While gamification is no longer a revolutionary way of training employees, the start-up GamEffective is claiming that their take on the trend is a fresh one. The company, which operates out of offices in both North Carolina and Israel, boasts some large-scale customers like Microsoft and Ebay. They’re confident in their ability to boost employee performance across the board with their no-code integration.
Salespeople are into selling and the rush they get closing a deal. They are not interested in a “data entry” job, and if you had an opening for one, you would not want to hire them for it.
On the other hand, sales managers need real data, in real time, so they can make accurate forecasts and manage a sales pipeline that is in touch with reality.
In today’s business environment, managers are constantly pressed to produce results, usually through industry-specified KPIs – setting challenging targets to be achieved on a day-to-day basis. Methodologies, such as MBO (management by objectives) and CPM (corporate performance management) aim to align the managers with their business’s goals. Targets are set and feedback is collected through scorecards and dashboards.
Stemming from the line of thought that “you can only manage what you measure” and “what gets measured gets done”, managers are put in the position of not only constantly evaluating their employees, but also being appraised themselves.
There is a strong correlation between a successful company and an effective goal setting process.
The fitness and weight-loss world is being revolutionized by the popular concept of interval training – the concept is as simple as it is effective: alternating bursts of intense activity with intervals of lighter activity instead of steady-state pacing throughout the exercise.
Take walking for example. If you’re in good shape, you might incorporate short bursts of jogging into your regular brisk walks. If you’re less fit, you might alternate leisurely walking with periods of faster walking. Gradually increasing the intensity of your workouts as you physically and mentally adapt to your routine.
Interval training improves your aerobic capacity, strength and endurance; even more importantly, it keeps boredom at bay and makes working out achievable so that you stay motivated to keep your routine up.
Couldn’t we also apply this model to our gamification design for a similar effect on workplace productivity?
Julie has recently been hired to a global sales team, she is eager to prove her worth. She keeps receiving countless emails letting everyone know her new co-workers are being awarded badges and accumulating points in some way. When she tries to find out why she is getting all these public notifications that are clogging up her inbox, her manager tells her it’s some gaming platform his boss made him use – “it’s a mandate from up high, I had nothing to do with it”.
During lunch, her cubicle mate tells her that three months ago the company decided to implement a gaming platform announced with great fanfare by the higher ups, but since then the only thing that’s different is that they have a desktop app that gives them “meaningless points for meaningless actions”. Once her lunch break is over, she marks all the emails as spam.
Could this have turned out differently?
Measuring ROI is an elusive task: you have external factors that affect the results; measuring the baseline is a subjective process; forecasting future impact is hard and even calculating the actual investment is a project by itself.
That said, one can measure almost anything (I recommend reading the book How to Measure Anything). There are testimonies of increased sales results after implementing gamification systems by 5-15%. But, I believe we need to dive in to understand how to analyze success.
