This week we're going to look at some specific applications of gamification. Many of the examples I've given you are in the external gamefication bucket. They're about customer facing types of uses. In this unit, I'm going to look at internal gamification, and specifically gamification in the enterprise in a large business organization. Many major enterprises are starting to experiment with gamification, and to apply it in concrete situations. Sometimes consciously, thinking that they are trying to gamify a process. Sometimes just using a technique that seems to work. That when we look at it we would identify as being part of gamification. The research from Constellation Research, put out a report at the end of last year, where they talked to 55 different early adopters of enterprise gamification. And found a wide range of different kinds of uses within the enterprise. I'd like to highlight a few examples for you, major areas where I see potential take up by enterprises and give you an example for each of them. The first is intranets or extranets. Online collaboration systems that companies operate for their employees or their extended networks. And gamification here works just like it does in the external setting with a discussion forum like stack overflow. The game elements can be used to encourage people to contribute. To encourage people to comment and respond, to enhance the quality of the participation that people engage in. And to develop leaderboards to identify people who have the most expertise or the most involvement in certain topics. So here you see a set of leaderboards for the SAP community network. Which is the extranet for the enterprise software company SAP and their network of developers. That interact with SAP software at other companies. And they very actively use gamification techniques to enhance the quality of the discussion in that form. So that's an enterprise case because it's being used internally by an enterprise. But the same basic dynamics that we saw with stack overflow, and really any other discussion forum kind of application. The next one though, is different. This is about productivity. And when I say productivity enhancement, I mean. Helping or encouraging employees to do their core job better. There are many different examples of this and there are many different kinds of jobs. So what it takes to motivate a salesperson. Maybe different from what it takes to motivate an accountant or an financial analyst but in almost every case. Gamification can produce motivation and can provide information and feedback. That is valuable to employees and helps them improve their job performance. Here's one concrete example which comes from call centers. So call centers have large numbers of agents. And they have to encourage those agents to first of all deal with calls quickly, because the longer they're on the phone the more cost there is for the customer. And, at the same time they want to encourage the agents to deal with the customers well. Because, the ultimate customers, the customers of the people using the call center business, will tend to be upset if the agent is clueless or surly, or anything like that. So, the call center operators are starting to look to gamification as a technique to help them manage these customer service agents better. This is an example from a startup called Arcaris, which is specifically focused on this call center enterprise market. And you see here on the right a screen that would come up for an agent. And it's got a leaderboard, she's number one. It's got a set of levels that she can achieve by virtue of her various activities on dealing with calls. It's got some customer satisfaction numbers that show some data on how she's doing, and it's got achievement, so all the standard gamification elements. But here focused in specifically, on encouraging better performance for a customer service agent, and highlighting the key elements in designed in an aesthetic way that works for that application. This here, that you see on the left, is a screen that the company might get, looking at key performance indicators, that's what KPI stands for. And integrating in those business metrics with the data coming out of the gamification engine. Allowing them to monitor their employee performance and use the gamification system to improve the level of productivity. Now let me put a placeholder here, which I'm going to expand on later. That there's a danger in this kind of application, that the gamified system could actually, rather than helping the call center agents. Be a tool for oppressing them and constantly monitoring their work in a way that's not helpful to them. So let's keep that in mind as a risk, but it certainly can be done in a positive way. Which I think this is an example of. Next category i'll call efficiency enhancement. The difference between productivity and efficiency here is productivity is in someone's core job responsibility. Efficiency is about just making them work better by doing everything they do at work efficiently. And specifically the example I wanna talk about is email. So lots and lots of workers spend time in their email. And it's not their job, primarily, to answer email, but they have to do it as part of their job. And people waste tons and tons of time, countless hours. Answering email, getting email that's irrelevant, cleaning out their mailbox and so forth. And so gamification is being used to improve the efficiency of that process. The example that I show you here is something called The Email Game from a company called Baitin. And you see here that they've got a timer, so you see how much time you're spending in your email. You see this progress bar of how much you've got left, and you see a point system. And the way the email game works is that you get points for quickly disposing of your email. For deleting it or responding to it in a way that you can take it out of your inbox. It incentivizes and encourages you to deal with email efficiently. And that little nudge tends to give people enough reason to deal with their email in a more efficient way, saving lots and lots of time that gets freed up for other things. Another interesting approach to email is being taken by a company called Seriosity that has a system called Attent. And their idea was to create a virtual currency around email. So they created a set of tokens that you attach to email. And it costs you this virtual currency to send and receive email. And the idea is by creating this kind of virtual economy, people will start to think about whether it's worth sending an email. Well, if it actually costs something and I've only got so many resources and I have to use some of them to send this email. Do I really want to send all to the whole company about this particular irrelevant thing? Or not. And, so the idea here is that by creating a structure that provides feedback. And the ability manipulate the activity around email In a game like way. People will start to see their effects on the overall system, that kind of systems thinking that games can