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The ways in which organizations think about engaging their employees have changed drastically over the past fifty years, influenced by the social and technological trends that shape our daily lives.
Since the Second World War, the evolution of how management teams treat their workforce can be split into three clearly defined stages, best defined by the anagrams Meat, Team, and Mate.
Recognizing these trends is one thing, but how do we actually take advantage of them to embed behavioral change within organizations?
Let’s take a look at the evolution of the workforce.
In the immediate post-war era we saw workers treated by management as unthinking resources, pieces of meat if you will. Employees were happy to act upon direct instruction to complete tasks, within military-based, hierarchical structures.
The introduction of the baby boomers into the workforce of the 1970s saw the first shift in attitudes. Worried that such human battery-farming techniques would limit innovation, some companies decided to proactively move towards more ‘team’ - based structures.
Step 3 takes us to the modern day where companies are comprised of socially-connected individuals, motivated by relationships with colleagues and the organization itself; the ‘mate’ generation has arrived, where employees feel subservient to no one and equal to all.
The proliferation of mobile devices and the growth of cloud computing has done more than simply enable remote working; it has shifted more power into the hands of the individual. In what must now be considered the ‘Age of Individualism’, employees are more informed than ever and able to make their voices heard, through social media channels, giving them a much greater awareness of their own worth and the power to control their own career. As a consequence they need a more intuitive style of management. Enabled by the same technological advances that have changed employees’ attitudes, management can use game mechanics to tap into these individual motivations and drive improvements to business performance.
Game mechanics is the practice of changing employee behavior through a combination of rewards, feedback and incentives. It can be manifested in the form of leaderboards, levels, badges, points and challenges and used to improve employee engagement, raise the quality of data an organization gathers and educate staff throughout the working day. However, there is more to game mechanics than just the competitive traits that leaderboards appeal to and the blanket financial bonuses of traditional incentives programs.
The key to the success of game mechanics is to remember that we are all driven by different motivations. Broken down simply, there are four different personas that we should be applying game mechanics to.
The Achievers – these employees are driven by the prestige of reaching a new level. For these employees a point scoring system can be set up, linked to performance. For example, completing full records for sales leads can earn an employee points, allowing them to move up a level, symbolized by any status symbol, whether that be animals of the savannah or mountain ranges.
The Explorers – these employees are motivated by mastery and learning new skills. They are turned off by having to plough through levels and chase badges for the sake of recognition. The best way to apply game mechanics to this group is by setting up nudges and hints within the application that can sit on top of your CRM system. This allows you to educate staff as they are completing tasks, letting them know how they could be improving performance.
The Socializers – these employees are keen to collaborate in the workplace and achieve things as a team. Setting up team rewards such as meals out, and integrating applications such as Chatter, will allow team members to collaborate with ease, driving that social interaction that is so important to many of us in the workplace.
The Killers – the most important objective for these employees is to win, regardless of the cost. Public leaderboards will get the best out of these characters. They cannot bear to be beaten by colleagues and will do everything to be top of the tree.
The key to implementing game mechanics successfully is to ensure they are specifically tailored to the needs of the workforce they are applied to. Management must constantly monitor and tweak the specifications to ensure game fatigue does not set in and that employee behavioral change is embedded within an organization. Game mechanics should not be treated purely as a software purchase. Without the managed service element any improvements will only be seen in the short-term, but with the requisite investment of time, you will be able to maximize the latent potential within your workforce.
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