Setting and tracking KPIs to ensure long-lasting behaviour change

Want to inspire solid behaviour change? Start by tracking KPIs like a pro.

Gamification provides more than just a fun way to boost morale – it’s also an innovative way of tracking KPIs to drive lasting behaviour change when it comes to your in-house sales team. Here’s why.

By now you probably realise that gamification can improve sales team performance which is obviously great in and of itself. Now we’d like to get you excited about the ways in which it can be woven into your business processes to help you to set and track the key performance indicators (KPIs) that underpin sales success.

Let’s be honest. It’s a challenge to motivate a sales team to meet targets every single month. It’s a high pressure job with a fair amount of stress, so pushing performance means more than just selling more. It means selling better.

This is where gamification comes in. When applied correctly, gamification is more than a way to make the drudgery of sales admin amusing. It can be designed and scaled to track any number of performance metrics tied to specific goals.

Why gamification is so useful in a sales environment

The benefits of gamification in the South African work environment are far from anecdotal. A recent study on the impact of gamification on employee engagement in advertising agencies in South Africa showed that employees from companies that use gamification have significantly higher overall engagement levels, intellectual and affective engagement levels, and social engagement levels. They also had increased organisational citizenship behaviour levels and reduced turnover.

When it comes to sales, the results are much the same. Major companies like Hewlett-Packard (HP) have included gamification elements in their personnel management strategies and reported a significant rise in revenue (up to 44% in some cases!) as a result. Every internal sales team is different, but they also have certain things in common – they thrive on friendly competition – and frequent rewards encourage them to achieve higher results. And sales leaders who promote collaboration and mentorship are effective in driving innovation from within the team.

All of this can be done with the help of gamification mechanics like leaderboards that focus on both sales and performance, points that make difficult tasks and behaviours more attractive, badges that commend experience gains in certain areas, challenges that reflect differences in roles and function, and so on.

It all comes down to three psychological principles that go beyond rewards, namely:

Compulsion loops that are based on anticipation, action and reward.
Scheduled reinforcements that reduce boredom and promote continued participation.
Intrinsic motivators that tread a fine line between ‘it’s too hard, I won’t win’, and ‘it’s too easy, what’s the point?’.

How setting and tracking multiple KPIs can improve sales performance

When sales competition is solely focused on sales closed, rather than all the activities that lead up to a sale, things are bound to go wrong. Multiple KPIs provide a more nuanced yardstick that gives a better indication of specific areas where sales people tend to drop the ball, or where teams need to change their approach to the process overall.

When you track the right KPIs, it’s much easier to up your game as a sales manager because you have access to data that makes revenue generation easier to control based on visibility and predictability. As such, you are able to gauge whether each member of your team is operating at peak efficiency, and whether there are gaps in the process that have to be bridged. This, in turn, makes it easier to adopt suitable workflows, share resources and schedule staff training and coaching to increase overall productivity in the long run. In short – you can make smarter strategic decisions and put them into practice by means of clear targets and assessments.

Choosing your metrics – which KPIs to track for sales success

Think about your KPIs as the game rules that will ultimately align your sales team’s behaviour with your corporate goals. A well-balanced set of KPIs will include both performance indicators (e.g. more sales, better leads) and process indicators (e.g. timeous completion of admin, efficient use of the internal CRM system) that are tied to specific business objectives.

Well-defined goals and metrics are the foundations of good gamification design; supporting both the effectiveness of the rules structure to motivate behaviour, and the value of the data to monitor progress and guide modifications.

Here are a few examples of the performance measures you might consider.

Lead-generation activities. How many calls are they making, meetings are they taking, emails are they sending, demos are they booking? Classic gamification mechanics like points, badges and leaderboards are an ideal way to inject a spirit of friendly competition among the sales team. Progress and feedback bars help people stay focused on targets and motivated to meet individual goals.
Response time and follow-up. How promptly are your sales people responding to queries from prospective customers, and are they getting back to existing customers on a tight enough timeline? If this is an area that’s lagging, maybe it’s not a performance issue, but a training issue. Gamification can make that kind of learning real and relevant.
Resource usage. Are they leveraging the marketing content or customer resources you’ve made available to them? Define the precise behaviours you’re looking for and build them into your rules.
Upselling and customer retention. Do existing customers stick around to order more, and is your sales team successfully upselling additional goods or services? Again, define the targets and build them into your rules.
Alignment with company ethos. Are your sales reps going about their business in a way that aligns with your overall vision and mission – do their actions reflect well on your business and do they contribute to positive company culture? Yes, gamification can help you evaluate those softer issues and provide feedback you can use to design interventions.

These are just a few basic examples of KPIs that could be measured using gamification. Remember that your goal should always be to analyse the behaviour and actions of your top performers and to use these insights to encourage those tried-and-tested methods among the rest of your team, as opposed to promoting quick-fix behaviours that won’t stick or have a significant impact.

Keen to give gamification a go to see how it drives lasting behaviour change to meet those all-important KPIs? We say go for it – gaining a better understanding of individuals’ motivations will help you boost sales performance and get the most out of your team. Schedule a chat with the experts to get the ball rolling – contact us today.

The skinny on breaking bad habits in the workplace with gamification

Breaking bad habits is much easier with gamification in the mix and you can use it to supercharge your workforce when you do it right.

