Fleming Gamification in HR & Customer Service Summit

Also just to not that I'll be speaking about gamifying HR at Fleming's Gamification event in Amsterdam on 8 and 9 June.

I'll be helping participants identify for themselves the main opportunities to gamify aspects of their HR (and Customer Services) processes.

If you're interested in ways to make HR more engaging and natural for your employees do come to the event and find out how to do this.

Also see Friday's post on gamification of reward and talent management.

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Reward Gamification in Talent Management

One of the other key trends in Reward and broader Talent Management I'd expect to see even more focus on next year is gamification, supporting a broader shift from financial to non financial reward.

Here are some thought on this, also taken from the new Talent Management Handbook published last month by the Association for Talent Development (ATD) and which features a chapter from me on innovating reward (matching the existing transformation in talent development).


Financial to Non-Financial Reward

We know that financial reward tends not to have as much impact as people often suggest so it often make sense to refocus on intrinsic reward by building a compelling environment in which people can become intrinsically motivated.  Edward Deci and Richard Ryan’s self determination theory suggests that this requires an emphasis on autonomy, competence and relatedness.  Dan Pink develops these ideas in his popular book, Drive, to suggest a focus on autonomy, mastery and purpose.  Creating an environment which encourages these things is still not going to be easy but it may well be more productive to put time and effort into this than putting more and more money into financial incentives.

To the extent that this is possible, the shift should also emphasize a move away from complexity and towards simplicity by aiming to pay people enough to get reward off the agenda (paying them what they are worth and ideally what is possible rather than just what you can be got away with) and then focusing on other things.

One particular approach which is worth reviewing is gamification which is one of the newest trends in business and HR as this can have high relevance for reward as it can for talent development.

People engage in lots of other activities, including games but also other voluntary activities, for lots of reasons that have nothing to do with reward.  In fact, they are often much more engaged when they are undertaking these activities than when they are at work, even though they are not being paid to undertake them.

Gamification uses the mechanics and components of games which make these activities fun and applies them to aspects of work to make these work activities more compelling too.  The three main three mechanics are points, badges and leaderboards, also called PBL.  Used inappropriately, these game elements can lead to unhealthy competition and dysfunctional behaviours however there are a broad range of game components which can be used.  One of these which is highly relevant to the reward agenda is virtual currencies which can be used to help people measure their progress and achievement against their colleagues, and can be converted into something valuable for them at a later point, providing potentially greater motivation but without the same cost to the employer.  Innovation systems are often based upon this mechanic.

However gamification can also be about meaning, collaboration and many other mechanics which drive intrinsic reward for example allowing people who are successful in an activity to do more of this activity.

One good example of a gamified approach is IGN which uses what it calls viral pay in which a proportion of profit is shared with employees through $1 tokens which can then be distributed throughout the workforce according to the wishes of each employee.  Although distributions are kept secret the company does publish the amount received by the most successful employees, as a way of inspiring other employees.

Also see:

• Pay transparency in talent management
• ATD Talent Management Handbook - pay ratios

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#GamificationMOOC

One of the biggest changes in my life over the last couple of years has been the incorporate of MOOC learning.  Coursera is getting close to being the most commonly used app on my phone and I'm probably always doing about 30 different MOOCs at any one time.  That's not necessarily a good thing as I don't always get to finish and therefore get all the learning I might like.  But I do get lots of learning!

I remember of the things Dave Ulrich noted at Artof.HR was that MOOCs don't work because most people only audit them (vs getting a certificate) and auditing doesn't give accountability.  So adoption trails away.  Well, I think that depends upon the MOOC, and of course and individual's level of attention and interest.  And as I wrote earlier, does it matter anyway, as long as they're still learning.  (I accept it may matter to a MOOC provider but it's a great boost to the world's total amount and rate of learning.)

