In recent years, gamification in the workplace has been all the rage. With the trend showing no sign of going away, a new white paper from the Incentive Research Foundation (IRF) offers guidance on what organizations should do (and shouldn't do) when designing and implementing workplace gamification. Here are the top 10 guidelines for gamification success, according to IRF and Michael Wu, chief scientist at Lithium Technologies and the author of the white paper.
10. Don't Build a Game On Top of Existing Processes. "Quite a few companies have tried to build games on top of their enterprise systems and workflow process to drive adoption and usage," states the report. "These attempts work in the short term, but they all failed eventually, because a game on top of work is generally not fun."
9. Don't Try to Fix a Broken Product or Service with Gamification. "Gamification is the icing on the cake," the report states. "If your cake is bad, the icing won't make it taste any better. It may make the cake look more appealing, and many might actually take a bite to try it. But because the cake is bad, they will stop eating and tell others not to bother."
8. Don't Gamify a Behavior that Doesn't Actually Provide Value to Your Players. "Regardless of the experience you are gamifying, it must eventually generate some real value," states the report. "Otherwise, your players will eventually realize that you have wasted a lot of their time playing, but provide no value whatsoever."
7. Try to Create Ways for Everyone to Play Frequently. "Whether it's a video game, poker, or golf, not all games appeal to everyone," the report states. "Similarly, gamification often does not appeal to everyone equally. Consequently, the range of participation levels in your gamification can vary widely."
6. Create a Community for Your Players. "Gamification tools with a feedback timescale longer than a few weeks require a community to be most effective," states the report. "For example, without a community, leaderboards don't work very well because your players will be playing with people they don't know and don't care about."
5. Know the Effective Timescale of Your Desired Behavior Change. "Knowing the effective timescale you want to achieve really comes down to picking the right tool for the job," states the report. "Gamifying engagement of a marketing campaign that lasts a few months requires a very different set of tools from driving participation during a meeting or conference that lasts for only a few days."
4. Know Your Players. The report asks whether your players have any or all of three underlying behavioral factors: "1) Do they have the motivation and want to perform the behavior? 2) Do they have the ability (and access to all the resources necessary) to carry out the behavior? 3) Is there a trigger that prompts them to take action?"
3. Keep an Eye Out for Unintended Consequences. "Gamification changes behaviors in the physical world and can affect people in real, tangible ways," states the report. "One of the great dangers of rewarding any behavior with an incentive is that people try to game the system."
2. Have a Sophisticated Analytics Platform for Tracking, Measurement and Inference. "After developing a list of behaviors you're trying to drive, you must have ways to track those behaviors so you can measure them," the report states. "After all, what good is knowing the behaviors that lead to success if you can't measure (or improve) them?"
1. Understand the Behaviors You're Trying to Drive. "Productivity is not a single human behavior, nor is relationship-building," states the report. "Think of all the different activities that people employ to improve productivity, such as education and adopting new tools. You must know all these behaviors well enough to list them in detail."
Source: IRF's "Gamification Done Right - The Do's and Don'ts"