needs,” said Meister. “People can get enamoured with the idea of
badges, points and levels, and neglect the strategy part. They really
need to step up and consider what their needs and goals are, and
what behaviours they’re trying to change.”
“Most failures I’ve seen with gamification are with implementation,”
said Kapp. “For example, leaderboards: they’re fantastic for
the top 10 people on the leaderboard. For the 11th person, it’s not
quite as exciting. And for the 100th person, it’s actually demotivating.”
Know your organizational culture, says Kapp, to understand
how best to overcome that challenge. “It might be better to implement
a group or team leaderboard; nobody wants to let the group
down, so they’ll be more likely to participate.”
With leaderboards, too, Meister suggests refreshing them regularly,
even weekly, so every employee has a renewed chance at doing
well or even taking over the lead.
It’s important to tailor gamification to an organization’s culture,
as well. “I know of one company – a consultancy – where every
second of the employees’ time had to be billable,” said Kapp. “They
tried to implement a gamified approach, but if a manager walked
by and saw an employee doing a gamified thing, that wouldn’t fly.”
Knowing what makes particular groups of people tick is key. “For
example, if you’re working with a bunch of engineers, I would use
more problem-based gamification,” said Kapp. “So, ‘Here’s a problem,
and let’s see if you can find the solution.’” He said, “With this
group, they wouldn’t want anything too game-like or too silly.” On
the other hand, if you’re in a retail environment and working mainly
with 18 to 25-year olds, then a completely different approach –
maybe one with characters and a story element – could work best.
TWO MAIN TYPES OF GAMIFICATION
Another caution when planning gamification: Understand the
nature of the information you want to share and choose the best
vehicle for getting it across.
“There are two types of gamification,” said Kapp. “One is what I
call structural gamification, like the example of Deloitte and their
efforts to support leadership training resources.” In this type of
gamification, an organization builds a structure around content,
without altering it. They may offer progress bars as employees read
through the material, for example, but content in this format is
king. “If you have really bad content and build gamification around
it, it’s not going to help you at all. People are going to check out
because they know bad content,” said Kapp.
The other approach, says Kapp, is content gamification, when
an organization takes content and changes it to be more gamelike.
“For example, instead of starting with learning objectives, you
start with a challenge or dilemma that someone has to solve,” said
Kapp. “Adding these elements makes the content more game-like
but doesn’t turn the content into a game. It simply provides context
or activities which are used within games and adds them to
the content being taught.”
Each is useful, for different scenarios. “If you’re quizzing me
about what are the five levels of leadership and I answer very
quickly and get on the leaderboard and get a badge for that,
that’s not going to make me a better leader,” said Kapp. “But if
you put me into content gamification where you give me a leadership
situation every day, and every day I have to comment on
that or talk to my colleagues on that and we have to come up
with a strategy that we have to use, that kind of gamification
can be more meaningful for softer skills, those skills that are
not technical.”
MINDING THE PRICE TAG
While gamification’s impact can be significant, if done well, the
price doesn’t have to be. “There are plug-ins for WordPress that
people can use for badges and leaderboards,” said Kapp. “And if
you think of game elements like story and character, you can put
those into the design of what you’re doing relatively inexpensively.”
For example, suggests Kapp, a learning module might skip objectives
at its start in favour of a story that might read: ‘You are now
in the role of supervisor and an employee tells you he thinks someone
on the team is stealing from the company. What do you do?’
“Instead of a didactic list of instructions, it becomes more an
exploratory mystery to solve,” said Kapp. “Organizations can do
that relatively inexpensively.”
As well, there’s been a shift in the past several years away from
organizations seeking full gamification solutions toward simply
baking gamification into many different platforms. “At our company,
we’ve developed a new online course for HR practitioners
about artificial intelligence called Using AI 4 HR,” said Meister.
“To ensure there were gamification elements in it, we didn’t then
go out and hire a gamification provider, on top of a platform provider.
We asked the platform provider to add a gamification feature
to what they were already doing.”
That kind of holistic thinking – layering gamified elements into
all different sorts of initiatives, even the unexpected ones – is likely
the future of gamification in the workplace. Big picture thinking,
plus a healthy dose of strategizing, can impact how effective those
future initiatives might be. “Determine what type of gamification
you envision and what business outcomes you’re trying to drive,”
said Kapp. “Nail down those two things and you’ll be a lot closer
to achieving your goal.” n
cover feature
“THE GAMIFICATION GAVE
EMPLOYEES A WAY TO
ENGAGE WITH OTHERS IN
THE SAME JOB FAMILY
AND LEARN SOMETHING
ALONG THE WAY, TOO.”
– JEANNE MEISTER
18 ❚ JULY 2018 ❚ HR PROFESSIONAL