There is an interesting and important distinction that comes up in enterprise gameification, which is the dividing line between the game on one side, and the job on the other. Why is this important? Well it's important for a number of reasons, but the core is that if you're designing a gamified system in the enterprise, what you care about is ultimately the job. The goal is to motivate employees to do something that's business benefit. The game is a means to that end, but for the players, for the employees, they may well be focused on the game. The game is the thing that engages them, and to the extent that there's a divergence, to the extent that the game is pushing them one way. And the job is pushing them another way. That leads to real problems, because again the players have a strong tendency to go in the direction that the game pushes them as opposed to what their job really should be about. So think about ,as an example, a call center. And the call center sets up a game, or a gamified system using points and badges and leaderboards, and so forth as we've, as we've seen. And then sets the rules of the game with something like, if you get done with a call complete a call in less than 30 seconds you get ten points. And, if you complete more than a certain number of calls in, an hour. You get 50 points and so on and so forth, and all of the structures in the game are around the volume and the speed of the calls, what are people going to do? The call center agents are going to try to get customers off the phone as fast as they possibly can. Not to provide good service to them, but just to get them off the phone to optimize against the game. On the other hand, if you have the same gamified structure, but the points are for things like good customer satisfaction. So, the customer says that you did a great job, when they get surveyed afterwards, you get 100 points for that, and that's what the game rewards. Or you get a bonus reward if you get a streak of customer sat, you got above a certain level on customer satisfaction. Five calls in a row, you get 500 bonus points. Then the game is encouraging people to optimize on satisfaction. Now, we still don't know in this very general hypothetical. Whether this matches up perfectly, with the job requirements. So, certainly if the system is designed just to create call center agents who want to get customers off the phone as fast as possible at any cost, that's not likely to be something that companies are going to want. At least companies that are thoughtful. Their long term interests and their customer perceptions but the question about how important it is to optimize on customer satisfaction versus something else, is a business decision that the company ultimately that is the customer of the call center. Or the company operating the call center needs to figure out. And then, the structures of the gamified system have to be designed to motivate towards those business goals. So, this ties back into the element of the design framework that I gave you earlier on, to first figure out what the business goals are, and then go through the gamification process. It's always important to focus on the job, or the task at hand, because otherwise, people will optimize themselves on the game. The second dimension here is that sometimes people are motivated at work for things outside the job in a good way. And that refers to corporate citizenshi-, citizenship behaviors, situations where people will do things at work just to be nice to colleagues, or to be good for the company. So, some of the ones that get mentioned here, altruism, people will do things just to be good to other people. Conscientiousness, people will work hard and want to do a good job, just because they take pride in what they do. Civic virtue, a sense that you are part of a larger community, and you care about doing your part for the community even though it's a business community where you work as opposed to a social community at home. Common courtesy and sportsmanship, being fair to others, these are normal human motivations and they're true for people at work as well. And they can be tapped into for the benefit of the company in various examples using gamification. The one that I gave you before was the Microsoft Language Quality game, which tapped into people's desire to make Windows a better product by volunteering their time to find localization bugs. Ross Smith, who is the head of the test group at Microsoft, that implemented the Language Quality game and several other productivity games, has developed a framework to understand which applications lend themselves well to this approach. And his structure involves, two different kinds of behavior or tasks and three different kinds of skills. So the two kinds of behavior are, first, what he calls in-role behavior, ie what you're doing for your job, it's something that's part of your normal job description. And then citizenship behaviors things that you do at work to be a good employee a good citizen of the organization not necessarily these specific things that you are hired to do or compensated for. And then he talks about three different categories of skills, one set are what he calls core skills. Which are skills that everyone in the organization has. The next are unique skills. Skills that are limited to a particular employee or a group of employees and, next future skills. Skills that an employee would like to obtain. And Smith says these productivity games, things like the language quality game, designed to improve productivity in the workplace are best used in just two of the sections of this chart. The first one is for, core roles that involve citizenship behavior, or core skills I should say that involve citizenship behavior. And this is where the language quality game fits. So this is a skill that everyone in the company has, the skill is speaking your own language. It doesn't require anything. Unique to you, any particular training. Anyone who is a native speaker of the language where the office is, can easily review dialogue boxes in their native language, and they're going to do it, not because it's their job. But, because it's part of being a good corporate citizen. So, the fact that the language quality game is down here, and not an in-role kind of task is what enables it. Because if it's a core skill and it's an in-role kind of task then there's not as good a fit for something that is designed to be fun and game like. The only reason to motivate you to do something that everyone in the company can do, is if it's part of this collaborative activity. The other category where he says, gamification, or productivity games work well, is up here so it's in-roll, it's your actual job responsibilities, but it's about future skills. It's about things that you want to learn how to do. That's where gamefication and productivity games can help in terms of training, and improving people's behavior. Really what I think Smith is getting at here, is that there are two big categories of gamefication application in the work place. One involves groups it involves community. Trying to get participation from as many people as possible within the organization. The other involves individuals. And typically involves improving their skills, or improving their performance at work. Those are very different, and one is better done in a, an example that's focused on. Actual job responsibilities, and one is better done outside of that environment. If, it, in the situation, though, involves unique skills, people's unique capabilities but it's skills they already have, a game-like structure may not be as effective. Because it doesn't create a level playing field for people to interact on. If it's not about training and problem solving just showing what you can do, then there is not really an environment for a game or the proper application of gamification. So, all of this goes to emphasize the point hat enterprise gamification requires a close attention to the nature of the game, and how that matches up with the different sorts of objectives and motivations in the workplace.