Breaking bad habits is tough at the best of times. The human brain is wired to stick to its guns and it loves a bit of instant gratification, which is why many of us keep on spending too much time playing video games, eating stuff we know is bad for us and getting up to super sketchy stuff like smoking, long after we knew better.

We know it’s unhealthy, we know we shouldn’t, and yet, there we find ourselves – binge-watching yet another Netflix show instead of heading outdoors over the weekend, melting cheese onto stuff instead of making a superfood smoothie and lighting up a cigarette instead of, you know, breathing clean air and not getting emphysema.

The same goes for bad habits at work, of course.

Why you should be concerning yourself with employee wellness in 2020

Healthy, happy people get stuff done. On the flipside, all work and no selfcare makes Jack and Jill pretty miserable. Statistics tell us that South African employees are busier and more unhealthy than ever before. In a bid to stay ahead, they’re sleeping less, sitting more, eating worse and burning out. This is bad for them, and bad for business – unwell employees are often absent and they tend to leave in search of greener pastures.

Unhealthy employees are also far less likely to be actively engaged at work, and that is a major problem, and we do mean major. Here are a few scary statistics to explain what we mean. Only 9% of the South African workforce is actively engaged, and of the 91% who were disengaged, 45% were actively disengaged (i.e. very negative about their job environment and likely to spread the negativity to co-workers).

In fact, over half of young employed South African professionals are job-hunting and looking to change employers within the next year. On the other hand, highly engaged teams show a 21% greater profitability than their competitors and companies that invest in employee experience are four times more profitable than those who don’t.

The benefits of fostering a culture of wellbeing

So what’s a forward-thinking business to do if they want to get the right kind of healthy folks on board? The truth of the matter is that balanced spaces attract star players. If you want to attract high-performing top talent that bring their best selves to work every day (and have these star players stick around for longer than a minute) your employer brand has to be irresistible. The A-team is out there, but they want to know that your business values them as humans as well as employees. This is why it’s about time we ditch the cookie-cutter and lead by example when it comes to employee wellness.

See, the same-old, same-old, top-down, one-size-fits-all, incentive-driven approach is not as inspiring as one might think. Programs that fail to drive lasting lifestyle change by giving employees tools to make those changes themselves don’t lead to happier, healthier employees. Additionally, sustainable wellness is not a nice-to-have that can be sorted out with a wellness check or two.

To truly work, it has to go much deeper, higher and wider than that. You need to cultivate a culture of wellbeing that results in greater engagement, productivity, creativity, resilience and retention at all levels of your organisation. Which is where gamification comes in!

How gamification saves the day!

By integrating game mechanics and dynamics into your internal business processes, you can drive participation and program engagement among your employees. Gamifying a set of activities with compelling actions, processes, and control mechanisms effectively creates a ‘playing field’ of rules and rewards that makes for a highly engaging user experience that’s fun, challenging and satisfying all at the same time.

As humans, we all have a fundamental desire to receive rewards, attain status, chalk up achievements, engage in competition with our peers and express ourselves. These universal, cross-generational desires are a reality among all demographics, cultures and genders, and gamification taps into this rich vein of motivation to drive the behaviours you want to promote among your employees.

When you choose to gamify your company’s approach to wellness, you can help employees become happy, calm, connected and energised by holistically considering the whole person and the relationships between the elements that free, fuel and inspire the humans that make up your workforce.

Plus, because gamification basically works on a data feedback loop, you can gather a goldmine of data and insights on a host of other key issues, for example, absenteeism, retention, and engagement.

For more on the topic of HR data analytics, read The hidden gems of gamification data.

By using gamification in the right way you can design your corporate wellness program to:

Inspire your troops by means of fun tasks and prompts that keep them interested and inspired.
Engage and empower employees with wellness content tailored to your company.
Transform and sustain your team’s overall lifestyle with ongoing gamified wellness coaching.
Gather data to assess and determine a baseline and gap analysis so you may easily review and adjust your trajectory on an ongoing basis.

Top tips for creating a gamified program that works

However, not all gamification initiatives are created equal. If you want this approach to work, there are a few important steps you need to follow.

Base everything on the latest science. Human behavioural science is a constantly developing field. If your gamification initiative is to work it has to leverage these findings to tailor a fun, creative, modern approach to create game environments that promote sharper thinking, foster epic engagement and give your people the opportunity to grow, thrive and become the best versions of themselves.

Speak human. If you outsource this mission, choose to collaborate with a team that has a strong capability and track record in employee communication and engagement. They need to know how to speak to your people in a language that motivates them and helps them feel understood.

Make it personal. Whole-person wellbeing should be anchored with self-awareness, and driven by communication. This is why a deeply personalised approach that supports each individual’s unique wellbeing journey results in meaningful change.

Use what you have and start where you’re at. Be nimble in your approach by choosing to optimise, augment or develop a bespoke wellness program that suits your company’s unique needs and various solutions that play different roles in creating a culture of wellbeing.

Keen to find out more about gamification and how you can use it to help your employees to break bad habits and level-up in terms of overall wellness? Feel free to reach out to the Playa team. We specialise in creating gamified experiences that change behaviour and can provide you with everything you need to get your employees fully engaged. Best of all – we’ll give you a view of your data like never before, design a system that drives your company wellness goals and give your people a platform they love to use. Contact us today.

How to personalise compliance training for a better, safer workplace

Compliance training is a concern in organisations around the world, yet data shows traditional methods just aren’t working. Gamification may be the solution.

