Kat Mandelstein of PwC Advisory was gracious enough to give us a complete run down on gamification and when and how businesses should plan to use it in the near future.
This new trend is growing and when businesses thoughtfully utilize gamification, Mandelstein said it can change behavior, develop skills, and enable innovation.
Mandelstein will lead a meet up “Gamification @ Work Meet Up” on Saturday, March 8 from 9:30-10:30 a.m.
Get well versed on gamification right here so you can be ready for this weekend’s meet up.
What is gamification?
Gamification is the application of game elements and digital game design techniques to non-game problems, such as business and social impact challenges. The reason behind it is to deepen engagement with your audience which may be customers, employees or even students. It taps into people’s natural desire to compete and play, and results in higher levels of motivated engagement.
2. How popular is gamification in business right now?
Gamification in business has steadily been increasing in popularity in business for the last few years. At PwC, we are seeing more customers in countries around the globe interested in applying gamification to their business applications and communities of practice, both for customers and employees. We identified this as a trend we were seeing in our PwC Technology Forecast in fall of 2012. I was a contributor to that publication where we explored both the business and technology implications of gamification for large enterprises. Read the full Forecast.
The industry analysts agree this a growing trend. According to Gartner, by 2015, more than 50 percent of all organizations will manage innovation activities through gamification and 70 percent of the Global 2000 will employ game tactics via at least one gamified application. (Source: Gartner Gamification 2020: What Is the Future of Gamification? Nov 2012)
Many areas of business can benefit from gamification to achieve these three key business objectives:
- To change behavior
- To develop skills
- To enable innovation
It is important to remember that it is not about playing games in business. It is about using game techniques within business applications to help motivate and guide desired behaviors.
3. Where is gamification for business headed?
Gamification is now being integrated into the applications that businesses use for social collaboration and connected to traditional business applications. Right now there are only a handful of community platforms that have gamification capability built in and a few software vendors with solutions to add a web-based gamification layer to business applications. As adoption increases, the technologies available to help implement the game mechanics in business applications will become more sophisticated, particularly in tracking and measuring data.
Externally, marketing contests and customer communities are the most common business application for gamification and I only see that growing.
Inside companies, three areas of the business:
- Employee Training — Missions and virtual rewards like badges help guide and motivate the learner while they are completing web-based training.
- Employee Recognition — Virtual badging and points recognizing employees for outstanding work or for completing HR-related tasks like Wellness activity. Often the points can be earned and traded for prizes, gift cards or rebates.
- Tracking Sales Goals — This is a natural. Salespeople are naturally competitive and sales leaderboards help them not only see how they are doing against their own sales goals, but how they stack up to other salespeople.
Not every website or application should be gamified. Also, how you design the gamification focused on your target audiences is critical to reward and motivate them to engage with you. Just sticking badges and points to earn out on your website without thinking through what will motivate your users to engage over the long term is a huge mistake. We like to call this Mardi Gras Gamification, where companies are throwing coins and beads at their customers without any real purpose or long term engagement strategy.
Gamification takes careful planning and evolves over time. It is important to start by designing for your key audience roles and defining what behaviors you want to reward with which game mechanics first. Then, plan for the long term as their engagement with the application deepens over time and their level of understanding and skill increases. Revisit and evolve the game play over time to keep them engaged and get to the next level of engagement.
Gamification should only be used when there is a very clear business goal that can be tied to audience engagement over the long term. Examples of where we have seen it be effective is in encouraging people to self-help or help answer each others questions in a customer community or for reaching goals in a health and wellness program for a healthcare provider.
Gamification requires a good understanding of your target audiences first. Do your homework in understanding their demographics, psychographics, and what motivates them before you try to apply gamification to the business challenge. Otherwise, your gamification efforts will fail.
Have the right skills on your team, either internally or higher outside expertise in this area to help you get it right. Strategy, psyschology and game design skills are the skills needed to do gamification right.
A few universities are teaching gamification courses, like the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. At Texas State and other universities, I would recommend taking classes in business strategy, psychology and game design courses. There is actually an excellent gamification course that I took myself for certification in gamification offered a couple of times a year on Coursera, a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), taught by Professor Kevin Werbach who teaches at University of Pennsylvania and also wrote an excellent book on gamification, “For the Win.”
Another good resource for gamification content is http://www.gamification.co. They hold an annual conference and many of the sessions from the past year are posted as videos here. They also have articles, news and links to resources and vendors in this area. The founder of the site, Gabe Zichermann, has recently written a good book, “The Gamification Revolution” which I would also recommend reading.
There are also two women who I admire that are leaders in this space, Amy Jo Kim and Jane McGonigal. Amy Jo Kim’s work around player types and how to design for them has influenced my own approach to gamification for business. Jane McGonigal’s first TED Talk originally inspired me and I have following her work, projects and read her book, “Reality is Broken” over the years. It is nice to see women role models in the industry, which has traditionally been a male-dominated field. This is definitely changing though. Women now make up 45 percent of all U.S. gamers, according to a recent survey by the Entertainment Software Association.