Johannesburg, 29 May 2014
Motivating employees to do their best has always been a challenge for business leaders. One of the most interesting methods for doing so is that of gamification: bringing the emotional and competitive experiences of game playing into the workplace. Richard Firth, CEO of MIP Holdings, says gamification offers enormous potential to motivate and inspire employees, and to improve productivity, for those companies that do it correctly.
"When the University of Washington turned a complex chemistry condundrum about the structure of HIV into a game, a quarter of a million people registered and competed against each other to find the solution, one that had eluded scientists for 15 years. The Foldit game players found the answer in ten days," says Firth. "This is an illustration of how gamification can motivate people."
Firth says that's the kind of engagement that most businesses want.
"Business partners, customers and employees are bombarded with social media every day, making it hard for a business to penetrate the noise. But, although gamification has the potential to provide a truly different and more engaging experience, most companies get it wrong, according to Gartner, whose analysts have predicted that by 2014, 80% of current gamified applications will fail to meet their intended business objectives, primarily due to poor design."
Gartner defines gamification as the use of game mechanics and experience design to digitally engage and motivate people to achieve their goals.
According to Brian Burke, research vice president at Gartner, and author of Gamify, How Gamification Motivates People to Do Extraordinary Things: "Organisations should use gamification to empower their customers, employees and communities to reach their goals. Gamification is about motivating people to achieve their own goals, not the organisation's goals. The sweet spot for gamification is shared goals. If a business can identify the goals it shares with its audience or provide its audience with goals that are meaningful to them, then it can leverage gamification to motivate these players to meet those goals, and the company will achieve its business outcomes as a consequence."
Firth says the principles of the methodology are not magical; reinforcement, reward and peer-recognition have been around a long time. But there is a challenge to adopting gamification: business solutions, traditionally designed for efficiency, need to be designed for engagement.
"You want to engage people using technology. Gartner's Burke says most organisations rely primarily on transactional engagement strategies in their interactions, for example by focusing on employees' concern to earn a living and to meet the minimal expectations of the employer. Gamification is about creating that engaged, emotional relationship. That means coming up with some sort of reward system, an experience design that describes what the players will be doing and finally, a means of measuring how motivated the players were."
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