encourage. And therefore be more responsible about the email that they send and receive. So a different approach tackling a similar problem and their other problems in the efficiency domain as well. Situations where gamification can be used to encourage people to waste less time. And therefore have more time for their core jobs. The next one I don't have a screenshot for, but this is an example from Deloitte, where they have an application called WhoWhatWhere. That is used to encourage their consultants to find out more about each other. That's in the broad domain of knowledge management. Companies don't necessarily collaborate internally that well, especially a very knowledge oriented company. Like a consulting firm has people all over the world with tremendous amounts of knowledge about customers and about topics. And yet they don't necessarily know about each other. And it would be really helpful for the company. If when a consultant in Cleveland had a question about, say, supply chain process improvements in the oil and gas industry. That they would be able to quickly see who else in my company has worked on those engagements or who else has real knowledge about that area. So gamification can be a way of encouraging people to provide that information into the system. And facilitating a process that encourages that kind of sharing. The who, what, where system at Deloid does that by creating game mechanics around the consultants sharing information about what they're doing. On their existing enterprise collaboration system. And other companies are starting to use similar kinds of applications to encourage that kind of lightweight knowledge sharing. There are a variety of applications in human resources. Let me touch on a few of them, really quickly. Companies are using gamification for hiring. Just playing games sometimes tells you something about people. And gamifying systems can be used to identify the best candidates, and to review candidates in the hiring process. Onboarding, gamification is a way to get people up and running at a company early on. We talked about onboarding as an important technique in game design. So if you think about your HR process as a kind of game, gamification and game techniques can be used to on board employees quickly. Beyond Onboarding is Acculturation, getting people engaged in the culture of the enterprise. And games by creating a fun kind of collaborative environment can help people get a sense of their co workers. And the notion of working together as a team. And can be a way to reinforce the culture of the organization. Now If the culture of the organization is very formal and serious, then a game like system may not be the best way to do it. But if not, or in a wide variety of other contexts. A game like system may be a great way to ease people into a sense of how we do things here and what the nature is of our culture. Corporate training, easy way to see that that applies to gamification. Using game mechanics to encourage people and reward people. For the learning that they do within the organization and various kinds of training programs. Performance review and employee recognition. When we hear from Daniel Debow who I'll do an interview with, later in the segment. His company uses gamification for informal employee rewards. Telling people you did a great job in the enterprise. And providing a structure around that activity to have it redown down to the benefit of the company. We can also think of gamification being used in the more structured, formal process of performance reviews. By expanding out to badges and achievements and other forms of recognition. And by encouraging employees to contribute to 360 reviews of their employees and co-workers. And finally, T and E, travel and entertainment, here's an example from Google. For their travel and entertainment reimbursements, they give people a fixed amount. That they can recover for a particular two-city travel pair that they were traveling to. And then, what they do is they create a virtual economy. So, if you don't use the full amount you're granted, you can bank it. You can give it to charity or you can cash it out, though at a discount. And this makes that kind of credit liquid in a way, which encourages people to think about creatively using it. To be more efficient about their use of that travel and entertainment currency. Which previously employees didn't think about as a currency or a game at all. They just thought about it as a process of getting reimbursement. Here employees are encouraged to think about. How to spend efficiently, because then they bank additional currency. That they can use either for themselves or for charitable donations. Next one is innovation. Companies want to encourage their employees to come up with great, new ideas. So this is an example from the Department of Work and Pensions in the UK. A public governmental organization, not necessarily the kind of organization known for great innovation. What they've done is they've built something called idea street which is an idea marketplace. So to encourage people within their organization to come up with great ideas. To improve their service, they created a virtual stock market. So, employees come up with ideas and you can see some ideas here, and other employees can essentially buy and sell shares in those ideas. There's a price, daily change, volume, total market cap. And here's the link where you can buy and sell it. And they've created a stock market like market place around these ideas. So great ideas start to float to the top. People can join in on teams that have ideas that they think are cool. And that are effective and that encourages more activity on those ideas. And what they've found is they've generated a large number of ideas. That have actually been put into place in the organization, saving millions of dollars, or millions of pounds there in the UK. And actually delivering better service to their constituencies. Using these game mechanics to make the process of coming up with innovative ideas more game-like, as opposed to just the suggestion box that you drop an idea in. Finally, there are many examples of serious games in the enterprise. So, here's an example from Siemens, the electronics and telecommunications company. Where they have created something called Plantville. Which is a simulation of one of their manufacturing plants and they've created a game around operating a manufacturing plant. So, this is something that can be used for training, it's something that can be used for other purposes, to help people understand how to be more effective in the process of managing one of their plants. That is what I would call a serious game, cuz it's a full-blown game. So, worth talking about in this overall context, but worth Putting to the side for the moment. Because I wanna focus most specifically on uses of game elements and structures that get incorporated into existing businesses. So as we see, a wide variety of different kinds of applications in different kinds of enterprises, all using gamification.
