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Playing for a living

Good news, nine-to-fivers! Your working lives could soon get an exciting makeover due to the innovative rise of occupational gamification. By placing a focus on  challenge and achievement, the gamification of work is a strategy designed to motivate employees to perform better on the job.

So how does it work? Let’s take the example of Bluewolf, a global business consulting firm based in New York. Beginning in 2012, Bluewolf created a programme called #GoingSocial in order to incentivise employees and enhance their commitment to building the company.

Now called PRIME, the programme makes heavy use of gamification techniques: Bluewolf’s employees get points for internal and external networking, for publishing a post on Bluewolf’s blog, and for sharing content on LinkedIn and Twitter. These points and rewards – which range from T-shirts to lunch with the CEO – are then presented on an individual employee’s “Pack Profile,” which can be accessed on the programme.
All of this sounds like a blast, right? For employers, it’s certainly got advantages. According to Alain Dehaze, CEO of the Adecco Group, the gamification of work has given recruiters a new way to educate and train workers. “Gamification is a tool to leverage the impact of education and training,” says Dehaze. “You learn faster through a game.”

Adecco is also incorporating gamification concepts into its recruiting efforts. It recently introduced a “CEO for one month” programme. Essentially a high-powered management trainee selection process and internship programme, the global challenge selects 47 finalists from a pool of over 200,000 applicants from around the world. The final 47 work alongside the company’s country CEOs; the final ten candidates compete at a management “boot camp” for a spot shadowing Dehaze himself as global CEO for a month. (The finalist also earns a USD $10,000 “salary.”)

The unconventional recruiting approach – which involves team-building exercises for candidates along with elimination rounds – is a way to set the Adecco Group’s  recruitment process apart using gamification techniques. It’s an appropriate approach for an HR firm that wants to stand out.

A catalyst for learning

Dehaze’s arguments ring true to Jamaican physicist Dominic Mills-Howell, a postdoctoral student at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy and Leader of Tomorrow whose essay for the St. Gallen Wings of Excellence Award was entitled “Artificial Intelligence, Gamification, Culture and the Amistics of Human  Development”. “The main idea behind the gamification of work is to accelerate the learning process”, says Mills-Howell.
Gamification, Mills-Howell says, can be very beneficial to the employee. For example, a video-game style leader board is a way to publicly recognise an employee’s achievements. This therefore motivates people to always perform their best.

Re-defining work in a more creative sense

Dominic Geissler, M.A Candidate in Business Innovation and Design Thinking at the University of St. Gallen, is also optimistic about the gamification of work. This is because the phenomenon may allow us to re-define what work means.

“Nowadays, work means income-generating activities. In the future, work will be about pursuing your leisure activities. On the side, you’ll get additional basic income,” says Geissler. Gamification of work promises a double advantage in the sense that it might enable individuals to really have fun with their jobs – and also get paid for enjoying themselves.

On the other hand, gamifying a workplace is not a straightforward process. “To have long-term success, you have to really think about how specifically you use game mechanics in order to achieve goals,” says Geissler. Game-design experts must create gamification techniques that are actually going to motivate the employee.

Geissler argues, for example, that just relying on a leader board is a problem: After an employee gets to the top, they may not be interested in gamification anymore. In contrast, an employee who is struggling to compete with their peers on the leader board may feel “disengaged” with the concept of gamification. Companies need to ensure that they are always coming up with something new and creative.

“You are kind of giving people a drug”

To Stefan Kießling, M.A. candidate in Philosophy and Business Administration at Copenhagen Business School, gamifying a workplace is comparable to giving employees a  kind of drug. In other words, it sometimes verges on the immoral: The most powerful gamification techniques have the dangerous capacity to really get into an individual’s mind. “Gamification can cause employees to become very competitive with one another and this can therefore lead to individuals feeling distressed,” says Kießling.

Because of these factors, Kießling agrees with Geissler and argues that one must be very careful when designing the elements of a gamification platform.

So is gamification a blessing or a curse? For Bluewolf, the #GoingSocial programme was definitely a blessing: Ten months after its initial launch, its blog traffic tripled, and visits to its website from social media platforms rose 68 percent. The approach was so successful Bluewolf expanded and continued it. The programme is now known as  PRIME; Bluewolf executives claim it’s boosted staff retention, project volume and revenues.

And at Adecco? Applications for their innovative recruiting programme are up, and it has become an annual event. The future of work, it seems, may be fun.

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