How Fedex Uses Gamification to Shift Company Outlook

FedEx has successfully launched a new social collaboration platform for its employees to reward them for sharing information with others. For a company that has been dominant in their market space for 40 years, FedEx has realized that they must “reinvent” themselves to stay successful for another 40 years.

Meet Bryan Barringer, the new manager for enterprise collaboration implementation at FedEx. He has been tasked to change the company belief that knowledge hoarding is power into one that promotes social sharing and collaboration to further foster the company’s growth. As an avid gamer, Bryan believes that video game psychology could be applied to a corporate setting because games give players the sense of achievement, encourage competition, and create a network of gamers that share knowledge. However, Bryan’s key insight is how an agile software development cycle can make gamification implementation more effective. In a way that is similar to agile development cycle’s iterative process of eliciting certain input and quick feedback, Bryan decided that FedEx’s social platform should release badges in small batches rather than create an extensive list of badges for employees to achieve. He believes that giving rewards in an iterative process helps people master a desired behavior but leaves them wanting more. Using Bryan’s expertise, FedEx has been able to revolutionize their 40-year-old collaborative ideology by rewarding employees for actions such as making blog posts or creating team websites. The long-term goal is to synthesize the knowledge FedEx has gained by operating in global locations into a small tight-knit knowledge sharing community, but Bryan believes that will become possible one badge at a time.

To read about Bryan’s road to becoming the manager for enterprise collaboration implementation at FedEx, read more here. The article also shares valuable do’s and don’ts of gamification implementation in a corporate setting.

Via SearchCIO