile completeness bar" appeals to the basic human satisfaction of completion. Even once you’ve gotten to 75-90% (including uploading a carefully selected picture), LinkedIn will try to appeal to your sense of mastery and competition to get to 100%, and beyond. Is there a "beyond 100%"? In LinkedIn, there is. LinkedIn came up with a new version of profile completeness: "profile strength"… even as you reach "All-Star" level, the circle (cup) is not never entirely full, insinuating that there is always room for updates and changes." I then conclude the post with a "it depends" - drawing the line between competition that may be disruptive within an enterprise gamification project and competition (and completion) done right: "When we want to implement gamification elements in the work place we have to make sure certain elements are being kept in order to encourage employees without making them feel worthless or over-challenged. It is important to ensure that the participants’ understanding that the final goal of gamification is the process going on at work (learning, improving sales, improving customer service, etc.) rather than the competition itself. Another means to smooth the competitiveness is to avoid pricey awards and concentrate on more symbolic ones, or reward with group prizes like a joint dinner, or other group activity."      

We just released a white paper about best practices in enterprise gamification project management. You can download it here. Here is an excerpt: "To give you a good sense of the project phases of an enterprise gamification project, we’ve decided to share our own project plans and charts. You can use them as a reference point for any gamification project you choose to implement, since it outlines the main phases in implementing a gamification project. The typical project, from beginning to actual launch should take 2-5 weeks, depending on the complexity of the process. This assumes that the gamification platform chosen is a no-code platform that can simply integrate across many enterprise systems. When choosing a gamification vendor, make sure you understand whether the IT integration effort risks lengthening the project or making it cumbersome, especially when the gamification project spans more than one enterprise system, meaning that employees will use it in the context of several enterprise applications. The main enterprise gamification project phases are (1) preparation (2) design (3) integration & setup and (4) testing and calibration. The preparation phase includes goal setting, player profiling, definition of desired behaviors and information analysis. The game design phase is where game elements and rules are set. The integration and set up phases include simulations, which, in turn, may lead to changes in game design. Testing and calibration extend from the launch phase and into the KPI and ROI analysis activities" To read more, download the white paper here.

We’ve just published an article in elearning industry: How Gamification Can Help Overcome Remote Employment issues Here’s an excerpt: "Gamification can solve remote employment issues, if used right. My favorite example is giving feedback, the immediate positive kind. Working remotely denies employees the opportunity to get it; this may lead to the feeling that they are working in a void. Feedback - as in "wow, you’ve managed to get so much done today" - contributes to the employee’s sense of well-being and drives them more. Many game elements can give this feedback - and also document it so a human will also be driven to give feedback too. For instance, think of Karma points, the classic reward for participating in knowledge sharing (think reddit). Collecting Karma points provides an immediate reward - but can also get noticed by a superior or peer and get a positive mention. Completion bars (think LinkedIn profile completion bar) can have the same effect." Regrading solving the communication challenges, we suggest, among other things: "Set goals that can be easily measured through time logging (such as calls made to remote employees), use the current gamification platform to suggest calls to action that involve communication (for instance, each time a customer order is obtained, its existence and special requirements need to be delivered in a skype call to the remote worker), and completion mechanisms similar to those used by linkedin ("you have reached 80% of your personal communication goal for the month"). Communication can also be gamified through pat on the back games, where employees choose "best communicators" and reward them in person, contributing to a good team environment and exemplifying the use of communications channels in accordance with goals. Communications goals can also be set on a team and departmental level." We also suggest thinking about how to reward over-communication (as in active participation in knowledge management scenarios). We then discuss gamification as a great way to track and reward productivity and go on to discuss knowledge management and the corporate culture changes and modifications arising from gamification that targets resolving remote employment issues,  relevant for both telecommuting and scenarios where there are several remote offices. You can read the full article here.    

