Any experience with "gamification" at work?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Part of my job at work is to staff the tech help desk, and the service we use for that (FreshDesk) has a “gamification” feature where help desk agents can compete against each other: Freshdesk Gamification Video - Introducing the Support Arcade - YouTube

It has metrics like how long it takes, whether the ticket was fully resolved on the first try, bonus points for extra satisfied customers, etc. It tallies up your monthly points and assigns various trophies like Sharpshooter, MVP, quickest on the draw, etc.

Have you ever have tried something similar in your workplace? I guess things like sales commissions are similar, but in my mind “gamification” expands on that concept by measuring and rewarding (or at least acknowledging) an expanded set of metrics.

Just curious how these things might work out in the real world. Are they considered childish, useful, somewhere in between?

2

Dunno about the rest of the real world, but the LMS we use allows you to turn on a feature that awards virtual badges for completing online courses. We decided not to turn it on for our users because it strikes us as pointless for adult learners, and kind of condescending childish to boot.

3

Why not just let customer service do the job of actually giving customers service, instead of trying to get rid of them as quickly as possible?

4

I suppose it can work in some environments but just be careful how broadly you apply it. I am the lone senior consultant at my site and I effectively run all of IT Operations for a very critical facility that has real lives in its hands. A number of fellow consultants work in other sites all around the world. Management at both my client and my consulting company have tons of different metrics they use to measure performance, award bonuses etc. Both me and my site are lumped in with other sites that are completely different and operate under completely different work models (most of them work in office environments whereas mine is most closely analogous to a military ship).

I am constantly getting hammered and criticized for not ‘playing towards the metrics’ but I am not going to because it would be disastrous if I did. We are actually the top-performers in the entire mega-corp and much of the reason is that both I and everyone else actually do what is needed instantly instead of worrying about how it will affect our ‘grade’ on bullshit measures that doesn’t matter for anything in the real world. Our only job is to manufacture, inspect and get very necessary medical equipment to the people that desperately need it overnight without fail and that is what we do.

If I actually did my job by the scorecards and metrics, service would be much lower because I would be aiming for a artificial rather than a real goal. I would have gotten some bonuses I missed because of that approach but it is worth it for everyone involved.

My point here is make sure whatever incentives you put in place actually serve the true goals of every position involved and don’t just become a set of defacto job standards that people start to play as the the true game disregarding everything else.

5

As an aside, am I the only one who opened this thread thinking it had something to do with the office dress code?
gam

6

Cool, thanks for that. I wondered if that might be the case. Seems like it is at least for you guys :slight_smile:

Well, at least in our case, there is no desire to get rid of them at all. This just seemed like a potentially fun, if unnecessary, way to track our progress (we’re not actually on a high enough plan tier to try it out, so I was curious if anyone’s tried similar).

With this particular service, different actions get you different customizable points. A fast ticket close might be worth 5 pts, for example, but one that was highly rated by the customer could be worth 20 pts (or whatever). Obviously you’d want to tailor it to your specific objectives, and maybe time wouldn’t be used for scoring at all.

Very fascinating, thanks for sharing that. It’s nice when people are just professional enough to know that their job is important, and to do it to the best of their ability, without needing external stimuli.

7

Yup!

8

Thinking of the teams where I’ve done support, I’d expect a majority of people to be offended by the idea (they might eventually buy into the idea of “it’s actually the usual metrics but with more shine and glitter”) and a specific minority to try and outcompete everybody else. You know, those same guys who already get mad when someone else “beats them” on the un-glittery metrics or boast endlessly when it’s them who have “won”.

The tickets I solve in minutes are the ones caused by “user made a typo” or “user didn’t RTFM”. The real ones take a bit longer.

9

I’ve been casually researching gamification for part of a possible postgraduate project, and one thing I can see is that it’s a set of very useful tools, most only useful in very specific sets of circumstances, but not so useful in others.

Something like sales, where individual salespeople are not working as teams, or in many small teams? It’s ideal to present the KPIs management should already be using into a game-like paradigm. This enhances transparency of the metrics, IMO. It’s just an extension of the existing “Salesperson of the Month”-type award, after all.

I think it would be an unmitigated disaster to just export any company’s internal KPIs to that format, though, because most work (like the IT dev work I do now) should be co-operative, not competitive. The KPIs should reflect this, and shouldn’t really be easily exportable into the language of badges and leaderboards - this isn’t to say some gamification techniques couldn’t be used, but they should be the ones that emphasize socialization, not competition. This is the new school of gamification (as in, the last 5 years), which considers the old competitive paradigm to just be another technique which benefits corporations more than workers or customers. I like Bogost’s term of “exploitationware” for this old style of gamification.