There have been epic compliance failures in the headlines lately. So if corporate compliance dramatically impacts organisations everywhere, why are we getting it wrong so often? A rethink of training methods is a good place to start.

Is compliance training working for you?

Most organisations will be quick to talk about their consistent adherence to compliance training requirements, but judging by the prominent ethics and compliance failures of the past two years, this probably isn’t the case. Or, if it is, the compliance message isn’t getting through. There’s been Facebook’s shady data privacy practices, Tesla’s supply of “false and misleading” information to investors, allegations of unethical conduct and fraudulent employee behaviour at Wells Fargo, and the anti-money laundering scandal surrounding Danske Bank.

In essence, compliance training should help employees understand the rules, regulations and policies relevant to their work and illustrate the potential ramifications of non-compliance. Clearly businesses are failing, too often, to deliver training that influences the real-life decisions employees must make every day. Most situations are always messier than any training scenario and have a fair number of grey areas that aren’t covered in traditional training manuals.

So how do you know if your training is effective, or not?

Too many workplace accident incidents. When compliance training fails to educate your people about workplace health and safety laws and regulations, both employees and clients (or customers) are vulnerable to accidental injury, or even death. Apart from the lapse of moral and ethical responsibility, the legal, financial and reputational damage could have dire consequences for your business.
New laws and regulations take your employees by surprise. Since laws and internal policies are constantly evolving in South Africa, your training material must be continuously updated and easily accessible to all staff.
There are regular lapses in your internal processes. There can be costly consequences for organisations that fail to effectively communicate roles and responsibilities and hold individuals accountable. Non-compliance can result in significant legal and financial risks to the business.
Employees resist training or don’t complete it. If your training courses are boring and repetitive (particularly for mandatory annual training), you’ve already the lost the battle. This makes your business and employees vulnerable to compliance failures.

The quickly changing and complex regulatory landscape of a business today means that complying with the relevant laws, rules and internal policies (both to the letter and in spirit), is crucial to your organisation’s sustainability and success. How do you do this?

Bring your training into the 21st century

It makes little sense in an age of smartphones, 24-hour connectivity and knowledge on-tap, that much corporate compliance training still consists of instructor-led classroom sessions and PowerPoint presentations. These traditional methods are not considered the most effective as stand-alone practices. On-the-job-training, and games and simulations are the more effective methods and tools, but just 11% of businesses use virtual classrooms, informal collaboration and simulations.

48% of companies would like to train this way in future, according to Brandon Hall Group’s 2017 Compliance Training Study. But it seems that although organisations realise the importance of updating their methods, they fail to do so. This could be because they’re uncertain about how to train today’s digital-savvy employees, or they’re up against other obstacles like a lack of buy-in at executive level.

Making the case for gamification

Whether you realise it or not, gamification has become mainstream in most people’s lives. If you’re an avid collector of loyalty points, or faithfully track your daily steps with a fitness app, you’ve been hooked by the power of gamification. So if you want to speak to your employees in a way they’ll understand – and in a voice that excites them – get familiar with gamification sooner rather than later. There’s a real and well-documented business case to be made for gamification of learning in the workplace.

Karl Kapp, Professor of Instructional Technology at Bloomsbury University in the U.S. is a world authority on the impact of learning games in corporate and educational settings. He says, that combining the principles of gaming with good quality instructional design, works well for compliance training because games embed good decision making behaviours, support learning transfer by mimicking real life choices and situations, and can be incorporated into a wider ongoing learning program.

In a game situation, players must make conscious decisions about what is allowed and what is not. This is actioned not only mentally, but has a corresponding physical action. Gamification of learning does not stop there. People get feedback on whether or not a decision and action was correct or incorrect. Effective feedback then provides the next steps for learning.

Also, a game can be designed to be played over time – and from research we know that the most effective way to not only learn, but retain what has been learnt, is by learning little bits over time. This is also called micro-learning. The repetitive nature of a well-designed game allows decision making to become automatic over time, reinforcing desired behaviours in a way that is not intimidating. This allows people to feel more open to learning with fewer mental obstacles.

How to get gamification of compliance training right

Getting proper performance out of a workforce is never about the message alone. It’s about how you choose to deliver that message. So pay as much attention to the best delivery mechanisms as you do to the message itself. Rethink that old training manual into gaming videos and simulations. Use what works. Turn compliance into a game quest that they enjoy engaging with, and you’ve taken the first steps to creating a culture of continuous learning in your organisation.
Pace a training course. Deliver content in smaller quantities, less frequently. If non-compliance continues to be an issue in your organisation – you probably need better training, not more of the same training.
It’s easier to turn learning into an enjoyable experience that aims to keep a person returning to learn over the long term, if you stop seeing compliance training as an onboarding or annual event. Keep in mind the evolving nature of laws and regulations and turn your compliance training into an exciting journey of professional development.
Carry out an internal audit of your learning management system. The Brandon Hall Group’s 2017 Compliance Training Study found that the higher the percentage of manual management of training activities, the less effective the training becomes. This is because manual management tends to be less effective than using an automated system that allows all compliance functions to be managed from a single platform.

Training for real people

None of us like to feel like a one or a zero. Gamifying your compliance training says a lot about you before you’ve even asked an employee to learn a single rule or regulation. Turning learning into an enjoyable and non-intimidating experience, making training digitally accessible, and speaking to your people in a way they understand through all the modern online training tools at your disposal – communicates their worth to your company. This is the message they will respond to with loyalty and their best efforts – and that, today, is the new bottom line.

