Gamification: How Leaders Can Boost Productivity Through Psychology

We live in a society that has been focused on influencing behavior to consume rather than produce. This makes it increasingly hard to maintain productivity, especially amidst difficult activities like work, without being distracted.

To make matters worse, work is becoming more complex and dehumanizing. People are often required to fulfill several roles and responsibilities while being expected to operate like a machine.

Fortunately, the gaming industry, which has spent millions to learn how to motivate people to play games for the sake of experience, has some insight into solving this problem. They discovered principles that can drive the same relentless motivation people have in playing video games towards productive work.

These principles are not easy to adopt alone, but with the help of leaders, they can transform organizations to become not just more productive but also more humane.

This article will explore what gamification is, why is it important, and how leaders can implement them in the workplace.

What is Gamification, and Why Is It Important?

Gamification is the process of integrating game elements into other areas of activity. This can be as simple as creating goals, setting rules to achieve them, and giving rewards after accomplishing them.

Through the lens of psychology, it uses the concept of cognitive reframing-- a way to view neutral or negative things in a positive light.

As we are transitioning to modern work environments with increasingly complex goals, nuanced rules, and delayed rewards, our unevolved brain are struggling since it was designed for simple goals, rules, and immediate rewards back in our hunter-gatherer era. This is partially why work is becoming more disincentivizing to engage with, especially when there are distractors that are much more appealing.

Therefore, if leaders want to boost productivity and maintain smooth operations in today's age, they must learn how to cognitively reframe work as simple, clear, and fun.

Soft Ways to Apply Gamification

There are several soft ways that leaders can apply gamification-- ways that implement its principles into company systems without making use of anything tangible. Here are some of them:

Breaking Down Goals

Leaders have already used several frameworks to create goals such as OKR's, KPI's, SMART goals, etc. The gamified way to do this is to imitate how games hook people to do things. They create huge goals and several clear and achievable subgoals underneath them.

For example:

Actionable Goal:

• In two weeks, produce 250 pots with the best-selling design from the previous quarter.

Actionable Subgoals:

• Ask the sales department about the best-selling pot designs from the previous quarter.
• Request the supplier for the type of mud used for those pots
• Create 25 pots per day, a total of 10 working days within two weeks

The more actionable these goals and subgoals are, the better (especially for those starting out).

It must be noted that leaders will not always be able to know the exact courses of action to take for every role especially when something is out of their expertise.

Instead, they can create sessions where they create broad goals and let employees narrow their goals into more actionable subgoals that they can take. This system can then trickle top-down to the organizational hierarchy.

When people can explain their goals-- they are given an opportunity to understand their job at a fundamental level. Having them explain their goals to others requires them to think of all the steps that are relevant to achieving said goals.

Goal-setting is not only an opportunity to give each member mental clarity and focus, but it's also a way to bond employees by helping them understand how each other thinks.

There is scientific evidence that goal-setting helps mental well-being. When people break down abstract goals into clear and actionable tasks, it offloads mental burdens which allows focus more on doing tasks at hand.

Setting Clear Rules

Anyone who has played games before knows how frustrating it can be if you lose a game due to unwritten or vague rules-- such as bugs due to poorly coded areas in the games. If rules have spaces in logic, unexpected consequences are bound to happen. Anyone who suffers these consequences is bound to be distracted from achieving their goals.

Therefore, leaders must learn how to create clear and nuanced rules. Their rules must answer questions such as: what is this rule meant to do, when does it apply, when does it not apply, and what exceptions can made to break said rule?

Creating rulebooks and company guides on how to navigate around the company structure, the job, and even the culture are great ways to eliminate ambiguities and create a safe and stable environment to progress toward goals.

Leaders must also inform/create rules once they have seen an employee's actionable goals and subgoals. This is especially important when an employee is new to the job, or exploring unchartered territory. Sometimes, there are certain laws, standards, and procedures that must be upheld to avoid consequences or to progress faster toward goals. These must be established with the insight of the leader and other experienced members in the field.

Giving Immediate Rewards

Immediate rewards are what most leaders fail to implement in their system. One may think that salaries and benefits are sufficient rewards but they are not as we are susceptible to a cognitive bias called hyperbolic discounting-- a tendency to value short-term rewards over significantly greater long-term rewards.

Our minds always subconsciously create a cost-benefit analysis in anything that we do. Long-term rewards are often too abstract for our brains so its often perceived as low value. If weighed against work which is a high-cost activity, then the subconscious brain has no incentive to motivate reinforced behavior.

Learning to associate work with rewards takes knowledge, time, and a high degree of awareness. Some workers aren't even aware of different ways to reward themselves, and some even have limited ways of rewarding themselves. Therefore, leaders have to find a way to give immediate and meaningful rewards to employees, exclusively within the business.

But what kind of rewards must be given? Most might think of financial incentives but it can be as simple as communicating compliments and acknowledgments in any way shape, or form. Returning someone's work with a sticky note saying "good job!" can go a long way to motivate positive behavior.

Integrating Meaning

Other than goals, rules, and rewards, leaders can also gamify work by creating meaning around the work that is done.?

Take chess as an example, in all technicalities, its basic game principles can allow anyone to play it by assigning roles to small objects that fit within boxes of a checkered surface. But part of what makes it engaging is that it appeals to one's ego. By creating names for each piece and carving them with iconic symbolisms to represent societal roles, it creates positions of power for those who play the game-- they become kings controlling an army.

This is why current popular modern games usually have stories and fleshed-out characters. They don't just create mechanics, they create meanings and identities that people would want to adopt.

If leaders can create work that is full of meaning and importance, and subconsciously communicate that through nonverbal cues such as an employee's workplace environment, workplace culture, titles, personal interactions, and other factors, then this gives them more purpose to work hard. Employees will not just work to earn a living, but to keep important roles, status, lifestyles, relationships, and identities.

Hard Ways to Apply Gamification

Gamification can also be applied in a hard way, such as buying software to gamify a certain aspect of your business or integrating gamification within existing company software.

Examples

An example of this is creating a digital workspace for a fully remote team, where they can explore a digital office and communicate with each other online. If your goal is to enable more communication and make it as fun and rewarding as possible, then this can be an attractive option.

There is also the option of using gamification to educate new members to the job or company. Gamified programs enable smooth learning sessions that automatically teach new hires about the company and the job.

How to implement

If leaders want to double the productivity of their employees on a certain aspect, they may want to apply gamification in the area. They may either code it themselves through in-house development, or they can hire outsourcing companies like Starshot Software that specialize in this field.

Although gamification has core components, it is still a field of study on its own with innumerable factors to consider.?

There are thousands of game principles that tap into different theories in psychology and art-- each one appeals to different sets of people and reprograms one's thinking a certain way. Leaders need to find experts who take these factors into account while having the technical coding prowess to pull it off.

Nuances

However, hard gamification has nuances because although it may work, it will always fail if leaders don't address foundational issues within their organization, or they do not employ principles of soft gamification. For example, if people are still not getting any sort of compensation for being required to do overtime, it doesn't matter if they use software that can virtually reward them, they will still be more likely to get burnt out. Leaders must keep in mind that although gamification can boost productivity, it's just one aspect of running a successful business.

Conclusion

Within a rapidly changing world, leaders need to learn how to drive organizations against never-ending distractions and dehumanizing work. They can do this by taking advantage of principles that the gaming industry has employed that drive motivation such as breaking down goals, setting clear rules, giving immediate rewards, and integrating meaning.

Whether through soft application in company systems, or hard application, through specialized software, leaders have all the incentive to gamify work to become more productive, profitable, and humane.