Work Gamification

I’m a game designer.

The best thing you should take from game design in terms of how to improve work is the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic reward. Most gamification focuses on extrinsic rewards such as leaderboards, levelling and achievements. But really they should think about the intrinsic rewards of work and how to improve those. Doing the latter without the former is just running people on a treadmill towards burnout. Focusing on extrinsic rewards also has a lot of negative consequences more generally. People focused on them as individuals often do so to the detriment of the wider organisation. You see that with bonuses as well. And extrinsic rewards can result in lower creativity, less intrinsic motivation and even less satisfaction from social rewards.

Basically do the hard thing and make the work inherently better rather than the easy thing of adding hoops to jump through.

I work in slightly dysfunctional division. Going extra mile is not desired and rocking the boat is being punished. I am old fart with a decade experience and want work at my work and play games with whoever I want. That’s where ageism comes, because I see cool startups around packing the same old development tasks into epic events for superheroes. Maybe I spend too much time with GURPS and d20 earlier, but work is work and gamification can stay aside. I wouldn’t do this as a manager either because the new superhero can suddenly start wanting more salary for being so superior.

I was involved into a project for subway operator efficiency increase. That was packed as a game where one gets points for braking as less as possible. Union stepped later in and closed the show. Nobody needs extra tension in already stressful job.

No part of your job should be gamified, or employees start optimizing to win the game and compete with each other instead of collaborating to create a better product/company. However, bug bounties and crypto bounties are a great way to "gamify" work that cannot be done by traditional employees.

Microsoft tried this years ago under Balmer and they called it Stack Ranking. They stopped doing it when it destroyed morale and they created terrible products like Vista and Zune. Just no. Read team books and do not create dog eat dog environments, we are not sales. We are knowledge workers.

Luke Hohmann designed "Innovation games" to help with collaborative decision-making during the meetings. It's a set of games that a team and customers/managers play together to build a shared vision.

They are most helpful in hierarchical environments when subordinates are reluctant to voice their thoughts against a person's in power opinion (manager, a more senior employee, etc.). Turning the discussion into a game enables everyone to participate without fear of breaking the social tabu of speaking up against the highest-paid person in the room.

"Six thinking hats" by Edward de Bono, psychologist, is another tool that helps to "gamify" discussions.

I have used Six Hats with excellent outcomes, usually when the team could not agree on a solution. They worked well in fast ("production is down, do we restore from backup or continue migration?") and slow ("what is the next most important thing to do") discussions.

Unfortunately, I did not have the opportunity to explore much of "innovation games." The reluctance usually comes from the business folks.

Curious to hear if anyone has experience with those methods or knows other collaborative decision-making tools!

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innovation_game - https://www.slideshare.net/emte69/innovation-games-14009295 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Thinking_Hats

It's for a different purpose, but we've thought of running a competition to create the most useful devops automation for https://robusta.dev to encourage new open source contributors.

We're still on the fence though because we want to encourage everyone. Every time there are winners, there are also losers

I think that this should be called salary.

I've seen examples of it be done, but think it's a patch that masks a more serious problem with the hiring process. In early stage startups, you should only hire people who are qualified and excited to do the job. At later stage or well-funded companies, the salary and compensation should make it worth working on niche things that are usually hard to be excited about.

At some point, over tracking metrics becomes effective gamification.

The only way I've seen it promote positive behavior are when the goals are shared, and when everyone's participation actually meaningfully contributes to the goal.

Otherwise, some people just have a natural leg up by virtue of some aspect of their work that lends itself to getting more "points" in whatever system you devise, and everyone else either becomes resentful or manipulates the system in a way that the points are no longer encouraging the behavior that you would hope they are.

The exceptions here might be things that are only work adjacent. I've enjoyed gamified health challenges, fantasy sports, and actual games with coworkers. Because then it's for fun, and not something that's going to impact my paycheck or my perceived value in the organization.

The problem with gamification is that everybody will try to game the gamification system.

our small team (~10) got some Ethereum to do anything we want. some invested, some HODLd, some "invested" in risk free-money type of deals but whatever, we were allowed to do anything. whoever has highest ROI after 3 months wins.

but most of all it was a great experience to play with defi, talk strategies. great team building.

Few years ago I tried doing this with fitbits to encourage exercise within my team. Worked a treat for a few months ...

These kind of initiatives are extremely cringe worthy, dishonest and unprofessional.

Thankfully no. My experience with women in tech made it very clear that this would be detrimental. Women usually do not like to aggressively compete for status, and it’s up to us to foster a better environment.