Gamification and the microlearning feedback loop

The efficiency of your microlearning feedback loop is a key element in the gamification of learning – it keeps employees focused, inspired and promotes enjoyment of continuous learning.

Learning and development professionals know that getting employees to commit to on-the-job learning is a challenge. Gamification – using gaming design, elements and mechanisms to maximise enjoyment and engagement in learning – is the best device in the L&D toolkit. Key to the gamification of learning is microlearning feedback. Data-driven, instant feedback clarifies goals, drives motivation and enriches the learning experience. The result? A more proficient and engaged workforce with a positive effect on your business.

Let’s find out more about the benefits of gamification and how you can use meaningful feedback to drive your microlearning strategy.

The gamification – microlearning connection

Two groundbreaking social developments took place in the second half of the 20th century. Education embraced the concept of learning as fun and students became involved in a more active type of learning. And gaming went from crude arcade video games to eighth generation consoles and a $152 billion industry.

For decades, professionals have studied the psychology of gaming. An ideal game flow happens when a game challenges a player sufficiently to keep them interested in playing, by being neither too hard (not fun anymore) nor too easy (plain boring).

Gamification came from this learning. Elements of gaming – which can be anything from point scoring, leaderboards and competitions, to sophisticated simulated experiences – make the hard or boring stuff fun. The purpose is to quickly engage people in the experience of learning, accommodate different learning styles, and help them absorb information easily and retain it for longer.

Microlearning is a response to our busy lives and the way we access and process information in a world of search engines and mobile devices. Chunks of training content are reduced to bite size modules that can be accessed from any device and easily digested in one short session.

By now you’ll see the natural connection between gamification and microlearning. When combined, they create a microlearning solution that is fun and interactive, personalised and relevant. Together, they increase engagement in learning, drive strong behavioural change, and allow people to see real world applications – this significantly improves a person’s ability to implement new information, post-training.

Role of feedback in the microlearning process

Gamification has three components: motivation, mastery and triggers. The trigger elements tell people when and where they can complete a training module. But even if a person is motivated and has the ability to complete the module, there may be obstacles – they could be distracted or doubt their ability to achieve the end goal. Triggers are designed to help people overcome their personal obstacles. But without an effective microlearning feedback loop, your triggers will probably fail because you’ll be unaware of a person’s lack of progress or changing perceptions.

In an interview with Forbes, Yu-kai Chou, author of Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards, predicted that as gamification became more mature in 2019, organisations would “go deeper” to find ways to make desired behaviours more enjoyable. This would see a shift from extrinsic motivation design (rewards and incentives) to intrinsic motivation design (making tasks enjoyable). Rewards and incentives motivate an individual to begin a set of actions, but they don’t tend to last long. Intrinsic motivation, on the other hand, guarantees long term commitment because doing the task itself feels meaningful and rewarding.

Microlearning feedback mimics the instant feedback we’ve come to expect in games – click here and your avatar goes into battle. Perform well and get bonus points; enough to buy a magical sword from a virtual store. Applied to learning programs, real-time feedback gives employees a live view of their personal targets and achievements. They can see how they’re progressing and test their knowledge, be motivated with reminders, and encouraged to stay the course.

If your training sessions only offer feedback at the end, you’ll need to change this. Feedback should be given throughout a course. This allows people to learn as they progress and can give them the learning tools they’ll need to get through more complex modules with confidence.

How to include purposeful feedback in your learning programs

Choose a type of personal interaction

A gamified microlearning solution must include a continuous feedback loop that gives people the cues they need to assess their progress and the learning tools to improve as they move through the training content. To do this, you will need to decide how people interact with content, as well as with their training coach and peers.

A microlearning solution can allow people to engage with content through simulations, or a productive failure design that encourages them to come up with methods for solving complex problems.
One-on-one interaction with a training coach could include a problem or game-based learning experience in which a person must discover crucial information from subject matter experts instead of sitting through a boring monologue. Real-time feedback can also take the form of regular reminders about how each part of the training will benefit their everyday work.
Peer interaction can include feedback from a mentor or co-worker. Giving people the option to ask for support while performing a task in a real life, simulated scenario is a particularly valuable example of a microlearning feedback loop.

Choose the right learning management systems

Traditional learning management systems were used to keep records and curate training content. Today, they do a lot more. Choosing the right system should be based on your objectives – is the system going to be used mainly for onboarding, or will it need to accommodate the large volumes of information involved in advanced training?

A system should always be scalable, have analytics and metrics capabilities, have built-in content authoring tools and a user-friendly interface, support multiple languages and locations, have a fast implementation time, an effective reporting mechanism and offer security compliance. Keep in mind that gamification and microlearning are all about accessibility. So make sure your learning management system can curate a mobile app and training content for mobile devices.

The future of microlearning feedback

Technological advances in augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), along with machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), are already changing the way the gamification of learning is designed and applied.

Simulated real life 360-degree environments, animations, peer-to-peer training support, interactive tutorials, and intelligent systems that gauge a person’s level of comprehension to constantly adjust to individual rates of learning and learning styles – have just begun to hint at the potential of next-generation instructional design and application in gamification.