One of the MOOCs I started last year was Kevin Werbach's Gamification course on Coursera.  You may be able to see from the screen shot that I only managed to get into lesson 1.1.  That's no criticism of Kevin - I was just very busy at the time.  But it did look as if it it was going to be a great MOOC and I liked the way Kevin described it at the Gamification World Congress in Barcelona later in the year.

Basically the MOOC is full of projects, challenges and interactive sessions which targets participants' interests and skillsets.  For example he presented a slide with a picture like to one above, next to another from later in the course to see if participants picked up what had changed (presumably not, since I've learnt from Dan Ariely's Coursera course that we don't tend to notice these sorts of things.)  Even when it's a lot more significant than a Boggle game disappearing off a shelf.  (The Human Zoo have got some great tests on this sort of thing too.)

I.e. Kevin's MOOC has been gamified and that enables him to democratise involvement and people stay on board.  More people, anyhow.

Kevin's suggestions were directed at Education but businesses are applying MOOC so they do apply directly to HR too.  But my main learning from all of this is about creating the right environment and culture and then measuring this - and not worrying too much about completion rates for particular programmes.

Oh, and the thing that reminded me about this post I'd drafted last May was that Kevin's doing another session of the gamification MOOC on Coursera - starting now.  So here's your chance to learn about MOOCs and gamification in one go.  What's not to like?

• My gamification posts
• Kevin's MOOC

See you there!

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#GWC14 - The games HR people should play

I was initially looking forward to this session because it’s got the word HR in the title.  But actually I didn’t learn that much about HR applications for gamification.  (Still, it was great to meet Isidro – ‘the HR gamer’).

However what I really took away from this session was a bit more, a new insight, actually a completely new insight into the connections between games and gamification (something which has once again been a little bit blurred here in Barcelona just as it was in Paris.)

If you’ve read my previous gamification posts you’ll have seen my suggestion for the gaming and gamification process shown above ie that we should start with a gamification process that may or may not end up with a game, and if appropriate with choosing and designing the type of game that’s going to be involved.

Isidro seems to see it differently.

I’ll explain:

For Isidro, gamification is an act of humility – as it’s difficult to be able to say product or service is not reaching its full potential.   Or that we need to increase engagement.

Gamification is useful as there’s a crisis of attention, engagement and meaning (this also applies to marketing and outside the organization)

Isidro plays Pizel Dungeon – where the monsters are more aggressive in the early morning.  This led him to think about whether you can apply the same sort of thinking to e-learning.

His work equivalent of this is Learning Dungeon – setting people challenges using higher level skills and higher requirements.

So the anser is yes, you can apply game mechanics to help engagement and learning.

However two types of obstacles which makes HR functions reluctant to apply gamification.  The first is budget and the second is risk – gamification changes people and the changes you achieve may clash with the corporate culture eg if you don’t really want to empower people.

However, what we really want to create are pervasive games / pervasive gamification which means there are certain features that allow players to go beyond the magic circle and apply the same ways of thinking to their real world.

The purpose of the game above was that Isidro wanted to use games to test the mechanics he wanted to apply in gamification.   They all involve simple mechanics – but how would he apply these mechanics in his own company? – in the business, not just in a game?

Take the Gift Trap game – a simple social empathy game. 

Isidro’s equivalent here is Gift Tasks – the opportunity to become a jedi using the mechanics of gifting.

But this type of mechanics can also be used to help people think about who might be the best person to support a particular customer, ie based upon supporting the drives of :

• Relatedness – group knowledge
• Competence – social certification
• Autonomy - accountability

Or Timeline which is a skill competition game involving a set of cards and you have to order the cards in time order.  The mechanic here is hidden rules.

This translates to Fuzzy Line which is about how people make strategic decisions – whether they want to improve technology, cut the staff, invest in talent programme etc.  And you need to order cards in a prioritized manner.

This builds collaboration skills, the ability to clarify priorities, and develop meaning and information.