Our lives are filled with to-do lists. We must deal with endless daily chores (laundry, dishes, lawn mowing, carpooling, and much more). We also have bigger, longer term tasks: all those New Year resolutions we make and seldom carry out such as losing extra pounds, or taking on a healthy habit like running or yoga. Some people are completely task oriented: whatever is on their list gets done, gets a little check sign or erased with a strikethrough, and they are off to the next assignment. Well, most people need a little push. Luckily for us, a nice variety of applications offers this kind of assistance. There are apps to help us get our chores done; others help us keep our diet, apps for maintaining and improving our workout routine, apps to manage our financial activities and more. Some of these apps use gamification to keep users motivated. Let’s see how: HabitRPG Let’s take a look at HabitRPG. The app aims to manage your tasks in a fun and motivating manner. Your boring to do list becomes colorful and game-like. Each of your tasks turns into a little monster you have to defeat. (aren’t most of our daily tasks monsters that must be wrestled to the ground?). You get rewarded with "experience points" for tasks you complete and lose points when you do not. The "experience points" can be spent on in-app purchases to improve your gear and mark your progress in the game as well as in real life. In case sharing with others inspires you, HabitRPG can be used to create a social experience. You can invite your real-life friends to the app so they can cheer you up, advise you and reassure you when the going gets tough. The active community is not only for sharing but can also compete with you, encouraging you to perform. Fitbit While HabitRPG covers most habits and tasks you can think of, Fitbit is all about your fitness: it manages your diet, your exercise routine and your sleeping habits. If you need help in losing weight (who doesn’t?!) or just watch your calories, you could try this app. You need to log the foods you’re consuming each day and report your daily exercise. The app sends notifications throughout the day allowing you to track your calorie balance, while taking into account your personal data, goals, and how intense you wish the plan to be. The gamified elements do not involve role playing or virtual prizes. But the logic is that of a game: a player wants to fulfill the set goal. This is done with a completeness bar which indicates the calories burned through the day and a gauge which indicates whether you are under budget or over it. If you are the type that gets thrilled and motivated by competition, you can share and compete with your Fitbit friends. You can share progress and data and applaud each other, or better yet, compete and learn from a leaderboard how much harder you have to try. Toshl Managing our finances is another one of those "must does" we adults have to deal with. Toshl is an app that aims to help you manage your financial activities. The ‘raison d’être’ behind it is that one’s finances are a serious matter but managing them could be fun. Toshl helps you control your expenses in accordance with your income and a budget you assign: you can add your expenses on the go, classify them, set reminders for bill paying (one time and recurring), get visualization to help you better understand your money handling, and share the info with your spouse or whomever you wish. Naturally, it does not offer information your bank account isn’t providing, but the presentation is more welcoming and the immediate feedback is a great incentive to stay away from extravagant spending.

Let’s assume you’ve decided to use gamification - the use of game mechanics to encourage behaviors - such as checking in (foursquare/swarm), selling (CRM scenarios), completing coursework (eLearning). Let’s assume it is in an enterprise gamification context. Maybe you’re gamifying learning, or call center activities, or sales. Now let me ask you question: is your gamification project going to be addictive? or how about this question: should it be addictive? are you hemming and hawing and refraining from an outright answer? I was when I was first asked this. I’ll admit that I myself hesitated when I started to hear these types of questions from gamification novices. After all, isn’t addiction a bad word? Its dictionary definition is "the fact or condition of being addicted to a particular substance, thing, or activity". THAT’S BAD. And if addiction is BAD (notwithstanding addictions to chocolate or coffee or extreme sports), then isn’t gamificaiton kind of diabolical? Well, it IS NOT. I was reading  Erin Hoffman’s post, Life, Addictive Game Mechanics, And The Truth Hiding In Bejeweled. And then it hit me: game mechanics may compel us to act. But they are not addictive or evil, and the sometimes naive portrayals in the business press ("in the future we will go to work and think we are playing a video game, but in fact the big corporate will be playing with our mind") are incorrect. This is why: Game mechanics are not a game; working with game mechanics isn’t play. The implementation of game mechanics (leaderboards, completion bars), narrative gamification metaphors (such as song contests and fantasy sports) and many others does not turn an enterprise application into a game. Employees are not playing with the game mechanics, at least according to the dictionary definition:  "engage in activity for enjoyment and recreation rather than a serious or practical purpose". Their engagement is definitely for serious and practical purposes. Game mechanics work well because we’re human - and humans are compelled by game mechanics - the desire to climb to the top of a leaderboard, win a fantasy sports match, build a virtual city or complete a completion bar. That’s how our brains work. Game mechanics are not play, since we don’t complete the LinkedIn profile completion bar to "play". The activity of filling in our profile has meaning. It is not recreational and shouldn’t be. Game mechanics are a means of communication. But game mechanics are much more that a "trick" to get people to do something. They indicate corporate goals, aspirations and objectives. They signal what’s important and what’s not, they tell employees how to balance the different tasks and goals they have. It’s somewhat of a corporate performance management system (to read more about this, go here).  