Podcast 20: Should gamification be part of a larger strategy?

Welcome to this week's Question of Gamification. I'm An Coppens, I'm your show host, and I'm also the CEO or Chief Game Changer at Gamification Nation. This week's question is asked to us from a variety of clients, and it typically goes something like this, is gamification or should gamification be part of a larger strategy? When we get asked that question, it's typically because people have heard that gamification is a thing. They like the concept, they like the fact that we can bring some of the game and play-like feeling into an organisation. But often it also means that they haven't thought through why they want to implement gamification in the first place. Start with why I would say or answer that question with, yes, gamification should always be part of a larger strategy. In fact, I would even say strategy comes first, as opposed to gamification comes first. Now, gamification can be the strategy. I mean, that's also possible. But in the end of the day, you need to have a reason why you are engaging in gamification, why you are even going there. You need to understand if it fits for your culture, if it fits for the type of problem you're trying to solve. Although I feel that gamification has a lot of power and a lot of benefits. It doesn't fix every single problem that you may encounter in an organisation. Sometimes it's simply a case of revising benefits, revising employee rules, or even very simple things as changing things around in an environment. It could be interpersonal related. The one thing you can't gamify is your boss, typically speaking. At best, you can gamify the process, but gamifying people is another story altogether, and gamification in the best form should always be voluntary. Make it voluntary If it's imposed, then as soon as that becomes known, it also causes a backlash of why people don't want to engage or they rebel against it, or they game the system, etc. When you're looking at gamification as a part of your employee facing strategy, I would definitely say it needs to be part of a well thought out strategy, whether that's employee engagement, whether that is a very specific onboarding call, an onboarding strategy, whether that is showcasing how your organisation is a leader in the field. There's a variety of reasons and a variety of things you may want to do as part of a strategy, and gamification could be one. What we see gamification do and where it plays in and ties into strategy, is that it enforces or reinforces the message of your strategy. Gamified on-boarding strategy example Let's give an example. Usually examples work better than me talking about the conceptual side of things. Imagine you have an organisation where people thrive when they're self-sufficient, when they're self searching for answers. Now, when people join the organisation, they didn't always know that. Gamification was introduced to help them through and teach them from day one, "Actually, in this organisation, it's up to you to make your career what you want it to be." What did the organisation do? Actually, they looked at staff turnover and they saw the ones that thrived were the ones that had adopted and became self-sufficient. The ones that left, and left quite miserable in some way, felt that they were left to their own devices and didn't know what to do. They were never taught that, actually, self-management and self-sufficiency is the way to success. That was the strategic input then, that basically made the company decide, "Okay, we want to apply a gamification strategy to solve this." Now, they did test out other strategies as well. What they came up with was, from day one, and I think it even started before, the person joined the company, they were sent access to an app. In the app you received instructions, a little bit like a treasure hunt: "On day one, please find X place in X building,