Also it makes the rules clear enough to use in communication with the rest of the company.  If a manager knows what activities are priorities, they become part of the decision making process.

Another simple example is example is What If based on the mechanic of the quest.

So the key is that gamification is not game based learning.  But you can test strategies and mechanics at a smaller scale (in a serious game) before scaling up (to the business).

These approaches work because they are based on pull strategies – letting people approach the management rather than pushing things to them; simple implementation; visible results and risk.  And because they build relatedness and competence, trigger more autonomy among players, and help provide meaning.

However two types of obstables which makes HR functions reluctant to apply gamification.  The first is budget and the second is risk – gamification changes people and the changes you achieve may clash with the corporate culture eg if you don’t really want to break down managers’ power and empower all of your people.  Are companies ready?

Apparently there is a database of 1500 games – so review this and choose the best game to apply for your situation.  Focus on the user (although I liked the previous day’s suggestion we call them the player rather than the user)

Ie, my process can be used two ways – from left to right as a way to identify the game (if appropriate) but also right to left, identifying opportunities for gamification based upon all of the possible games.

Neat.  And I wouldn’t knock it’s postential.  But I’d still suggest the more strategic approach based on understanding your people and business needs is going to be the best way forward most of the time.

It does suggest however that we’d benefit from a better appreciation of gaming than most HR practitioners currently have.

See you in the MMORPG?

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#GWC14 Past and Future of Gamification

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I'm at the Gamification World Congress in Barcelona today.

We began the conference looking at ancient history (above) and the origination of gamification with Nick Pelling, inventor of the term in 2003.

This session wasn't that relevant for my normal HR audience but I found Nick quite charming (eg in terms of being the originator but not the oracle) and loved the start to the conference (protohumans and astronauts) and so still wanted to post.

Nick became interested in gamification when realising that games culture was taking over the world – changing the way people thought about and talked about things.  things like digital downloads, easy to use handsets, immersive interface design (UX), digital content platforms (Apple istore etc).

Also the way that people make games a persuasive business model as well.  Ie you can’t do everything yourself, you need to create a digital platform for people to do things for themselves.

(Personally, I don’t think this is what gamification is about, sorry Nick.)

The big thing since then is social media.  Today it’s the two things together.  Exploring the fuzzy social interface between psychology and programming.  Changing behavior is as much political as it is technological.  Building software to act in constructive social ways.

There’s sometimes a bit of a bad small about gamification – getting people to do things in a funny sort of, gimmicky way.

But there is a lot of happening too.  Things you never think off egKickstarter connecting people who want to give money and people who want to run social projects.  Not about social media but social activity.  AngelList, Alibaba, Match.com.

Don’t think about what it is but what it’s for – joining people together and getting them to do things.  Future opportunities include things like social assisted living – helping young people help older people.

There are till lots of places where people get together awkwardly.

(And that I do agree with – most business organisations come to mind!)

We're supposed to have a session with Brian Burke from Gartner taking us into the future (below) of gamification but he's been delayed - I might add on more here later.

Photo credits Boris Perilli and  BCN Stories (as I'm sitting at the back with the power leads.)

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#GamifyHR - Gamification Design

Here are my notes on day 2 of last week's HR Gamification Summit.  Day 2 was a workshop day involving a mix of game playing and interactive group work, following different if similar processes for gamifying HR / work or other things (we spent quite a bit of time - a bit too much time for me - gamifying avoidable blindness.)

Importance of Gamification

We heard quite a bit about why gamification is so important for engagement and learning.  For example Martina Mangelsdorf introduced Nicole Lazzaro's four different kinds of fun:

• Easy fun - casual, light, nice fun because it's easy
• Hard fun - representing mastery, accomplishments, overcoming challenges
• People fun - comes from social interaction
• Serious fun - doing things that are meaningful to the individual.

Difficulty seriousness often seen as antipode of play - we need to get round this.