The goal of feedback in a microlearning environment – to better trigger, understand, motivate, adjust and inspire – is to change not only how we learn, but our perceptions of the learning process and active involvement in a culture of learning. With an engaged, aware and productive workforce, companies stand to make significant gains.

On your marks, get set, learn.

Using games to facilitate learning is a strategy that’s been around forever.

And with good reason; games engage our attention, heighten motivation to win (that is, to learn) and satisfy basic human needs such as ego gratification, pride of mastery and the other emotional rewards that make games fun.Using games in a learning context is known as ‘game-based learning’, which is not to be confused with ‘gamification’. The two terms are often used interchangeably, but they’re different concepts.

Gamification

Gamification is the use of game-like elements in traditionally non-game settings, providing levels, points and badges as the player progresses through a journey of challenges, quests and missions. It’s not a learning tool in and of itself. But applied in a learning context, gamification elements are highly effective aids to learning; especially when learners are required to understand and recall conceptual and procedural knowledge (think compliance training). Gamification basically takes certain game elements and sprinkles them into learning content to make it fun to interact with and easier to retain new information.

Game-based learning

Game-based learning, as a technique, uses games to ultimately achieve a specific instructional goal. Unlike gamification, game-based learning is an actual ‘game’ designed to help people learn. Learners will either gain new knowledge or acquire a new skill by playing the game.

Game-based learning takes instructional content – new software, or new product specifications, for example, and manipulates the information into a stimulating challenge within a game space. It forces learners to stop what they’re doing and willingly engage with the content. And it often contains an element of fantasy. Whether you are surviving a zombie apocalypse or living on a deserted island, the fantasy element brings the story to life and helps reinforce memory and learning. And it’s not just about factual learning. If designed correctly, game-based learning can impart soft skills such as negotiation and problem solving, amongst others, in a thought-provoking manner.

The marriage of gamification and game-based learning

The marriage of gamification and learning is an incredibly clever way to encourage people to learn. It adds a little extra motivation to what we should be doing anyway, and sets up learning as an unfolding flow of quests, missions and challenges leading to ever-higher levels of knowledge and skill.

Gamification inspiring financial upliftment

As you’ve probably noticed from my most recent blogs, I’ve been going through a bit of a personal wellness journey, using gamification to help me improve my overall health and fitness.

Looking back at my story, it occurred to me that if my personal gamified fitness plan could so easily scale up to a company-wide wellness program, maybe other important aspects of everyday life could be gamified for personal benefit and greater good.

So I asked myself, “Could we gamify financial improvement and start a whole social trend toward real financial upliftment in the country?” My exploration started, as usual, with a personal challenge.

Let’s buy a house

I’ve been in the market for a new property for a while and honestly, just haven’t been feeling too confident that I entirely understand my financing options. Most people don’t, of course, but that was little comfort over the hours I’ve spent trying to figure out what kind of loan I qualify for, with which bank and how much I’m in for all told. None of this sounds like any fun, and it hasn’t been until I had a bright idea, “Hey, I can gamify this!”

So I did, and here’s how.

Set objectives

First of all, I set myself some clear, simple objectives:

I want to purchase a new home
I want a house of a specific value

Decide timeframe for achievement of goal

Considering school terms, year-end holidays and my family’s general excitement at the prospect of moving, I chose a conservative 3-month timeframe to purchase a new house.

Identify risk factors

I found it very helpful to think through the factors that could have a negative or positive impact on achievement of my goals. Some were just straightforward requirements that I had to meet, others were subject to behaviour — mine and others.

Loan consultant
Banking behaviour requirements
My financial behaviour
Location of the property
Value of the property

Manage the risks

After identifying the risk factors, I took some time to understand the events/behaviours required to support the achievement of my goals.

1. Loan consultant

Buying and selling property is not my line of work and it can be a very confusing process. I needed to find a mentor who would guide me on my home-buying journey; someone who understood the industry and knew what was required of me as a customer to successful qualify for finance. And also someone who would be patient with my questions and straight with their answers.

2. Banking behaviour requirements

The loan consultant who ultimately joined me on my journey carefully outlined all of the bank’s requirements and gave me a very clear understanding of what needed to happen to achieve my goal within my 3-month timeframe.

3. My financial behaviour

Now that I understood what was required of me, I could take a step back and look at my financial habits over the previous three months and compare those to the behaviours required of me to achieve my goals. I analysed each behaviour as follows:

- Have I been practicing correct behaviours?
- Should I change behaviours that don’t help me meet the new requirements?
- If certain of my behaviours are correct, I need to make sure I continue performing them correctly.
- How often do I need to perform these behaviours over the next 3 months to make sure my actions have the most positive effect on my goals?

After getting clear on all of those points I set up a scorecard to evaluate and track my progress

4. Location of the property

This was pretty easy, but still, I narrowed my scope to a 15km area. It was not too limiting, but tight enough to keep me focused on my priorities and my deadline. It also made me look more closely at the pros and cons of each neighbourhood.

5. Value of the property

In this final step, I needed to understand credit industry regulations and how much I was allowed to borrow irrespective of my financial behaviour. With the assistance of my loan consultant, I learned to take a long-view and evaluate a property based on its future value.

A long journey

House hunting carried on for a good three months. It was a tiring, but interesting process. And I’m sure you’re wondering if I ever achieved my goal. Yes, I did! I found just the right property and got bond approval in exactly a day and a half. And it was offered at subprime!