To put it differently, game elements are becoming part of the user interface of the future. Using them in a corporate setting is about making the user interface work well. And it’s also about giving employees the sense of a job well done. That is almost the opposite of "play" or manipulation. Gamification is not addictive. You may still ask yourself whether gamification is addictive. Here is where Erin Hoffman’s blog post explained something to me, a very good observation about addiction and games. The post says this: "Addictive" is a word we use in game development perhaps too lightly, though I would argue that there is no game designer who doesn’t treat that term with a huge dollop of trepidation. Executives love to hear the phrase "addictive gameplay". Game designers, speaking for myself and those I know (whom I’m sure will correct me if they disagree), find the concept intriguing but simultaneously dangerous …  no one, from executives to game designers to behavioral psychologists, can give you an absolutely clear and quantifiable test for what "addictive" means when applied purely to a behavior or action." The post describes playing Bejwelled, the thrill and satisfaction of it, and analyzes the game mechanics that make it work well. Yet, as the player asks herself "what are other players experiencing when playing this" truth hits: there are other , more complex tasks left to do (aka work and life). Although playing the game satisfies the internal five-year-old, one must get some work done, and one does. And then Hoffman says: "Addiction is not about what you DO, but what you DON’T DO because of the replacement of the addictive behavior". When we say that something is addictive, we want to say that the addictive behavior tells us that we’d rather do it than perform the things we are supposed to do and that we are anxious about avoiding the work/life behaviour. These are huge human questions: what should we do with life?. Hoffman even argues that behind the perception of addiction lie anxiety and depression about not doing what we are "supposed" to do. But this does give us the answer for enterprise gamification: since game mechanics help us do our job, they aren’t addictive, since they don’t make us avoid our work. They help employees work, feel compelled by work, understand what they are doing and, most importantly, feel a sense of accomplishment.

I often see requests, mostly on Quora, to indicate 10 less known gamification examples. Here’s my take: Though the word "gamification" is relatively new (its widespread use dates to 2010), the concept itself is old, and never seems to go out of fashion. Using game mechanics such as competition, rewards and sense of accomplishment, creates engagement (aka fun) and , helps people achieve better outcomes. The US Army for recruiting The U.S. Army uses "America’s Army" a multiplayer shooter game that simulates a real battle - it’s a real game, not an application of game mechanics. Its virtual combat experience is fairly authentic. Players can choose their training (including combat life-saver and Special Forces), receive honors, get injured and … die. Prior to downloading the game the recruit has to subscribe, disclosing factual information. The game is the #1 recruiter tool in the U.S. Army. Treehouse for learning Treehouse teaches the "in-demand technology skills you need to land your dream job or build a startup". You can learn at your own pace, how to build websites and apps, write a code or acquire business expertise. Students may opt for a new skill, or promote an existing career. They decide which track to follow in order to obtain set goals. Along the journey the students are awarded with points and badges, earned through quizzes and interactive code challenges. The points and badges are indicators of the skills the students currently possess and are viewable by anyone online (like potential employers). eLearning (or learnification) can improve greatly with learnification, giving people a sense of mastery and completion. Recyclebank for greener living Recyclebank is a company that inspires and rewards a greener life. Its website is set up to create greater consciousness to environmental issues. The user can earn points for learning online and taking actions like recycling. These points can be redeemed for products, or discounts in the site’s online store, which sells environmental products. The reason behind it is simple - awareness and incentive will encourage people who just need a little nudge - game mechanics can be the perfect nudge. Rewarding teen readers Another gamification example with good cause is a site that encourages teens’ reading habits. The Pierce County Library lets everyone participate, choose categories and badges of interest, but only members may win prizes. The participant earns points as he makes progress and is measured against other readers. The results are displayed on a dashboard and thus create healthy competition as well as a significant increase in library subscribers. I spy …. A pretzel Successful and well established brands need to remind their audience they are still out there. They too have to retain the loyalty of their customers and there’s no better way than promoting engagement. M&M’s published a simple I-spy online game on the company’s Facebook page. A single pretzel was hidden in a full-page graphic design of M&M’s. The low cost operation yielded a boost of engagement which was manifested in a dramatic increase in shares, likes and comments. Nissan Leaf: making better drivers Another company that successfully increased its customer engagement is Nissan. Nissan Leaf is Nissan’s 100% electric car. A special program was designed for the car owners. The program gamifies driving by comparing car owners’ statistics to other local drivers. The results are displayed on a regional leaderboard. Drivers can earn medals from bronze to platinum, according to their performance. Cleaning inboxes: Baydin Emails, emails and then some more emails. Baydin is a productivity web application that created "The Email Game". The tool is designed to help the customer with handling today’s infinite amounts of email in an efficient and structured manner. By "forcing" the user to categorize mail, label it, and take action; by imposing time limits and introducing completeness bars, the user has no other choice but to improve their workflow and productivity.