My own use for it will be in public participation and environmental monitoring applications, where adding a game-like layer to various crowdsourcing programs would encourage uptake and reuse. In this use case, there’ll be a big crossover between gamification aspects and the related “serious games” category.

The argument that it’s childlike is not a valid complaint, IMO. That’s kind of the point - it taps into some Ur-mind elements that are almost instinctual, which is why they manifest in children. But it’s a mistake to think they’re not inherent in adults - we almost all desire status, achievement and socialization, even as adults.

And it’s also a mistake to think gamification is only about the status and achievement aspects. The socialization aspect is also important, participation in a shared endeavour can be a powerful motivator even when no individual reward or even tracking is done.

10

To understand the many positive employee achievement and socialization benefits, one need only watch the award-winning documentary on workplace gamification.

11

I object to anything which gives management another set of numbers to beat the support personnel with.

12

Bingo!

I see this in places that want to solve lots of little problems that are easy and you can do a lot of them in a short period of time, and don’t want to bother with the big complex problems. It actually requires more skill at solving complex problems, but no one wants to actually figure out how to measure complexity.

13

My company doesn’t gamify anything actually work-related, but they seem to always gamify the employee health initiatives and other stuff like that.

You’d be amazed how many people get SO into the things; they compete on who can walk the most each day/week/month, or lose the most weight, or get the most exercise minutes in, etc… far out of proportion to the actual prizes involved.

To me, the big catch with gamifying things that would be competitive is the fact that a lot of people will spend a lot of time literally trying to find exploits and glitches in the system, since their actual performance would depend on it.

Also, for the game designers, you have to be really, really careful to not penalize people doing their jobs well; I’m reminded of a friend who worked in a help-desk for UNIX systems, and he was spending something like 30% of his time fixing this same problem over and over, and the problem had been in place well before he started with that company. So he realized what the root cause of the issue was, spent his minimal down time between calls fixing this problem, and when the fix was put into production, his (and several colleagues’) production metrics dropped by 30%, and they were all penalized for a “drop in production”. My buddy was fit to be tied; he’d done the company a true service, and they penalized him for it, because the stupid metrics made it look like he wasn’t doing as much work as before.

You don’t want to set up the gamification to reward fixing trivial or repeated problems to the detriment of fixing serious problems once.

14

Yet another example of :“you get what you manage and you manage what you measure.”

Measure stupid and you get stupid and then manage to the stupid.

15

This week’s New Yorker has an article on SuperBetter, a gamified self-help approach. It was…interesting. Like programming yourself to be a Stepford person.

16

These organizations who hire a slew of hopefuls, then do things like e-mail them at 2AM and log how long it takes them to respond; then compile that with similar data into tracking metrics for a few months, and then fire the bottom half.

I flash back to Captain Kangaroo reading The Story About Ping, where the Chinese farmer always swats the last duck in line.

17

That’s really neat. Can you give some examples of this? What sort of socialization would you measure?

18

Things like amount of info shared with others, measures of the amount of multi-team efforts or any other measures that track co-operation. Also, tracking of overall progress on team tasks, not broken down by individuals.

But when I said “some elements of gamification”, I wasn’t just talking about things you can measure - one part of the project I’m researching would involve the production of short time-lapse films of a particular botanical garden, co-operatively, and everyone who contributes frames to that movie gets to see the final product, and share it with other non-contributors as something they helped make. Of course you can track the amount of shares, but the real gamification element there is the tangible reward of the movie.

19

For what I’ve read and seen videos on, gamification works best when the points are completely pointless. I don’t think it’s likely they are pointless in the way the OP is describing their use. They’re probably actually being used to evaluate how well you do your job. That makes the whole thing stressful and creates resentment.

It’s why gamification with monetary rewards actually seems to backfire. People resent it. But if it’s just pointless fun, it works.

You can tie it to the real world, but that has to be voluntary. Like with fitness apps. You don’t have to make those points, but it helps keep you motivated.

It’s also why achievements in games tend to not really do anything. At most, they get you cosmetic changes, so you can show off.

EDIT: And, yes, I’m discussing the competitive forms. Cooperative gives you more leeway. Again, you aren’t adding more stress.