In 1918 Frederick Taylor, a mechanical engineer came up with an idea of improving the workers’ productivity by giving them coloured cards every morning to let them know about their progress and achievements the day before. Like all genius and people who come up with novel ideas, his boss “Charles Harrah” then the owner of Midvale Steel in Pennsylvania told him “Do you know what I am going to do when I have made a few more millions? I am going to build the finest asylum this world has ever known, and you, Taylor, are going to have there an entire floor to yourself”.
Taylor went on to work out what would be the most productive weight to lift, order different size shovels for different materials and finally measure how much each worker had shoveled. Each worker would then get a coloured piece of paper to visually inform them if they had done the minimum amount of work to earn their $1.85/day wage.
Role the clock forward. You are sitting in a bar, waiting for a friend to arrive, switch on your mobile and pick up on the last game you were playing. You are on level 42 and you only need another 10 points to get to the next level. Basically for everything you do, you get a point, a star or a bonus. Play for another 5 minutes to get 1000 more coins, watch another advertising to get one more diamond, post your activity to Facebook to get 1 free ride and introduce us to a friend to get another life.
These simple methods get us to repeatedly complete actions to the financial benefit of the game owner and our virtual world status. It sometimes seems insane what we give away for a virtual diamond; hours and hours of our life, more expensive than gold and totally irreplaceable. Yet it is a method that works.
So will Gamification work in the work environment! Frederick Taylor demonstrated that in simple terms it can at least get the message across, but what if people are willing to give so much of their time away, so meticulously and making sure that the job is done to the best of their ability only to get a virtual recognition, can we employ the same features in software that run our work environment and reap the same results.
It would be an entrepreneur’s dream to have an army of staff working their butts off, just to get virtual stars. It is really nothing new. Gamification has been a common buzzword in businesses since November 2012. A Gartner report predicted that "by 2015, 40% of Global 1000 organizations will use gamification as the primary mechanism to transform business operations.
In the same report, they also predicted that - "by 2014, 80% of current gamified applications will fail to meet business objectives, primarily due to poor design".2 I think the first estimation was rather optimistic as we are now in 2019 and I can hardly say even 4% of businesses are using gamification to increase productivity, far far away from the estimated figure, yet they might be right on the second prediction of that 80% will have failed to reach business objectives. One thing is playing for fun and the other is creating that fun atmosphere at work.
Furthermore while the top 1000 organizations may have all the money and resources to try and test these methods and inventions, what about the small companies. Companies with 1 to 20 employees. These sectors always lag behind the rest and for that reason, I took an interest in making sure that we implement all possible gamification aspects in our software. That was just over a year ago.
At Urbytus the idea sounded good) however we have so far held back to at implementing into our software. While I have no doubt that it will work in many cases as the concept is the same what I am unsure of is how long it will last and will cost of development be worth the implementation. Sooner or later, we all drop these types of games and rewards simply because the primary virtual reward does not result in a secondary monetary or tangible award.
Yet I still like to believe that the next generation of Enterprise Software should be designed almost or totally as visual games, include joysticks and even virtual reality glasses.
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