Can you measure the return on investment (ROI) on your gamification project? You better do that, because when the time comes to make or renew an investment in gamification, it should be justified. But aside from justifying projects to management, there are even better reasons to measure ROI - it can help focus on the areas where gamification can matter. First, choose your KPIs What is return on investment? It is about making something better. What will gamification make better - it will improve key performance indicators (KPIs). Choosing the right KPIs is very important. First of all, by clearly stating the KPIs and measuring them before the gamification project, you have your "control group" - or, to be more precise, the state of affairs as it was before gamification. Additionally, KPIs are important in defining the game rules and, more importantly, in communicating to employees what the corporate goals are. A gamification project is an excellent opportunity to communicate corporate goals to employees and to align them with those goals, similar to the use of Corporate Performance Measurement systems for management. Finally, KPIs will help you assign a monetary value to the project and measure its ROI. You can also try to set an improvement goal, stated as a percentage - where you’d like to improve a certain KPI by a certain percent, as such 10-20% more. In this respect it is important to create a distinction between process KPIs and performance  KPIs. A process KPI is a behavior you’d like to change. For instance, increase quality reporting into the CRM system, which can, in turn, enable you to make better quality sales forecasts. A performance KPI can be the result of a process KPI (but not necessarily) - more sales. Similarly, pay attention to the difference between KSFs (Key Success Factors) and KPIs - key success factors will influence the outcome of the project, while KPIs are how you measure it. Calculate ROI To calculate the return - take the KPI results from a control group or from the period prior to the gamification launch. Compare them to the results after the project implementation. Assign a monetary value to the improvement. This is your return. For non-monetary goals, such as customer satisfaction, set a monetary value. Ask the organization what the value of increased customer satisfaction or better knowledge collaboration is. Record it. Take time into account: if you expect the return to last 12 months, make sure you reflect the projected 12 month gain and not the gain at the time of measurement. Take care to make realistic assessments of the time element - don’t take 10 years into account…. Calculating the investment is even simpler: what are the costs expended by the organization to carry out the project? These may be license costs, integration costs, etc. Divide Return by Investment - and this is your ROI.

