Game On for Employee Gamification

While speaking at a recent HR conference in Vegas, I had occasion to meet Jane McGonigal, game designer, speaker, author, and probably the world’s biggest advocate for gamification, the idea of adding game incentives like points and prizes to non-game activities.  

While within the HR community gamification is still catching on (I find a number of my clients don’t even know recognize the word) gaming, in all forms, is incredibly popular. When the latest Call of Duty video game was released in November, one in four workers called in sick. Look at it from a productivity standpoint: The amount of hours it took to create all of Wikipedia’s content in 12 years…is spent every three weeks playing Angry Birds. 

During Jane's keynote speech, she cited the 2012 Gallup study that found that 71% of American employees aren’t fully engaged in their work, making it “impossible to innovate” and costing $30 billion in lost productivity annually. 

Infographic courtesy of Gigya

It's no surprise that she believes gamification can help. Evidently she's not alone. A study by gamification company Gigya showed that gamification increases website engagement by 29%, website commenting by 13%, and social media sharing by 22%. Here are some recent employee gamification success stories.

Motivating employees

Risk Management Services recently turned an internal re-branding into a trading card game. “Another email or intranet page just wasn’t going to get employees on board,” Vice President of Talent Acquisition and Employee Engagement Amelia Merrill told IABC. “This contest was fun and different from anything we have ever done.” Merrill said the initiative was a “smashing success.”

Orientation and onboarding

Recruitment marketing agency Maximum recently won a Creative Excellence Award for Best Interactive Media for its Deloitte China Virtual Tour campaign. Maximum virtually mapped Deloitte’s offices in Beijing, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, allowing job-seekers to explore every department – and get a firsthand look at what working at Deloitte China is really like. More than 20,000 job-seekers took part in the tour’s game feature, Green Dot Mission, and shared their scores on China’s most popular social networks.

Health and wellness

Aetna recently partnered with social media company Mindbloom to create an enhanced version of Mindbloom’s Life Game, an online social game for personal wellness. Players grow an on-screen tree by attaining personal goals, ranging from health to relationships to finances. According to Forbes, activities include “substituting water for soda, taking the stairs to the office, cleaning your room each day, or simply thanking a friend.” Players earn virtual rewards while making progress in their real lives.

Employee referrals

Just last month, Herd Wisdom launched Most Wanted, a mobile app that gamifies the employee referral process. How? “Every action – from choosing an avatar to sharing a job posting – earns points and get participants in the running to win giveaways from Herd Wisdom,” the company says. The game offers “instant gratification,” since employees can earn points and prizes before they refer anyone, and features funny animated scenes to keep them engaged. Mobile apps like Most Wanted turn social sharing and mobile gaming, which just about everyone likes, into a talent pipeline for any company.

Are you ready to gamify your careers site, social recruiting channels, employee referral program, or other HR initiatives? Contact Brandemix and it’s game on.

Three Chances to See "Socialize Your Talent Strategy" This Month

Click here to register for the SHRM 2013 Talent Management Conference.

Click here to register for SocialHRCamp New York.

Click here to register for the Quality of Hire virtual conference on HR.com.

How IBM's Intranet Improves Employee Development and Retention

At  HR/NY's fabulous social media recruiting panel (which I moderated,) the audience and I were wowed as Nabeel Ahmad, Learning Developer at IBM, rocked the New York Times Building. 

He showed how IBM, the conservative corporate giant, has been letting its hair down and opening its intranet to new ideas. The results have been greater collaboration, better retention, and more advancement opportunities. Here's how IBM did it, and how you can too:

Employees Thank Each Other 

Instead of a top-down rewards program, IBM allows its employees to recognize each other with "Blue Thx." These can be sent to any colleague anywhere in the world. And it's not a private interaction; a leaderboard shows who's received the most "Thx" in the last 30 days. Kind, simple gestures like these help unite IBM's global workforce of 400,000. 

Employees Shadow Each Other

IBM's ShadowMe program connects employees with senior executives based on department and location. A search for "social learning," for example, brings up more than 800 IBMers across the entire company. Employees can physically shadow their mentors at the same office, or virtually follow mentors anywhere in the world. An employee never has to miss a learning or development opportunity because the expert in their field is in a different building, city, or country.

Employees Learn From Each Other

IBMers have access to a crowdsourcing resource, allowing them to ask their colleagues questions about any topic. An HR question posted here, for example, yields much faster results than an email submitted to HR...and it cuts down on HR's workload. While there's a danger that employees might give each other wrong answers, I've found that, like Yelp restaurant reviews, the truth usually rises the top. 

Employees Don't Have to Email Each Other

Nabeel asked us if we agreed with the statement "I live in my email." That attitude is a problem at IBM, so senior leaders look for any way to keep employees' inboxes clean. When new CEO Ginni Rometty took over in January, she didn't send an email announcement; she put her speech on video and made it available only on internal channels. This showed everyone at IBM how serious she was about cultivating the intranet.

IBM's collaborative spirit even extends to live events. Before a recent technology panel, employees were asked to submit questions ahead of time. But instead of picking his favorites, the moderator made all the submissions public and allowed employees to vote for the best ones. This ensured that the panel addressed the issues most pressing to the largest group of people. If you've been to an event where someone asks a question that's relevant only to them, you know how important this is.

Nabeel showed us that IBM's conservative image doesn't really reflect the true nature of its employees' creativity, resourcefulness, or satisfaction. If your business is large enough for an intranet, we'd love to put the lessons of IBM and other corporate superstars to work for you. Contact me for more details.