Again, I'm not totally convinced - I'd have preferred to have talked about enjoyment.  And I can definitely relate to serious enjoyment.  Serious fun - less so.

But Martina also linked game playing to emotional learning.  When something is rewarding valuable or surprising the human brain releases dopamine and we feel pleasure and have fun.  The same dopamine system is activated when learning happens.  Ie our brains are wired to learn.

I think there's a big focus on being social too.   Eg Willy Kriz suggested that cats play to engage in a simulation for when they have to fight.  I think (I haven't seen the feline neuroscience results) it's also, or mainly, that they're learning how to connect and engage with each other.

So one of the other concepts we looked at is self determination theory - that I'll be engaged by something if it's coming from me - which is often down to competence, autonomy and relatedness (see Dan Pink's Drive).

Ie the key is flow rather than fun.

One further benefit of games in particular is that they can be very useful to help explain complex systems.

Game Mechanics - PBL and Beyond

Games help us play, and have fun / enjoyment through their features and mechanics.  At the most basic level there is PBL - Points ,Badges and Leader Boards:

• Points help keep score, provide feedback, display progress, connect to rewards, are fungabile (= they are all equal, providing a universal currency)
• Badges represent achievement, signal importance, can be stylish, offer credentials, can be collected, display social status, offer flexibility (you can represent anything in a badge)
• Leader boards provide ranking, and work well with ambitious players, plus can be personalised, but the risk is demotivation (people may choose to amandon the game because they don't find it fun or feel they can't win.   Whatever you do, don't break the feedback loop so that people want to keep on playing!

I can't say I'm a great fan of PB or L.  And I still don't believe that 'most of us want to earn points, gain badges, and move up levels' any more than I did before the conference.  In fact, even where they do work, it's only because they help us monitor our progress towards something else - PBL have little value on their own to most, or at least a lot of people.

I also thought it  interesting that even if this group of, or at least including, geeks and gamers, other than An Coppens I was the only person checking in to the hotel on Foursquare.  I use Foursquare quite a bit though until this conference I'd never shared any of my badges.  In fact I can't think of any badges which have been important to me since I left cub scouts.

I used to think the same about leader boards, however we had one of these to encourage tweeting at the conference.  And after tweeting that it meant absolutely no difference to my own twroductivity I noticed that as I started to fall out of the top six tweeters I did start to tweet a bit more to stay on the scoreboard.  That made sense for me - I don't get work by tweeting but all things being equal I'd rather be on a projector screen than not on there.  But it didn't really help the conference as most of my additional tweets were quick and easy actions to give me more points, not to engage in conversation, which is my normal purpose in tweeting.  So for example I tweeted a few links to other articles or previous tweets around gamification.  Ie I engaged in what we often call dsyfunctional behaviour (even though at an individual level it's totally functional, or gaming the system.

I think there's a lot of this with PBLs.  And even if it works, it works by encouraging competition.  And actually we've got far too much competition in most organisations already.  I liked the example of a leaderboard for cleaners at Disney - who were all trying to do a great job already but weren't slightly competitive - and referred to ait s the electronic whip instrument.

But I'm more convinced by some of the other mechanics which do foster collaboration.  These can include avatars, teams (social graphs), challenges (quests, missions), rewards, resource collection, feedback, progress and completion etc.

Having said that I wasn't that engaged by the various games we played during the conference eg gamification bingo.  I did quite enjoy Stephen Shapiro’s personality poker though.  And I loved Willy's use of thumb wrestling to show the benefit of collaborative vs competitive behaviour (people set goals to beat other player by one point rather than to co-operate and each make a higher number of points).