The Stanford "marshmallow" test is a famous experiment conducted in the 1960s and 1970s. Its purpose was to measure preschoolers’ ability to delay gratification. The experiment, conducted by psychologists Walter Mischel and Ebbe Ebbesen, consisted of presenting a child with two options: get a reward immediately or a get a larger one later. A child could receive one marshmallow (or another favorite treat - a cookie or pretzel) immediately, or, the child could get two marshmallows later. The two marshmallows were given  only if the child waited for 15-20 minutes to pass, seated alone in a room with a table on which stood a plate with the two marshmallows and a bell. The child could ring the bell to call the researcher back into the room before the allotted time. If the child managed to wait the entire time, they got the two marshmallows. If they called the researcher, they could have just one. Most children chose to delay the reward and not receive the immediate one marshmallow. Of the children that chose to delay the reward, about one-third managed to wait the time required for eligibility for the full two marshmallows. Originally, the purpose of the experiment was to gain a better understanding of how children develop deferred gratification and their strategies for maintaining the ability to wait for a greater reward. Children’s strategies varied - self distraction, imagining the two marshmallows are "just a picture", humming, singing, kicking furniture, rocking on chairs and even turning their back on the marshmallow. The full significance of the marshmallow test was realized in its follow-on studies. In 1988 Mischel found that preschoolers that did well on the original test,  were described by parents, ten years later as more competent adolescents. Later on success in the test was  correlated with higher SAT scores (210 points more compared to the most impatient children), educational attainment and even lower body mass index measurements. Successful delay gratification also correlated with better mental health outcomes. Many people first encountered the marshmallow test in Daniel Goleman’s bestseller, "Emotional Intelligence". Since then it has become a popular, encouraging Cookie Monster to delay its cookie gluttony, getting favorable mentions in The Atlantic and The New Yorker and even inspiring this great TED talk (complete with videos of children trying hard to resist temptation). Most notably, Mischel just published "The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self Control.". You can read an interview with him about the book here. But sometimes eating the marshmallow makes a lot of sense. David Ogilvy, the famous advertising man, commented on one such instance: "When I was a boy, I always saved the cherry on my pudding for last. Then, one day, my sister stole it. From then on, I always ate the cherry first." Mischel has a similar thought in this well-written book. "When preschoolers have an experience with a promise maker who fails to keep his promise, not surprisingly they are much less likely to be willing to wait for two marshmallows than to take one now" Working in Trinidad and administering a similar test to adolescents there, Mischel started to think maybe there was an additional element to consider: trust. "Perhaps those that came from homes with absent fathers … had fewer experiences with men who kept their promises. If so, they would have less trust that the stranger - me - would ever really show up later with the promised delayed reward. There’s no good reason for anyone to forgo the "now" unless there is trust that the "later" will materialize. In fact, when I compared the two … groups by looking only at the children who had a man living in the household, the differences between the groups disappeared". So, trust is important if you want to reward people for delayed gratification. Lack of trust (or fairness) can induce adverse outcomes. Why am I writing this? I am the CEO of an enterprise gamification company. I believe that enterprise gamification (and indeed any dialogue with employees) should be based on trust and fairness. Gamification, the practice of using game mechanics to encourage employee behavior, requires trust too. Reading Mischel’s book I was struck by how important it is to keep the game rules straight, fair and achievable. After all, we are requesting employees to defer their gratification, modify  their behavior, doing what they perhaps would rather do less or not do (completing CRM information, working better at customer service, elearning and more). In his book Mischel describes another experiment, to answer the question "would those who delayed more in the first session be less likely to give in to a strong temptation in a different situation - one in which cheating was the only way to succeed?" Thia experiment uses badges to reward children for a game of skill (gamification reminder, anyone?). There’s one catch: the game rules are not fair. To do this, children were introduced to a game of skill - using a "ray gun" to destroy a "rocket" target (this being the 1960s). "Above the target, a row of five lights illuminated the number of points earned after each shot. Three brightly colored sportsmen badges ( marksman, sharpshooter and expert) were flashed and offered as prizes, to be awarded on the basis of the total number of points obtained." But the game rules were "wrong". The number of points a child could get for each shot was random and had no connection to their skill level. The score they received did not make them eligible for  any badge. The only way to get a badge was to falsify their scores. As the boys played and kept their scores (and cheated) researchers tracked it all. The results were correlated with the delayed rewards: those that weren’t good at delay gratification cheated earlier, but"if the boys who had preferred the delayed rewards did cheat, they waited much longer". What’s the takeaway for employers? Keep employee trust high - it translates into "willpower" (the synonym many use when asked what the marshmallow test tests). When using rewards, gamification, anything, keep the rules of the game honest and fair. Otherwise, you’ll create a game that rewards cheaters.