A good lesson

Now I have a question. How many people out there actually understand what they’re being measured on when they apply for a property bond or a car loan? How many of them actually understand the behaviours required to get a loan and manage the payments?

In order to achieve my financial goals I had to first understand that I was not setting the rules, I had to play by banking and credit industry rules. After that, I had to go through phases to achieve success.

I had to understand what I wanted to achieve and what the requirements were (the rules).
I had to evaluate my current performance against the requirements (the metrics).
I had to track my current performance (using levels/scaffolding to show how close I was to the goal).
I had to control/change my behaviours to impact my goal (show a sense of autonomy over my mission and performance to maximise their effect).

Gamification for good

So after hearing about my experience, imagine how gamification might work in a lending situation. Customers choose their challenge (owning a house for example or saving for a special holiday) then plug into a gamified system that helps them set clear goals, develop a path to achievement, recognises efforts, evaluates performance and rewards success with fanfare and celebration.

Empowered with this kind of support, individuals stand a good chance of changing bad financial habits and acquiring good ones; certainly a better chance than the current system of obtuse rules and punitive charges offers. The benefits are fewer bad debts for the bank, financial empowerment for people and growing economic stability across society.

This is gamification to inspire financial upliftment. Anyone up for the challenge?

Can gamification impact a wellness culture?

In a previous blog article, Fun vs performance, I talked about how Gamification can influence performance and illustrated my point with the formula “F+E2 = P (Fun plus engagement squared equals performance.) Keep this in mind, because you’ll soon see how it’s once again relevant in our current discussion.

This week I was asked the question, “Can gamification impact a wellness culture?” Before I get to that, I want to reinforce how important staff wellness is to corporate culture and performance.

Here are a few of the benefits a company wellness program offers from HFR’s (Health Fitness Revolution) list of Top 10 benefits of a workplace wellness program:

Improved productivity
Lower medical aid costs
Stronger team spirit
Heightened staff morale
Healthy, happy, satisfied workforce
Reduced absenteeism and turnover.

Taking this article to heart, I set myself a goal to see if a structured fitness plan would improve my health, happiness, productivity and job satisfaction.

I don’t belong to a ‘wellness program’, so I considered my available resources and set about testing if it’s humanly possible to get fit enough to achieve all of those benefits. I started with a two-week plan.

Week 1: Control diet and achieve exercise balance

I started looking at what kind of food I was eating and how much I was consuming on a daily basis. That was a little tedious. Wouldn’t it be great, I thought, if I didn’t have to check everything I put in my mouth and someone could just tell me what I should or shouldn’t eat every day?

With no dietitian at hand I consulted the android play store and found an app that was compatible with my smartphone. A very clever app that advised me on the calorie count of different foods and how much I was allowed to consume in a day.

Even better, this app was compatible with my smartwatch, which was already set up to track my steps and tell me how many calories I burned in a day. So by letting my smartwatch exercise app access my food intake the whole diet tracking and recording process became a lot easier.

There’s more. My smartwatch also assessed my sleeping patterns, so my smartphone app now started suggesting an earlier bedtime. Here I thought I was past those childhood days of being sent to bed and now as an adult I have an app setting my bedtime. Go figure.

And the best part, the app linked to my Facebook profile and put me in contact with friends who are also on the fitness journey. We encouraged each other and celebrated milestone achievements. We could even challenge each other and set up competitions for daily, weekly or monthly trophies. I was off to a great start, but needed to go further.

Week 2: Get active and have fun

In Week 2 my app prompted me to walk more and control what I ate. But I still needed to find a way to get more active. I wasn’t ready to make a commitment to a gym membership and wasn’t prepared to go running outside in the cold heart of winter.

I assessed my resources at hand for inspiration. My office building is big and has several staircases. I could easily walk around and climb a few stairs every day. Another idea was the local shopping mall, where I seem to spend a lot of time walking around anyway, thanks to my kids. Neither one of those exercise options seemed challenging enough.

Then I remembered. My kids have a gaming console with Kinect, a camera that tracks movement (if you’re excited by this idea there are cheaper movement camera options with similar features. The wii, for example). And because I’m such a clever Dad, I bought them a few different gaming subscriptions with access to multiple free gaming titles. A little content search produced a title that assisted with exercise routines ranging from novice to expert levels.

So, confidently prepared with a workable healthy eating plan and revived exercise plan, I started a fresh journey to physical fitness.

The exercise gaming activities started off moderately enough, allowing me to work out on my own and at my own pace. But it wasn’t long before the game unlocked opportunities to verse people all over the world in their workouts.

With no prompting from me, the game scheduled daily challenges and boss fights (versing top performers) and tracked each level I managed to unlock. What started out as different activities performed once, then twice a week, were now happening every day and becoming a regular ‘way of life’.

And the odd thing was that my family started noticing the spike in my activity level and thought it looked like fun. So pretty soon they started joining my workouts. In some activities they surpassed me by a lot, while in others I was better than even my teenage kids.

Now I had multiple challengers online and in person to keep me motivated. And on those days when I felt tired and not in the mood to work out, someone in my family would inevitably show up and challenge me to match their workout performance. I could never refuse.

So after all of this true-life background, let me get to the point of this blog. This week, I was asked if gamification can influence a culture of wellness. The answer is “Yes it can”!

Add a few very simple gamification elements to your wellness program and watch participation increase, health costs decrease, and employee productivity pulse with a new energy.