See Gamification Design Elements

And how they meet our engagement, relatedness and other drives

Gamification Process

So after having reviewed game mechanics we can move onto the gamification process.  Martina suggested that in simple terms this is:

• Strategy first, including measures (thought I thought Phaedra made a good point that if the game is good, you generally don't need to worry about proving it)
• Design thinking - understanding people their behavioural profiles, actions, experiences eg in onboarding what journies happen in 1st hour, 1st day, 2nd day, 1st week etc - how will we make them feel
• To help with this we were introduced to Bartle’s player types 
• And Andrzej Maczewski’s gamification user types 
• It's also important to conider things like the gender gap in gamification - differences in how males and females play games eg boys are more likely to like destruction games, competition etc.

• Use game mechanics before you build or buy the game
• Understand intrinsic and extrinsic motivation - gamification is 75% psychology and 25% technology
• Select a pilot - test it
• Communicate

An Coppens took us through other processes include Kevin Werbach's 6Ds:

• Design business objectives (vs games can be just for fun)
• Delineate target behaviour (positive / more of)
• Describe your players (who are they / what do they love / hate)
• Devise activity loops (game mechanics)
• Don't forget the fun (where does the buzz come from?)
• Deploy the appropriate tools (no / low / complex tech)

Or there's Gabe Zicherman's players' journey to mastery:

• Find what the target audience wants / needs - emotional triggers
• Design challenges based on these triggers
• Design rewards based on wants  / needs (not just badges)
• Design communication for platforms where your target group spends time
• Invite players to participate - implement communication plan and player registration

Rajiv Vaid Basalawmoit suggested using the Design Council's 4D / Double Diamond process:

• Discover (divergent - what do we know)
• Define (convergent - what's the problem)
• Develop (divergent - potential solutions)
• Deliver (convergent - what we're going to do)

Phaedra's Rule 1 is - if you aren't spending majority of your time understanding what motivates your audience you're doing it wrong - and will end up with 'chocolate covered broccoli' - something boring which doesn't stop being boring just because it's dressed up (eg World of Warcraft for database administration).  You should always be asking what is fun about what I'm trying to teach?  That also implies content gamification is going to work better than structural gamification:

• Structural gamification no change to content but motivate to go though content and engage in learning process
• Content gamification make the content itself more game like

Phaedra also introduced a further process for selecting games if this is needed to support the gamifcation process (it may not):

• ROI
• Learning / pain points
• Puzzles  experience to teach and motivate
• Technology genre
• Platform

I thought this was useful to connect gamification and gaming - ie that even if all you're trying to do is to development a recruitment or learning game you'll still do well to follow the full gamification process, ensuring you don't end up with brown vegetables.

The challenge with games can be in translating engagement and learning back into the workplace.  However Phaedra suggested that IBM try to create a 'social wrapper' to help people apply their learnings from games into work.

So what about if you decide that a game isn't required?  My slight worry then about all the above processes is that, with the slight if important exception of the mechanics and activity loops, they end up looking like a fairly typical / traditional process design process (eg compare them to the Social Business POST process).  So how else is gamification different to more traditional working?

Several of the speakers suggested one common attribute of a gamified approach is that it provides a safe environment in which to fail.  Another might be that it's about creating a level playing field (Rajiv talked about cricket in his sessions on social entrepreneurship.)  I also liked Tom Chatfield's suggestion that we should  turn 'failed' into ' not yet succeeded'.

To me, it is about starting with a traditional process design approach.  But then injecting extra elements around funology and game mechanics.  It's why I don't think Tom's tweeted suggestion that gamification is just a marketing buzzword for people to find ti difficult to accept that humans are inherently playful is helpful.  Gamification has to be different from normal process design to make it worth talking about (as not everything can be or needs to be gamified - we may be inherently playful but we're lots of other things as well, and not everyone may want their fun at work), and if it's different then we need a different name for it, and to understand what it is.

So this is how I'm currently seeing things...

However I'm attending the Gamification World Congress in Barcelona on Friday so I may change my mind around this soon.

Conference Summary

I was really pleased to attend the conference and thank Fleming as having me there to blog on it.

It was certainly an interesting three days, and there are always opportunities for improvement in any conference.  For me the main opportunities are about closing the gap between gaming and gamification.

