How Gamified Strategy Execution is at the Heart of a Lean and Agile Organisation
Gamification taps into some of our most primaeval instinct as humans, motivating behavioural change that lasts. First, it inspires our instinct for survival so that we try and do better than our competitors. Second, it encourages teamwork and collaboration, strengthening workplace bonds similar to personal relationships and once-tribal communities. Finally, it drives permanent behavioural change through positive reinforcement and public recognition, establishing a person as “the winner of the pack.”
In other words, it is a far more effective strategy for operational execution and outcome-oriented tasks than traditional top-down management.
In these last few months, I have been working closely with startups and mature organisations intent on adopting Lean and Agile principles. I have discussed my experience in more detail here — and gamification has proved to be an invaluable crutch for strategy envisioning and execution. Its impacts range from operations to employee engagement and training, and even customer-facing campaigns, essentially improving any outcome-oriented task. In addition, it allows stakeholders to visualise their goals and targets instead of having a much larger and often intangible “purpose.”
I’d argue that the secret behind gamification’s efficacy is its ability to distil corporate purpose into achievable targets that we can take away with us outside of the office environment.
The Potential for Gamification in HR
HR is among the prime candidates for gamified strategy execution, as it relies hugely on people processes.
● Learning and development — Gamification makes self-paced learning programs more engaging and encourages participation. Even without a corporate mandate, as is the case for compliance training, gamification encourages employees to upskill in higher, more value-adding areas.
● Employee benefits adoption — Benefits adoption is directly linked to the returns you get from HR investments. Unfortunately, adoption often remains slow due to a lack of awareness, interest, and perceived irrelevance to the employee’s context. Gamification adds that essential incentive needed for participating in a benefits program.
● Performance management — Performance management in a fast-paced workplace has a lot of potentials to be gamified. For example, managers could convert individual KPIs into collective, team-based goals with feedback shared in the form of daily rewards.
In HR, gamification cultivates a practice of continuous engagement and improvement so that employees feel motivated to bring their best selves to work every day while feeling fulfilled and valued.
How Gamification Could Help Product and Ops Teams
Interestingly, the agile approach to product development has its roots in gamification, with the concept of scrum borrowed directly from the sporting lexicon. For example, in rugby, scrum refers to an orderly team formation where team members work in close collaboration (literally with their arms interlinked) to win against the opponent. Similarly, product owners can set multiple time-bound targets that inspire developers to stay within or exceed release timelines while adhering to quality benchmarks by incorporating gamification principles.
Apart from pureplay products, gamification could play a role in other business operations as well.
● Service request management can be gamified in IT by treating each issue and query as a component in an overarching KPI plan.
● Contact centres can transform agent operations by assigning a specific number of targets and customer volumes, rewarding each instance of exceptional performance.
Incorporating Gamification into Customer Experience
A gamified CX entails a direct cause and effect equation for user action, where the customer gets incentivised to stay engaged. For example, it could involve rewarding and recognising loyalty, highlighting critical customers for their exceptional lifetime value on a more superior strategic level. On a CX execution level, you could gamify the user experience on your product, roll out gamified promotional campaigns, and incentivise feedback sharing and participation in surveys.
This has several benefits:
● There is always the risk of impersonalization and generic experiences when you target a large customer audience, leading to disengagement and dropoff. Gamification prevents this by enabling the customer’s active participation in the CX (apart from purely transactional activities) to drive greater engagement.
● Gamification positions your company as a trusted provider and not just a product seller. For example, consider how in the B2C space, Swiggy discloses its annual numbers for most ordered items, customers spending the most, and individualised scorecards detailing each app user’s engagement. Grammarly does something similar in B2B, telling users how prolific they have compared to their colleagues (i.e., competitors) and their weaknesses and strengths.
● It makes your loyalty programs seem much more meaningful. Imagine a simple points-based system where customers get an apportioned cashback for every transaction and a Starbucks-like strategy where customers win “stars” as rewards that allow them to customise their products, get a free meal, or even receive a birthday treat.
The Challenge with Gamified Strategy Execution is Reaching the “Sweet Spot”
The ultimate purpose of gamification is to help you do more with less. Tapping into our foundational psychological drivers facilitates impactful behavioural change at a relatively low cost and effort investment. However, the challenge with this tactical approach is finding the sweet spot among your users and employees without risking boredom or anxiety.
A gamified structure that’s too involved in points, trophies, personas, scores, etc., can lose sight of the underlying psychological need and become so complex that its perception is “too boring.” On the other hand, if the gamified targets simulate a sense of urgency too closely, it can cause excessive anxiety among players, leading to burnout.
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi captured this problem best through the notion of flow which he visualised as is given below in his 1990 book:
To be truly effective, organisations must try to achieve gamification that perfectly balances employee/customer skill with the task’s difficulty to sustain a sense of achievement, reward, and desire for more. In addition, it will help to power a seamlessly running organisation where actions are intrinsically motivated and not imposed from the top down, resulting in better outcomes. However, in today’s world, problems of any significance cross boundaries that render the perspectives and methods of single disciplines incomplete and inefficacious. In effect, we need to give experience to undergraduates to think in ways that may prepare them less than adequate for the problems they will face once they leave the college environment and face the outside world. In my understanding, gamification does provide such a direction. The current view that a significant (or minor) subject may have made more sense in a less complex and interconnected world where the perspective and method of one discipline applies to a relatively confined and narrow problem.
To know more, you can reach out to me at <arvind@am-pmassociates.com>.
