🎮The Power of Play: How Gamification is Revolutionizing the Workplace

👋 Hello, and welcome to this new edition!This week is extra-special, as it marks our community reaching the 5,000 mark - I can’t say enough how humbling and happy this makes me, so thanks for subscribing, supporting and reading through 🥳

Today, we will cover a topic I’ve always found super fascinating: Gamification.

I think this is a real trend, especially with new generations and technologies coming through the workplace.

You’ll find out:

• 🎮 What is gamification and why it can be applied to work

• 📈 Why it’s a relevant trend right now

• 💻 Positive implications and ways to implement Gamification

• 🤖 The risk of control systems and algorythmic control

• 🔗 Blockchain - an enabler or a limit?

🎮 What is gamification and why it can be applied to work

If you have any experience with working in technology/eCommerce, you may already know how important the concept of Gamification has been over the last decade. The use of game-like mechanics and design elements in user experience has been popular for its ability to increase engagement, and lead to increased conversion rates, customer loyalty, and brand recognition. Most frequent examples are reward systems, achievement badges, interactive quizzes and social competitions - mastered by companies like Duolingo (one of the top posts by ‘product-influencer’ Lenny Ratchinsky is exactly on this topic: ‘How Duolingo Reignited its user Growth’)

Applying the same concept to work, the idea is that gaming can help make dull, repetitious, or unpleasant parts of work more bearable. Optimists argue that reality doesn't effectively motivate or inspire us and that sensibilities from gaming could change the very nature of work.

The concept of gamification in the workplace is new. Years ago, Google used a series of riddles in order to attract curious and skilled job candidates, while SAP created an app  where sales reps engaged in role-playing activities and earned badges based on their progress.

Thank you for reading Work3 - The Future of Work. This post is public so please consider sharing it to support my work!

📈 Why it’s a relevant trend right now

An increasing number of employees are working in so-called “bullshit jobs” (anthropologist David Graeber wrote a book on this) which often contribute only to the bureaucracy of an organization rather than any meaningful impact on the world.

GenZ is looking more and more for ‘mission-driven’ jobs, and research shows that Gen Z may be struggling with engagement at work. According to a 2022 Gallup Poll, 54% of Gen Z employees, slightly higher than any other generation, are ambivalent or not engaged at work.

However, the underlying issue is the extent to which employees feel alienated from the decision-making process of work rather than the type of job per se. Essentially, we feel that work is bullshit when bad managers don’t respect or allow for autonomy.

💻 Positive implications and ways to implement Gamification

What’s at the basis of gamification? Behavioural psychology points simply at reinforcing desirable behaviors with rewards, and to be successful, it needs to be oriented towards fulfilling intrinsic needs rather than just tracking mechanisms/actions.

🤹 Assessments - Gamifying assessments can increase engagement and motivation to complete them.

👨‍🏫 Training - Gamification can assist in making training more fun and engaging: some ways to do this can include using interactive simulations, creating missions or quests, and incorporating competition between employees.

🎯 Goal-setting - Setting goals is an important part of work, but it can be difficult to remain motivated to achieve them. Gamification can make goal-setting more stimulating by including rewards for reaching specific targets or collaborative objectives.

💬Feedback - Providing feedback is essential for employee growth and development. Gamification can help by creating a reward system for constructive feedback, where employees can earn points or badges by providing useful feedback to colleagues.

Some real-life examples:

• Employees who get the highest score on a company-wide assessment around workplace safety will earn company-branded swag of their choice. This way, the company aims to encourage employees to pay more attention and try to get as many correct answers as they can, as opposed to simply completing the test quickly just to get it over with.

• The company has built a library of online courses on a wide range of topics and employees who complete a course will get a certificate. This way, the company motivates employees who decide to build up their skill sets.

• Instead of training employees through presentations or manuals, the company created online mini-courses that include fun characters, quizzes, and a scoring system. By adding interactive elements, the company aims to increase participation and boost employee engagement so that learning sticks.

🤖 The risk of control systems and algorythmic control

One of the best applications of gamification at work, could be the in the Metaverse. Given it may not be anytime soon that you start going to work with VR headsets on, there are still ways in which this vision could trickle in today’s ‘real’ world:

⌚ Moving away from Time to Output - With the rise of remote work and automation, a key shift that companies and employees have to embrace, is the way in which they measure productivity. Once, the ‘hours worked’ was the main element, now, it’s the quantity and even better, the quality of the output. Automation and Generative AI will help do things faster in some cases, but in most, they will enable to do things better. By removing or reducing time needed for research, or operative / tedious work, employees will have the time to focus on how to leverage more the human element and creativity. This can only happen if quality is being measured though, or you will find hoards of AI-generated outputs, similar to each other.

📊 Datafication and Productification - We talked in one of the latest articles (Datafication of Work), how work is becoming more and more ‘data’ driven, with the collection of more information by HR functions. Another trend that is around the corner, is going to be the construction of software and processes that help ‘productize’ work so that is can be more monitored and eventually, algorythmically controlled.

What do I mean by algorythmically controlled?

To answer this question, we need to borrow from ‘Control systems’ used in engineering. This is the way in which engineers to control the behaviors of a system (think of any type of appliance, like a thermostat for example, that needs to regulate temperature and therefore measures / acts accordingly).

The more that we get inserted in something that looks like a ‘productized’ system, the more we end up being the ‘human in the loop’ in this picture

In a Metaverse-like world, the ‘Sensor’ would be the IoT/VR technology that starts to measure eyesight and even worse, your brain inputs and thoughts (think of brain-machine technology).

This is the catastrophic version, where we become vessels of technology itself.

In a much more optimistic, and immediate type of scenario, I think that all of these trends can go back to ways in which work is more measured and controlled, bridging the gap between OKRs and the day-to-day activities.

🔗 Blockchain - an enabler or a limit?

Last, but not least, we can consider how technology like Blockchain could play a role in all of this. Especially when considering incentives and rewards, using smart contracts and algorythmic rules can ensure transparency and a new types of incentives. What if companies were to establish and use internal tokens? Currently the only option is to use stock option plans, but these are usually relegated to upper management and can gain or lose value based on the stock market.

🪙 Internal tokens - could be built with some mechanism that increases their value based on how often or precisely goals are hit, so things that are more in control of individual contributors, and place them inside a virtuous circle of engagement between colleagues and peers.

🎟️ DAOs - at the end of the day, they’re the gamification of a company in a way, both in terms of structure and communication (may not be a coincidence they started out on Discord, a gaming platform..)

Clearly there are limitations to the utilization of something so rigid as blockchain for ‘human relations’ and goal setting, much like there is to leaving control to algortyhms and AI to make important choices or decisions in the workplace. As always, a healthy balance should be the real winner.

Thank you for reading Work3 - The Future of Work. This post is public so please consider sharing it to support my work!

🍭 Treats to Try

FindThatPod - If you have FOMO and difficulty in getting up to speed with the right podcasts (there’s over 4 million out there)...you can check out Find That Pod, a weekly newsletter bringing 5 hand-picked podcasts. Great way to discover hidden gems.

Artifact, an AI news app, can now summarize and explains articles to you in different ways.

Engage AI  - If you’re into building and improving your personal network (which I wrote about in ‘How to Make Networking work for you’) this tool helps you use Linkedin by engaging through insightful comments, breaking the ice and building relationships with prospects.

Covey - AI sourcing assistant that evaluates and finds you better candidates.