When designing a gaming strategy for the workplace much emphasis must be put on the design of the gamification idea, mechanics and software. One of the main reasons that gamification fails at improving employee engagement and motivation is a wrong design. According to Brian Burke, research vice president at Gartner, “poor game design is one of the key failings of many gamified applications today. The focus is on the obvious game mechanics, such as points, badges and leader boards, rather than the more subtle and more important game design elements, such as balancing competition and collaboration, or defining a meaningful game economy. As a result, in many cases, organizations are simply counting points, slapping meaningless badges on activities and creating gamified applications that are simply not engaging for the target audience.
Some organizations are already beginning to cast off poorly designed gamified applications.” (Gartner, 2012) “The great majority of engagement and recognition platforms currently in the market fail to incentivize and acknowledge such multi-faceted desires. Rather, they incentivize the passive act of receiving of recognition – quite simply, the employee who receives the most recognition wins. By incentivizing a passive action, these programs consistently fail to deliver widespread engagement.” (Wong, 2014)
According to Pihl, “the problem is that the proponents of gamification don’t actually understand the substance of games. In their enthusiastic fervor they have mistaken some of the least important parts of games – things like leaderboards, points and badges – as the essence of games.” (Pihl, 2012) It is not enough to just gamify mundane jobs and except to increase productivity and employee motivation.
When designing the game mechanics used in a corporate world, it is important to remember to consider the target audience and what ambitions motivate them. “The real challenge is to design player-centric applications that focus on the motivations and rewards that truly engage players more fully.” (Gardner, 2012)
The game designers have to consider employees’ intrinsic and extrinsic motivational factors in order to make the gaming elements have a positive effect on the job performance. “Intrinsic motivation involves engaging in behavior because it is personally rewarding; essentially, performing an activity for its own sake rather than the desire for some external reward. Extrinsic motivation occurs when we are motivated to perform a behavior or engage in an activity to earn a reward or avoid punishment.” (Cherry, 2016)
According to Wong: “it’s critical to identify the correct processes and intrinsic motivations to incentivize. In the case of employee engagement and workplace recognition, the core motivators are the innate desires to give and receive recognition, to encourage and support each other, and to connect. An effective game design must tap into and provide users with an appropriate level of satisfaction and accomplishment for demonstrating these behaviors.” (Wong, 2014)
If extrinsic rewards such as prizes or money are large enough that they supersede intrinsic motivation, then all the unintended behaviors are likely to occur and the benefits of gamification are lost. One of the key qualms about gamification in the workplace lies in the fear of creating gimmicky games that end up cluttering employees rather than engaging them”(Chou, 2013).
Read on: REFERENCES ON GAMIFICATION