Gamification Is Changing How We Work - and Succeed
Gamification Is Changing How We Work - and Succeed
Gamification Is Changing How We Work - and Succeed
By Kevin Werbach & Dan Hunter
November 16, 2020
Summary
Other times, companies misuse the "Guided missile" of gamification to have people work and do things in ways that are against their self-interest.
Of course, you end up on the downside of that particular wave, and everyone goes, "Oh, gamification, it was just a management craze." It turns out now that we're in that sort of happy point that you see in the hype cycle wave of a gradual kind of acceptance that's going upwards, being used in areas where people don't even think about it as being gamification.
They're just thinking about how you get people to do things.
So one of the really interesting things about this has been how we've ended up with people just doing this - implementing these kinds of systems - without going, "Oh, we've got to put out a press release that is all about gamification." You know, "We are the first with the latest." Because it's not the latest anymore, but it's still really powerful.
Now, frankly, the reality, if you ask how much implementation there is of gamification, often as Dan says, without thinking of it as that, it's really much more than the hype of people talking about it.
To me, really brought home the point that people are talking about gamification as a phenomenon a lot less, but people are doing it a whole lot more.
We've seen the same thing in health care, where it's really changing people's lives on things like getting people to take their medicine.
So it's a really great thing, I say as a business school professor, to talk about this as a technique to motivate people at work and a technique to help drive business metrics.
"People are talking about gamification as a phenomenon a lot less, but people are doing it a whole lot more." -Kevin Werbach.
"In the subsequent startups that I've done and also in my teaching, it's not so much about gamification as the be-all and end-all. It's about saying,"Hey, what do people really want to do? How can I make this experience of teaching or of an online community, for example, in one of these other startups - how can I make that really a pleasurable experience for people so that they don't feel like it's work, they don't feel like it's really hard? You know, I'm not going to class and being bored out of my mind.
Reference
Werbach, K., & Hunter, D. (2020, November 16). Gamification Is Changing How We Work - and Succeed. Retrieved November 28, 2020, from https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/for-the-win/