How simple gamification elements can make a positive impact on wellness.

Set up the rules: Control eating and increase activity level
Track performance: Record daily calorie intake and track calorie-burning activities
Create events, simple missions and challenges: Create opportunities for people to join events, challenges and missions that put endurance to the test. Performance can be measured in calories burned or activities completed.
Scaffolding (leveling-up): Once people have completed basic events, provide new challenges and missions that push them just a little harder to reach the next level of achievement
Allow for social engagement: Give people opportunity to share and compare their performance with others on the same fitness journey
Encourage wide participation: Build an entire community of people who share common wellness goals and challenges. This allows for mutual support and teamwork in pursuit of specific goals.

These are all very simple gamification elements that I used to create my own wellness culture among personal friends and family. With just a few everyday resources I made dieting and exercise a fun experience, built a community with family and connected with wellness-minded people all over the world. Plus, I managed to lose some weight and made an all-round improvement in my physical performance.

The hero with a thousand faces

Don’t worry, this is not Game of Thrones and I am not saying that your players will join forces with the Faceless Men.

In one of my previous blog posts: Know the player, know the game, I made the following comment: “Bear in mind that the evaluation of personality traits can vary based on the situation and environment users find themselves in.” This blog post expands on the concept described here.

In order to understand the above I need to explain the The Hero’s Journey. In 1871 an Anthropologist by the name of Edward Taylor observed common plots in myth narratives. Joseph Campbell then published a book called The hero with a thousand faces in 1949, which described the basic structure represented in the diagram below.

View this Hero’s Journey in 6 Popular Movies infographic and see if you can recognize the structure of current film plots?

This hero’s journey can be broken into three parts as described below:

1. The hero’s departure

The player/participant (the hero) starts off with an ordinary day as usual in a familiar world. Out of the blue, the hero receives the call to adventure which opens up their world. This new world brings excitement and a journey towards learning new abilities. There is some hesitation as there is a sense of the unknown, but the hero then receives an aid to guide the journey. Once this mentor/supernatural aid has joined the journey, the next chapter begins.

2. Commencement of the journey

With the hero’s new-found ability and knowledge, the tools and confidence are enough to commence the journey and there is a feeling of confidence and excitement. In this part of the journey, the hero is able defeat basic obstacles, but is then faced with a tragedy/loss and a sense of demotivation/despair sets in. The hero must dig deep and ask questions of their abilities.
Does the hero quit? Or does the hero continue to a challenge greater than their current abilities with no guarantee of success? If the hero continues, the next chapter is unlocked.

3. The hero’s victorious return

The hero has conquered the ultimate enemy, but in doing so has suffered loss, injury or even managed to lose life in the process. There will be a surprise twist as the hero gains a valuable gift of renewed life or a transformation. The hero then looks back at the journey with a sense of mastery and life returns to normal.

Now that we understand The Hero’s Journey let’s look at how this applies to the four basic player types and how the hero connects to each of them during the journey.

1. The hero’s victorious return

The hero draws on a sense of adventure with a the need to experience new things.

2. The socialiser

The hero would not be able to overcome obstacles by using only the known. Collaboration by working with an aid/mentor to gain new knowledge is essential to successfully completing the journey.

3. The achiever

With new skills and knowledge, the hero pushes through obstacles with new energy generally found in the achiever player type. This leads to rapid gain of knowledge and experience.

4. The philanthropist

When the hero faces the ultimate foe/challenge there is more at stake than survival. Once the foe/obstacle has been defeated there is a sense of mastery and with reflection this leads to paving the way for others.

All players are able exhibit qualities of each player type, but this depends on the situation. When creating your gamification solution, it is necessary to cater for all player types in order to gain maximum effectiveness. The player type that manifests within the player can only be determined during their particular point in The Hero’s Journey.

Shall we play a game?

New gamification clients often start conversations with a request to build a game. As providers of gamification solutions, we are not game developers and yet for most providers of gamification systems there is a need to frequently explain the difference.

Of course, it’s completely understandable given that gamification is derived from the word game. This post will hopefully help to explain away some confusion.

Karl Kapp, author of Learning and Gamification, says it best by describing gamification as simply “using game-based mechanics, aesthetics and game thinking to engage people, motivate action, promote learning, and solve problems.”

Note that these game mechanics are not necessarily games themselves. Instead the mechanics are simply components to a solution. Gamification should be considered as a layer that may be added to existing solutions or to solutions during design. The game mechanic is the key component to the gamification of any solution and these mechanics are concepts such as scoring, levels or instant feedback. Think about any actual game that you may have played recently, perhaps on your smartphone, and consider the game mechanics that are involved.

Games such as Candy Crush, Fishdom & Homescapes all use a similar mechanic in that the player experiences a core game (sliding and matching tiles) in order to earn points, coins, gold, jewels, etc. Once earned, these points allow the player to progress through a narrative chosen by the player. There are many variations of this model and the core game may be a hidden puzzle game, a battle game or pretty much any game type. This concept of repetitive gameplay towards achieving progression in an overarching narrative is a game mechanic in itself.

It is worth noting that the player does not constantly return to the game because of the core game. The core game is often repetitive and changes very little over time. Instead, the player is drawn to the overarching narrative. The sense that there is constantly something new and just over the horizon is a massive factor in motivation.