"The Power of Habit - Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business" is a New York Times Bestseller by Charles Duhigg. It shows us recent scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist and how they can be transformed. It follows corporations and individuals that achieved success by focusing on the patterns that shape every aspect of our lives - transforming habits. Most of the choices we make each and every day are not the products of well-considered choices. They are the products of habit; we are creatures of habit. Habits range from small gestures: like what how we say goodbye to our kids in the morning to complex habits, such as backing a car from a driveway. According to the book, a Duke University researcher found that more than 40 percent of the actions people performed each day weren’t actual decisions but rather habits. The book examines recent research and insights on the power of habit: how habits emerge in our life, what it takes to build new habits and change old ones. It also examines the habits that makes companies and organizations successful, from Starbucks to Alcoa. Habits - acquired behavior patterns that are regularly followed until they become, in a sense, involuntary - have an enormous impact on our lives. Bad habits can turn someone’s life upside down and earn them social disdain. Good habits - from interpersonal exchanges to willpower and perseverance - are the cornerstone of success. "Habits, scientists say, emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort. Left to its own devices, the brain will try to make almost any routine into a habit, because habits allow our minds to ramp down more often. This effort-saving instinct is a huge advantage… An efficient brain also allows us to stop thinking constantly about basic behaviors, such as walking and choosing what to eat, so we can devote mental energy to inventing spears, irrigation systems, and, eventually, airplanes and video games." Dhuigg then goes on to explain how habits work, taking an example of a rat that hears a click, goes down the same route in a maze and then discovers chocolate at the same corner. At first the rat is startled by the click and is unsure what to do in the maze. After a while, a habit forms. A cue (the click) tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. The routine tells you what to do (wait for the door into the maze to open and hang right) The reward (chocolate, a sense of satisfaction) helps your brain remember the habit and reinforce it. In the same way when a ping alerts you that you’ve got email, the routine is to check it immediately, and the reward is distraction. Over time the habit forms a craving - in this case for distraction - which is enabled anytime there is a cue (phone pings), and satisfied only after the routine (checking the email) is followed. That’s why emails and instant messages sometimes become distractions that cannot be ignored. Over time the cue, routine and reward loop become more and more automatic. The cue and reward are so interlinked in the brain that once the cue is given the reward is expected and going through the routine is automatic. Duhigg then describes habit changes: since the cue, craving and the reward are difficult to change, some people focus on changing the routine that follows the cue. The classic example is eating a carrot when a craving for a cigarette is cued by an external factor (sitting with friends in a bar, for instance). Enterprise Gamification, the practice of using game mechanics to promote behavioral change, is also about habit formation and changing habits. And changing organizational habits, by focus on a keystone habit, as Duhigg explains, can bring on tremendous organizational change. Let’s say your sales people have one great habit: when a customer sounds doubtful, they immediately flood him with sales materials such as brochures and white papers. But their sales managers are not happy: they would also like the sales person to properly update the CRM about the customer’s doubts- that information is needed so that they can make meaningful forecasts. However, no requests, demands or threats make salespeople update the forecast regularly. Perhaps driving sales people to update the CRM requires formation of a new habit - and also requires managers to think about the reward: will a sense of completion emerge or will salespeople will actually be rewarded? Or, perhaps the habit is reverse: when a customer expresses doubt, maybe sales people disengage. In this case the cue is there (fear of customer loss) but the routine and reward need to change. One more thing about habits is that they take time to form and require repetition to be acquired and mastered. Desired behaviors need to morph into the automatic activity that requires little or no thought to perform. Gamification can be the tool that drives repetition and makes desired behaviors into habits, effectively removing the need for gamification since the activity has become intrinsically motivated.

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! We’ve already written about the 6 bad habits sales people have and how that can mess up your pipeline. The main issue is simple: to make a good pipeline, the CRM has to include quality up to date information. Sales people would rather not spend their time doing the quality up to date thing. They would rather do something else. Below you will find some guidelines about the best ways to use gamification to improve data quality, timeliness and, as a result, the quality of your pipeline management. 1. Gamify Performance Gamification is the use of game mechanics (such as narratives, points, leaderboards, completion bars etc) and game rules to modify behavior by driving employees to change their actions based on the cues given through gamification. Enterprise gamification is the use of game mechanics in conjunction with enterprise apps, such as CRM. Using enterprise gamification together with CRM can have surprising results, creating lasting changes in employee behavior. 2. Don’t let leaderboards confuse you The immediate thought for most people, when they think about gamification and sales, is a leaderboard. But leaderboards are just one of a large arsenal of game mechanics.  