The medical field is hectic: stressful on good days, devastating on bad days. Amongst all the chaos, individuals are completing crucial tasks that can be the difference between life and death for a patient. The work done by medical professionals and other hospital staff often goes unnoticed. The leaders at UCSF Bennioff Children’s Hospital decided to make a change.
Nowadays, a growing number of companies encounter the serious challenge of designing the best training program that will lead to employee engagement and improve the bottom line. Businesses also search for fresh and innovative ways to motivate their employees to learn and master crucial skills. Thus, companies are beginning to take a good look at how they run their business and deal with customers. The application of new technologies also serve as a practical way to enhance and ensure quality results in their employee training process.
Experimental economics show that people are more likely to cooperate and avoid competition in the prisoner’s dilemma or public goods game if their identity is revealed as opposed to playing anonymously. If you believe you’re being watched there’s a potential gain for behaving yourself: you establish a good reputation.
If creativity is a muscle, then gamification is the bench press. Much of workplace frustration stems from being stuck on day-to-day problems that arise such as optimization of a large workload or maximization of quantified metrics such as sales. Organizational creativity is in great demand for companies, and Blitz—a speed-thinking process that brainstorms innovative solutions—may be the gamified answer to the knot in the creativity muscle.
Dr. Ken Hudson, former marketing director of American Express, created Blitz as a fast, easy way to bring people out of a production rut. The main idea is to create as many as nine ideas in about two minutes. He found that when he gave managers less time to generate novel ideas, not only could they do it, but also they did it in inspired ways. Blitz’s rules and platform combines energy with creativity and production to drive innovation.
Whether you are a project manager of a fortune 500 companies or a small business owner, organizing a project can often times be a tedious and strenuous process. Thankfully with the advent of collaborative software such as Microsoft SharePoint, the days of conflicting information and miscommunication between projects are a thing of the past. Yet, while SharePoint has been adopted by almost 4 out of 5 Fortune 500 companies, spanning over 125 million users, the software is still not being optimized to its full potential. This is where gamification could play a leading role in rectifying these challenges by increasing end user adoption as well as boosting organizational productivity.
Seeing a company’s employees in a fully collaborative and effective setting is extremely hard to come by these days. As businesses continue to promote cutthroat strategies to encourage individual performance, teamwork is almost non-existent. In fact, it may get so bad that simply communicating with colleagues over an internet chat-platform even becomes tiresome, which also isn’t helped by the fact that most of these communication platforms are hard to understand and difficult to work with.
The Following is an Op-Ed by Michael Hugos, CIO and Mentor at the Center for Systems Innovation [c4si] We know game mechanics are going to merge with business operations. It’s a great idea. And the introduction of points, badges, levels and leaderboards on company websites is the first step. But now a lot of business folks…
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…
Money can’t buy everything. “The drive to make a few dollars comes from a very different place than the drive to do a favor.” That is Micki Krimmel’s belief, co-founder of FavorTree—the first ever mobile favor-trading game. Backed by a $350K investment from the Knight Foundation’s Technology for Engagement Initiative, FavorTree aims to build stronger…
Historically, games have focused on competition. Gambling, video games, board games, and athletic sports are often defined by having a winner. On Forbes a few weeks ago, author Haydn Shaughnessy looked at the rise of gamification and the return of game-like competition to the workplace. According to him, too many corporations focus solely on collaboration…
