In one of his stand-up routines comedian Chris Rock explains the difference between a job and a career, revealing that he once worked a minimum-wage job as a dishwasher at the Red Lobster on Queens Boulevard in Queens, New York, scraping shrimp off of plates. He advised people with careers to shut up around people with jobs. “Don’t let your happiness make someone sad,” he said. Because “when you got a career, there ain’t enough time in the day. When you got a career, you look at your watch, time just flies. Like goddamn, whoa. It’s five thirty-five. Damn, I gotta come in early to work on my project. ’Cause there ain’t enough time when you got a career. When you got a job, there’s too much time.”
Anyone who has held a stultifying job can attest to how slowly the day passes. It’s a completely different story for most of us with careers. Doing what you like doing is good for engagement. The trick is transferring some of this to jobs that are just that: jobs. “Work can be tough. It can be boring, repetitive, complex; you have to collaborate,” says Stanford professor Byron Reeves, who studies the role of multiplayer online games to improve collaboration, innovation, and productivity, as well as customer and employee engagement. “If you are not engaged, it doesn’t go well.”
Reeves predicts that game design will eventually insert employees inside video games. He posits two scenarios for a mythical call-center employee named Jennifer. In the first, Jennifer spends eight regimented hours a day at a typical corporate cubicle farm. She fields seventy-five calls a day. Her performance is tracked on a gargantuan lighted board that lists data such as handling time, number of calls on hold, and projected versus actual call volume. She must log out for lunch, so the exact start of her break can be recorded. If she’s late, she can be suspended. Turnover at this office is high, and there’s scant opportunity to get to know coworkers. For the three months she works there, she’s talking constantly, surrounded by a sea of other people. Yet she’s lonely, bored, and feels undervalued.
In the second scenario, Jennifer works from home. When she logs in, she’s greeted by her own personalized avatar and joins her twenty-person team. While they congregate on a pirate ship (this week’s theme), they are in reality spread across three different time zones. But they can chat with one another, so Jennifer forges friendships. Her team competes with others and her success depends on the success of her teammates. As calls are routed to her screen, she accumulates points for inputting data accurately and following company protocols. There’s even voice stress-analysis software, so that if Jennifer handles a caller deftly, she scores more. The higher she scores, the more she helps her team, whose progress is expressed by how quickly its ship sails to an island, where they are rewarded with a real-world perk: free holiday airline travel.
Jennifer performs the same core job functions in both scenarios. In the second, though, even mundane tasks seem fun, and the constant feedback she receives in the form of points gives her a growing sense of accomplishment. She’s become a motivated, loyal, productive team member.
This far-out scenario may not be as far off into the future as you might think. At IBM, Chuck Hamilton holds the curious title of V-learning strategy leader. (The “V” stands for virtual.) One of the stranger parts of his gig is to manage the tens of thousands of avatars that IBMers have created for themselves. Like Cisco Systems and other large companies, IBM saves on travel and hotel expenses by holding the occasional convention in a virtual space; a couple of hundred employees, each represented by an avatar, can attend. “In the early days,” Hamilton says, “people showed up as whatever they chose—dogs, cats, penguins. It was a playful, exploratory time.” Now that these virtual conventions are common fare, however, IBMers’ avatars have gotten, well, more traditionally IBMish. “They modify their avatars to get as close as they can get to the way they really look,” he says. “I do get e-mail from people in Japan and China asking where they can get a particular eye shape or skin color.”
In this section we’ll explore why businesses in this increasingly social media–fueled world must better engage workers and customers or confront potentially dire consequences. We’ll look at a company that has achieved a “self-fulfilling cycle of benefit” for both customers and its business, another that has deputized users to handle complicated questions about software coding, and a third that deploys game mechanics to encourage customers to act as customer-service representatives. We’ll visit a restaurant outside Boston that has added a game layer, which creates customer feedback loops and increases monthly revenue 2 percent to 4 percent. And we’ll travel to Microsoft to spend time with Ross Smith, who has been experimenting with introducing games into the company’s famously challenging workplace.
There’s a lot more to gamification than offering users, employees, and consumers badges and other virtual trinkets, of course. Rewarding Tropicana orange juice drinkers with redeemable points, for instance, is “Taking the thing that is least essential to games [points] and representing it as the core of the experience,” as game designer Margaret Robertson put it. She’s even coined a neologism—“pointsification”—to describe the phenomenon.
Sebastian Deterding, a German game designer and academic, decries “the badge measles” as an “infectious disease currently spreading across the Internet.” Starting with Foursquare and other geolocation services, it jumped to Yelp, Huffington Post, Google News, and now afflicts sites of all stripes and sizes. He quotes Will Wright, creator of the megahit The Sims, who once said, “Game elements aren’t the monosodium glutamate of fun that you can simply add to an activity to make it motivating and engaging.”
Businesses, Deterding says, “engage in a very flawed pop behaviorism” by treating games “as Skinner boxes that dole out points and badges like sugar pellets every time we hit the right lever.” People play games because they enjoy the tension that is presented when they are overcoming challenges. Games are intrinsically motivating. We play them for ourselves, not because they offer rewards like points or money. In other words, “games are not fun because they are games,” he says, “but when they are well designed.”
Robertson and Deterding are right, and you rarely hear about the gamification failures, which, if the designers don’t engage users, slip quietly into the night, just another corporate expense on a balance sheet. But the companies I write about in the following chapters have judiciously incorporated gamification into their workplaces, products, or services, motivating employees or even their own users to perform tasks they normally wouldn’t want to do. This is true of those working at a virtual call center, trawling online message boards for queries to field, serving at restaurants, and bug-testing software. While the recipes may be the same—engage, encourage competition, offer instant feedback—they play out in vastly different environments.
Virtual call center LiveOps, British SIM card provider giffgaff, and EngineYard, which offers software in the cloud, all maintain large, distributed workforces that either field calls from their homes where they can only be monitored remotely or offer customer service over the Web. The use of game mechanics helps these companies solve the problem of cheap labor while maintaining better quality of service. With restaurants deploying Objective Logistics software, waitstaff—the frontline employees who are the ones to deal with customers directly—compete for the privilege of naming their schedules, which turns out to be a powerful motivator. They aren’t ordered to be friendly to diners, push more expensive entrees, or nagged to keep refilling water glasses—and they can’t look forward to raises or promotions—but they’re graded on their ability to upsell (sell more items), which leads to bigger checks and ultimately more generous tips. At Microsoft, the workforce is comprised of highly skilled, well-paid employees, many of whom are on career tracks at a hugely profitable, mature company that may very well be on the decline. It has to navigate a generation gap between younger engineers and Microsoft veterans and induce already harried, overworked people to take on even more responsibilities when new software must be tested in-house.
As varied as these work environments are, these companies all turned to the same solution, gamification, and it’s been working.
To steal an idea from Gamification Summit Chair Gabe Zichermann, perhaps companies should create an entirely new management position: chief engagement officer. Her job would be to focus entirely on engagement. Zichermann proposed it as a customer advocacy position, but I think it makes sense to expand its duties to include all sorts of engagement—from customers and staff to freelancers and management.
Find ways to make work seem less like work, and everyone benefits.