Written by: Sufiz Suffian
Gamification has become a buzz word as of late with many growing interest in the subject, particularly on how gamification could be injected into other areas, be it in learning, product and service design, and more. This has a lot to do with it being closely associated with increasing engagement and fun. But what makes gamification so engaging and fun in the first place? The very idea of gamification doesn't necessarily mean creating a game, as many would mistakenly believe. If that was so, it wouldn't be much of a surprise as to why people would find it that enjoyable in the first place. Rather, gamification by definition is taking engaging elements in games and applying them in a different environment. So not exactly a game, yet it is game-like? The best way to possibly approach this is to understand what makes something engaging in the first place.
An “engaged employee” is said to be someone who is fully absorbed by and enthusiastic about their work and so takes positive action to further the organization's reputation and interests. In other words, engagement is all about motivation. So, to properly engage people, it is imperative that we understand what motivates people to begin with. Motivation can be broken down in different ways but for all intents and purposes, we will focus on two variances of motivation: extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. When a person is extrinsically motivated, their behaviour is motivated by an external factor pushing him/her to do something in hopes of earning a reward or avoiding a less-than-positive outcome. On the other hand, when a person is intrinsically motivated, their behaviour is motivated by their internal desire to do something for its own sake. Among the two types, most would obviously prefer the latter. Yet if we look at the foundation of today's world, most of it is built on extrinsic motivation.
Consider the industrial revolution, where technological developments played a pivotal role in fostering the growth of industry, from railroads to steam engines to electricity. But with new advancements came a new set of challenges, how can these be best managed and maintained for sustainable growth? Businesses were being run haphazardly and incredibly inefficiently. To combat this, a gentleman named Frederick Winslow Taylor invented "scientific management". In essence, scientific management is a theory of management that analyses and synthesizes workflows. Its main objective is improving economic efficiency, especially labour and employee productivity. The heart of it all? Extrinsic motivation. It promoted the idea of "a fair day's pay for a fair day's work". However, as the years went by and new innovations appeared on humanity's doorstep through the efforts of brilliant individuals and companies, resulting in a more complex world and increasingly sophisticated inhabitants, we find that we are still stuck in the shadow of scientific management and continue to focus on rewarding the good and punishing the bad.
This incompatibility comes from the change in how we do work today compared to when scientific management first came into existence. Back then, almost all work was algorithmic where one would merely need to follow a set of established instructions down a single pathway to one conclusion. Today, most of these tasks are either outsourced to cheaper nations, automated, or made obsolete by other advancements in technology. Most of what we do at work today is heuristic in nature, where one would need to experiment with possibilities and devise a novel solution to most problems of today. Scientific management's carrot and stick ethos works best for algorithmic tasks, but can impair heuristic ones. Some might think paying someone a large amount of currency to do any given task would motivate them significantly, but most often than not the opposite tends to occur.
Studies have shown that paying or rewarding someone to do good deeds such as donating blood or volunteering would in fact reduce their motivation to do those things compared to when they were not paid to do them in the first place. Countless other studies and experiments have been conducted all over the world where one group of test subjects were given a reward to complete a series of tasks while another group was given no reward for doing the same tasks, and the results were all the same. Rewards impaired motivation. It simply took the joy out of doing the tasks, causing performance to suffer, foster short-term thinking, and sometimes even encourage unethical behaviour and cheating.
Wikipedia, undeniably the largest encyclopaedia in the world, is free and created and edited by volunteers from around the world. None of its contributors were given financial rewards for their work despite billions of people using it in their own pursuit of knowledge and curiosity. As we've learned, rewarding these volunteers would probably lead to the downfall of Wikipedia. So why does intrinsic motivation drive us so much? To create masterpieces of art, to find cures to deadly diseases, and to create the next disruptive innovation? And most importantly, how can we inject intrinsic motivation into our workplace to increase engagement of our employees and managers? The answer lies in one word - Autonomy.
Autonomy means acting with choice, be it choosing when to go to work, how to solve a problem, and where you do work. Having a sense of autonomy has a tremendous effect on individual performance and attitude. It promotes greater conceptual understanding, better grades, enhanced persistence toward challenges, higher productivity, less burnout, and greater levels of psychological being. In other words, autonomy is creating an environment where people can make their own choices freely, which is something gamification excels in. Sure, some choices they make may not yield the best results immediately. But in the long-term, they'll make the right choices that work best for them. But with this much autonomy, surely there is room for abuse? Control is needed right? Control leads to compliance, whereas autonomy leads to engagement, and only through autonomy can we truly reach our full potential and even achieve mastery.
So rather than creating more linear processes for employees to comply to, giving them more freedom to approach work however and whenever they prefer might be better (with some clear boundaries set of course) as this creates the right environment for intrinsic motivation and autonomy to foster and spread.
Sufiz Suffian is the Chief Business Officer of Think Codex, a Gamification Consultant & Trainer.
You may reach out to him via https://www.linkedin.com/in/sufizsuffian/