The game way to get out of everyday business concerns

When a person starts a job, they are usually passionate, work harder, are more creative and are ready to sing the praises of the brand they have joined forces to support … but within a month, and sometimes even less, passion often turns to unexceptional. Within two months, creativity is often reduced to stagnation and the brand is simply a response to someone asking you what you do.

According to a DCI study, it takes an average of 57 days for a new employee to develop competency in their new office based position. But it takes an average of 49 days for them to start performing less than their potential.

Unfortunately, competency and potential are not synonymous.

— How many people have the ability and knowledge to realise bigger, faster achievements, but do not apply them?

— How many people know what to do, but wait to be told by their superior?

— How many people have great ideas to improve processes or results, but keep quite due to apathy or fear?

— How many leaders would gladly take constructive feedback to improve their leadership but their team members keep quite due to insecurity?

To engage our teams and create positive organisational cultures, we need to create an environment that supports individual and organisational success.

But how? Fortunately, most people, even the serious ones, have two things in common.

1. They want to succeed in their work or efforts;

2. They like to have fun (Yes, even your boss when you’re not looking).

Success: The emotional drive for achievement is filled by completing something, even something small. The key here is consistent feedback of its completion. For example, Facebook gives instant feedback by showing you how many likes and shares you have. Much of Facebooks success comes from the ability to give a Quick Fix of our need for achievement.

Fun: It is filled by the emotional drive of diversity, situations and environments that are out of the ordinary. Situations that also allow us to fill emotions for belonging with our loved ones or friends, a sense of recognition, and sometimes give us a controlled sense of risk that increases excitement.

But knowing how to do something, does not ensure motivation to do it … making it fun however, supports motivation. Especially if you are filling the right emotions through it. The key is to identify the emotions needed to create the behaviours required to achieve bigger objectives.

So, we know what we need for productivity and engagement, let’s systematise it. Or more accurately, “gamify” it!

Understanding the psychology

Step 1: Start with the Objectives: what do you want to get? More innovation, more tangible results, improved leadership, more passion, better customer service.

Step 2: Then figure out what behaviours are required to achieve those results. If it is leadership, we may need patience to develop people, and we may need to be goal focused and maybe even support a vision that helps you stand out above the competition. If it is customer service, we actually need to care and want to make someone’s days, and we may also need to be proactively creative in solving problems.

Step 3: Determine what emotions motivate the behaviours required for the objectives. For example if you want to nurture motivation to stand out with new unique innovations, you would want to provide the emotion of personal growth to see mistakes as learning opportunities, a feeling of recognition to be outstanding, and finish off with achievement to get it done.

Knowing the emotions required is the fundamental recipe to get the behaviours which will ultimately produce the objectives. These are essentially the seeds for the specific areas of performance development. But to make reaching objectives more fun, and to expand the emotion of diversity, we need the out-of-reality experience, the story, the theme.

Step 4: Create a theme. For example, reaching a goal as a journey to achieving “superhero” status. Each milestone provides feedback through different super powers related to the objectives reached. The idea just makes it more exciting than an average milestone.

Now that the psychology is identified, Gamifying work becomes a structured process with three parts: the Mechanics, the Elements and the Feedback.

The Mechanics — What will be measured

•Competitions

•Resource acquisition

•Transactions

•Achievement definitions

•Cooperation

•Time

•Competitions

•Levels of competency or achievement

Elements — How will it be measured

• Points

• Individual/Team

• Badges

• Final Combat

Feedback — What gauges success

• Milestones

• Leaders boards

• Progress indicators

• Comparisons

• Time

Example of a work-game structure:

We want to improve efficiency and cooperation between the Finance and the Procurement departments. We need the emotions of belonging and growth for cooperation. And we need the drives for achievement and recognition to motivate action.

The Mechanics

We could define the “Time to Transaction” within three different achievement levels. Assuming the superhero theme, they could be: victim, sidekick and super. But since we need to cultivate growth and belonging, rather than making the teams department-centric, we would create teams with people from both departments in them so they learn each other’s issues to overcome them.

The Elements

Success can then be measured by awarding points for consistency and then badges after reaching a specific number of points.

Feedback

Create a leader board that compares current time efficiency with last month’s for both departments (comparison creates competition with previous results instead of other people). Then show only the top three mixed teams that are leading with the most badges or points. This feedback then supports the emotions of achievement and recognition.

Implementing simple game structures incorporated into everyday work and processes will support a culture of more fun and passion, which means more engagement and provides avenues of personal success in the process. Your next step — identify an issue you want to improve and gamify it.

The writer is a leadership guru. He is scheduled to visit UAE for a two-day Leadership Summit and is represented in the region by Vinsys.