They can be great for the person who is at the top of the board - the best sales person - but can be discouraging for the rest. Leaderboards are also focused on the bottom line - sales - and won’t necessarily work well to promote the actions that will make your sales pipeline management better. More about that in item number 3. 3. Don’t forget the small actions What are small actions? Let’s begin by defining the "big action" - this one is pretty straightforward when thinking about sales and CRM gamification. In this case, the big action is "sell more". But for pipeline management quality data that timely is all about the "small actions" - update a lost deal, insert more information about the customer, make a realistic estimate of the deal size and more.  Smaller actions are sharing leads and eliminating duplicates. When you think about gamifying the small actions, you can also see why leaderboards aren’t best here. It isn’t about competition - it is about the satisfaction that comes from completion. This is where game mechanics that reward completion work well. 4. Reward Speed Aside from the quality of the data, the data also needs to be timely, or else the pipeline will be based on old data. Salespeople can be rewarded for timely updates of the CRM by implementing a simple game rule: the faster the update, the better. Let’s say a sales person just finished qualifying a lead. If they put the data into the CRM earlier, they will get more points than if they had taken several days to update. An ancillary benefit here is that salespeople will also, as a result, try to do their job quicker, creating more momentum in the sales process. 5. Gamification is an opportunity to communicate One of the great benefits of gamification, a benefit that is often missed, is that game rules, calls to actions and game mechanics are all great ways to convey messages about corporate objectives and what’s the best way to achieve them. People pay attention to game rules. Game rules let them know what’s important - and they often convey this message better than through exhortations and lecturing. Messages can be about the importance of a live demo, if the game rules reward that, about the importance of actually visiting with customers or about pursuing cross and up sale opportunities. Using a gamification avatar  (like Gameffective’s) which pulls in data from several enterprise systems can suggest calls to action that span several applications. 6. Think about the learning moment Not doing well on a game or being unable to complete a suggested course of action aren’t necessarily regarded as failure in a gamified world. Sometimes they can be gateways into learning and training opportunities. Want to have your sales people offer more of that new, complex product? Gamify the offering and tie gamification into the training systems you have in place - when a sales person will suspect they are not doing well, they can stop and learn more. Other sales people can earn points by helping others engage with the new products. 7. Think about forming habits Gamification can form habits - good ones. It can suggest new behaviors to replace the habits that come when certain cues are made, and can also offer the reward, a sense of mastery and completion. 8. Use Karma Rather than viewing your sales force as a bunch of hyper competitive individuals, think of a game rule that involves "karma"  - rewarding people for their contributions to others’ success, for their assistance, information and examples loaded on corporate knowledge management systems and activity on corporate social networks. 9. Use Narratives   Narrative based gamification lets  you set weekly matches (like fantasy sports) based on the achievements of the previous week. These events are fun - they are also very good at communicating the message that every week is a new one and should be approached with energy. Gamification Narratives are also a way of driving complex and nuanced behaviors. 10. Avoid vanity KPIs Whatever you do, think about the behavior you want to encourage and that matters, and not about amorphous "metrics" that look good but matter less. Conclusion Some people say that CRM lacks process - that it is a good system for tracking customer interactions but not for ensuring that opportunities and leads are sold to. Gamification can insert this process component into the use of CRM and encourage reporting. In this way the CRM stops being a data repository and becomes a living system. Gamification is not an external leaderboard or reward system that is nailed on top of your CRM. It can turn CRM from a data store of customer data into a process oriented application,  and support continuous optimization, giving managers information that they can trust.

Using narratives in enterprise gamification for sales, training, service and more from GamEffective

We just published a whitepaper about best enterprise gamification practices for CRM - specifically the art and science of pipeline management. In it, we’re taking a close look at how gamification can help with ensuring that the sales pipeline is good…. Salespeople are salespeople. They are into selling. They love the rush they get when they close a deal. Sales people are not interested in a "data entry" job, and if you had an opening for one, they probably would not be a good choice. They would find it frustrating and boring: no competitive or winning instincts are satisfied when all CRM data requirements are accurately completed. On the other hand, sales managers need real data, in real time, so they can make accurate forecasts and manage a sales pipeline that is in touch with reality. Otherwise, they have a GIGO problem: garbage-in-garbage-out. In this white paper, we’ll take a look at the key challenges sales managers face when tasked with keeping their CRM system garbage-free: Distorted forecasts Duplicate leads Stale information The no-lead sharing economy The "Opportunities are never lost" problem Avoiding data entry at all costs We’ll then show how gamification can be used, simply and elegantly, to address these challenges, communicate corporate objectives and help with process. After all, we want to keep salespeople and their sales managers happy. Go here to download the white paper.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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