Actually, it’s quite scientific and it’s all about dopamine. According to Liraz Margalit (Ph.D.) of Psychology Today: “Although the dopamine cells respond when they recognize a familiar pattern, they are more excited at unexpected rewards (three or four times as excited, as measured by the strength of the dopaminergic firing). In other words, the reward is more pleasurable the more surprising it is.”

And so, given all of the components described above, consider a gamified workplace. For this example, a layer of gamification is applied to the task of capturing data into a company database. The game mechanics provide the data-capturer with feedback as data is captured using the data capturing interface. The feedback allows the capturer to instantly see their accuracy (or lack thereof) as they complete data capture events. A set of rules could also be built to reward a series of achievements with higher points or even introduce a multiplying effect to points. The system could allow for accumulated points to be traded for real world rewards such as additional leave days or canteen vouchers.

In the example above, the core “game” is the data capturing event. This is the task that must be repeated multiple times in order to achieve the points, feedback and ultimately a reward. In some solutions, the reward mechanic may simply be the experience of an unfolding narrative or perhaps the experience of victory over co-workers. Simply put, the work task has become the game.

A perfect end result for such a solution would be that the players push themselves to an enhanced level of job capability in order to experience the positive feedback and satisfaction of achievement. In so doing, they will have learned healthy new workplace habits that result in higher productivity and work satisfaction.

There are many ways that the rules engine is configured between game, feedback, achievement, narrative and reward. Designing such a solution is a complex endeavour and probably the most important aspect about creating such a solution is the understanding of the players themselves. Given that the entire system is premised on the basis of motivational design, knowledge related to what motivates the specific players of the given system, is key.

I hope that this post helps to clarify the relationship between actual games and gamified systems. Feel free to send us an email if you’d like more information.

Know the player, know the game. The 6 player types in game design.

The six player types, which were initially developed using the Bartles model in 1996 and then refined by Marczewski in 2015 form a vital part of the key messages found throughout our blog.

A summary of the key messages:

Always start with an understanding of your company’s vision or the end result that needs to be achieved before building a solution.
Make sure you have built the link from the user to the metrics that link back to the company’s vision in order to create smart metrics.
Have a strong engagement to foster engagement and once you have the user’s engagement make sure you retain it.
To achieve engagement you need to fully understand the user as the entire solution will be centered on their participation.
Finally, and most importantly, in order to fully engage the user you must understand the types of player.

In this post we focus on understanding the player types.

The first four player types are strongly motivated by intrinsic rewards, which is to say that they are motivated by internal motivation such as feelings and personality drivers.

1. Socialisers

These player types prefer interactions with others in a gamified environment. They don’t shy away from a challenge but prefer to achieve as part of a team. They are normally users that drive team engagement, are vocal about their opinions and their desire to share their successes.

2. Free Spirit

This player has two traits: the Explorer and the Creator. The Explorer loves open worlds and rich narrative based on the user journey to discover new experiences, and doesn’t want to be restricted in their journey. The Creator wants a sense of autonomy in their journey or their world. They want to discover new items and be able to use them to shape a unique user experience for themselves.

3. Achiever

Achievers want to succeed. They need to be able to see themselves moving up the ranks and to seek out challenging solutions. Each level has to be more difficult than the next, allowing the Achiever to feel a sense of accomplishment once the level is complete. The challenge continues forever and there needs to be a greater good to what this user is achieving (a new skill unlocked).

4. Philanthropist

Similar to the Achiever, the Philanthropist also wants to succeed and achieve something bigger than themselves, but with one exception: they expect nothing in return. These users enjoy the fact that they have mastered a specific skill but now have become a Guru to help others. They need a gamified solution to assist them in imparting their wealth of knowledge onto others.

The next two player types are motivated by extrinsic rewards: the need to achieve an outcome separate to the solution or achievement based on an external reward.

5. Players

They are motivated by the reward and will only complete the task if there is a definite reward at the end. This player type can end up losing out on some unique rewards as they don’t like to explore new things if there is no guaranteed reward.

6.Disruptors

Disruptors are similar to players but with one key difference: they will seek achievement even at the expense of the game mechanics and/or other users. Naturally, this can have a negative or positive effect on those participating within the solution or on the solution itself.

Once you understand these player types, you can then understand the motivational drivers that help to guide the solution design:

1. Relatedness

Socializers are the focus here: make sure to include social status, social connections and a sense of belonging when creating a solution for this player type.

2. Autonomy

Free spirits require solutions that encourage creativity, choice, freedom and responsibility as part of the solutions mechanics.

3. Mastery

Here the Achiever is being referenced with their need to learn, for personal development and levels to challenge them throughout the solution to make sure they achieve the greater good.

4. Purpose

The Philanthropist is catered for with the ability to achieve something greater than themselves and the ability to share their bountiful knowledge with others.

5. Rewards

Players requiring guaranteed rewards in return for their efforts. Leaderboards and achievements matter to them with a strong focus on extrinsic rewards.

6. Change

Disruptors who thrive on achieving at the expense of the game mechanic and others. They love voting and enjoy a sense of anarchy in achieving their personal agendas.

I hope this has helped to shed some light on player types and their motivational drivers, and helped you to identify the different users/staff that work within your organisation.

Bear in mind that the evaluation of personality traits can vary based on the situation and environment users find themselves in. We will cover this more fully in a future blog post, but for now simply make sure to account for all player types to allow for these dependencies.