We talked about the gamification process, we used it to think about opportunities in areas like onboarding and performance management (I'm definitely going to look out for GE replacing forced ranking with doodling!) and more fully (much more fully!) for avoidable blindness.  Personally I'd rather have used this time to consider gamification in HR.  And to have had some case studies on this, rather than just ones on serious gaming (other than IBM which is many miles ahead of where most organisations are looking.)

But this may just be me.  Most attendees didn't seem to see the distinction between gaming and gamification as so important, and to the extent that there is a difference seemed most interested in the gaming.  Eg at the end of the first day I suggested the chair change some of the roundtable sessions to create more time for discussion on gamification.  They ignored me - correctly - as the group split quite nicely into seven groups where six were on gaming and only one on gamification, and this wasn't even one of the biggest, though I do think it was the best.

However, I do accept that, as Tom suggested, digital and non digital both provide opportunities but digital allows us to learn from play like never before.  So online games are likely to be an increasingly common end result of the gamification process.

I've certainly increased my interest in both gaming and gamification through the conference.  One of the things I think will stick with me is the scoreboard from Boehringer Ingelheim's Professor Syrum game, which Andy Stafford referred to as a dicombobulator (I'm still not sure why, but I do like the term).  Well I monitored my own personal gamification discombobulator through the conference, and definitely feel 'levelled up' in terms of my understanding but confidence in all of this as well.

Also see:

• Learning gamification case studies
• Recruitment gamification case studies
• Gamifying IBM
• Gamification in HR

And:

• Work sucks, play games

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#GamifyHR HR / Learning Gamification Case Studies

Day 3 of Fleming's Gamification in HR Summit focused on learning, particularly in this case study from Tuba Surucu from Yapi Kredi Bank in Turkey.  The bank has 18,000 employees, 40% generation Y and the rest mainly Z.  They're always on their ipads and 'what they want they want'.

The firm's use of serious gaming in learning dates back to 1998 when YKB City, similar to SIMS City, was introduced into their Learning Centre enabling employees to seek all the information they need.  The game's launch was supported by a teaser movie and was made accessible for two months.

The game was based on two scenarios - 2 phases simulating the real environment found in branches and departments.  In the first phase employees earned points to test their knowledge using wheels, horse races etc.

The game incorporate levels to help people see where they are at that point in the game - and they can do things like change their avatar etc.  Each level assigns specific missions to users ensuring theyinvestigate the environment and the applications in the game.

Scoring meters provide an external motivator running through the game.

4260 employees participated, 1000 different questions were solved and 30 different scenarios were played.  Cross sales increased 19%, 89,460 training hours were saved, pre/post scores increased from 63.5 to 82.5 and job waiting time decreased 25%.

Yapi Kredi were able to see which topics had been most successfully trained and where future efforts needed to go.

Version 2.0 of the game was introduced this year to meet a need to certificate 1500 people.  It was based on a virus attack and the need to solve scenarious to save the bank

The game as designed and implemented in 6 months and was supported by email and video teasing and brochures.  The branding focused on the highest score participant in each branch and encouraged other employees to try to beat them.

The rest was left to employees to learn throughout the game.  There were also rewards and visibility to the 10 winners.

3.0 is going to be for orientation - investigating the 7 wonders of the world.  At each wonder people will find puzzle pieces to complete the picture.  There's also a new mobile app which will include some games too.

So again, this is gaming rather than gamification - and quite similar to the recruitment case studies in fact.  But it's useful to see what a company is doing internally - most  recruitment gamification experiences can be reviewed externally anyway, but the learning stuff is all behind the firewall.

But I did get a chance to ask about proper gamification examples later on.  An suggested this LMS as an example, but this is still just a technology system which makes gamificating easier - it's not a case study of how a company has gamified their learning.

So I'd have still liked to have seen more, but maybe that's just me - more in my next couple of posts.

 

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