If you are responsible for influencing the behaviour of hundreds or thousands of people, where do you begin? Here is one emerging area of thought and practice: Gamification.
“Gamification is about using game-like setups to increase user motivation for behaviors that businesses target.” — Akar Sumset
Do you use social media regularly (perhaps too regularly)? If so, you may feel the time-consuming impact of addictive social media applications. It is possible to apply the fun and engaging techniques of game mechanics into a non-game environment. This includes changes to the employee experience.
Are User Experience (UX) professionals well ahead of change and project leaders in grasping gamification? UX professionals are well-versed in applying these techniques to websites and mobile applications. Their users are rewarded and ultimately (trained) to check in to an app and perform certain behaviours.
Similarly, the self-quantification movement makes a game out of everyday facets of your life. Personal statistics are interesting to capture and reflect on. What do you make of your evolving resting heart rate, heart rate variability and daily steps taken? Now combine this static data with others. How about community challenges, leaderboards, and a sense of progress or accomplishment? The “game” of regular exercise becomes even more engaging!
Want to learn a language? Clever mobile applications like Duolingo take gamification to its zenith. Even the gambling and stock-market industries use gamification to keep punters on the platform.
So how can we apply game application to leading change? Can gamification become part of our art of mass influence over organisations?
Gamification can apply to influence both yourself and others. It does sound like a clever way to help people get on-site for your change. Done well, it can help people impacted by your change try out new ways of working. All through the guise of fun, flow, confidence-building and experimentation.
Gamification goes beyond simple behaviourist psychology (“push button, receive a reward”). Well-designed games cleverly introduce a social dynamic and other distractions — adding another dimension to behaviour change.
Euan Wu, the founder of The Change Compass is one of the leaders in the Australian change profession. Euan worked as Head of Change at the National Australia Bank and is now a tech entrepreneur providing change management software as a service. Euan presented at a change management Institute workshop in July 2021. In his presentation on gamifying change, he spoke about the practicalities of gamifying changes to the employee experience.
Euan used a clever model in helping businesses adopt a gamification process.
Gamification applies to “business as usual” endeavours — or changes of many shapes and sizes. But it isn’t all about fun — there is a balance of commercial pragmatism involved.
Gamification should start with business objectives. What target behaviours are you looking to change? With these target behaviours in mind, your planning can move to the next step. This planning is essential to get decision-makers onside with the entire proposal for any “game”.
Now add fun. With this planning, you can choose a format for the game and establish many challenges and goals. All these aspects should link to the target behaviour; your challenges and goals may be akin to a computer game level. This is where the fun and creative part of your planning comes into place.
Creating habits via your game
Nir Eyal, an author of consumer psychology and behavioural design, developed a “Hook model” to help you gamify your change experience. This four-part model comprises:
- A trigger: Triggers can be internal and external and act as the “spark plug” to a given behaviour. Alerts, such as emails or other reminders are these external triggers. Internal triggers might be particular times of day, routine behaviours or particular emotions. Users may form associations between external and internal triggers. Over time, users may rely more on internal triggers as the spark plug to a given behaviour.
- The action: The target behaviour that your game seeks to achieve. The Fogg behaviour model aims to take advantage of people’s motivation and ability to increase the likelihood of this behaviour.
- Variable reward: We need a timely and straightforward feedback loop paired with a desirable prize. This reward doesn’t have to happen every time someone performs the target behaviour; it can be occasional. Occasional rewards are powerful.
- Investment: The investment part of your habit-building efforts should not be overlooked. This part helps you increase the odds that a person will engage in the target behaviour again. You can take credit from a user’s positive feelings to ask them to engage in a particular call to action. For instance, you could ask them to invite other community members to your game. Or seek a testimonial about their experience.
The science of persuasion
Jonah Berger, a marketing professor, spoke about the science of persuasion. Jonah rightly says that people don’t like being pushed and attempts to use logical positional power are not as strong as leaders would like them to be. Influence can be through either push or pull tactics. Pull tactics don’t need as much energy as push tactics-but they may take more planning and patience.
Entice, don’t push. Jonah likens the art of persuasion to giving people the space to make up their minds and using clever questions to help bridge a gap. This gap is the space between another person’s position (often a defensive one) and hours-which is often far away from the other person’s position.
By making behaviour change fun and engaging, are we using pull tactics to influence?
Euan described several inexpensive and clever examples of gamification. Want to reduce building cleaning costs? Or get people to use the stairs more often? How about getting people to adapt to unfortunate circumstances, like a slow lift?
Akar Sumset speaks of using fun to motivate people toward certain behaviours. Looking at Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, our sense of belonging, esteem and self-actualisation can be used as “levers” to influence this motivation. Dan Pink’s ideas about intrinsic motivators — purpose, autonomy and mastery are also motivational “levers”. Guess what? Well designed games tap into these motivational “levers”!
Feedback loops are an essential part of gamification. After all, how will employees impacted by your change know if they successfully adapt to a new way of working? Games can foster a sense of community, progress or friendly competition.
Intermittent rewards are also an essential accompaniment to feedback loops. These infrequent rewards throughout your game may provide a sense of achievement and fun. Your cleverly-timed rewards also shape your ideal target behaviour.
Caveats
What if every change program use games as part of their change approach? What if people get used to gamification? Especially if these games are either passé or well delivered? Or a game is far too elaborate to get involved in, or has the potential to embarrass people?
Care. So like a cook using seasoning, use careful consideration and “taste the soup”. Being judicious with this novel seasoning can prevent disasters. For example, people repelled by your attempt at a game. Or becoming used to attempts to gamify changes to the employee experience.
Simplicity. It can be tempting to design some stimulating and novel games. Clever and excited change practitioners may consider elaborate and complicated games. For example, what about introducing an escape room game to my organisation’s leadership team? But put yourself in the shoes of a disgruntled and time-pressured executive: Will they end up looking silly or feel this game is a waste of time and money? Does your game tie back to influencing the target behaviours of hundreds or thousands of end-users?
Choice. Is there a chance to opt-in or opt-out of the game? There are some excellent games in business designed to improve everyone’s fitness and enhance employee well-being. The global corporate challenge is a perfect example of this.
Rewards are for saps. Consider your awards carefully. This is a caveat. Why? Suppose you provide intermittent rewards that you assume are valuable to others. In that case, the power of your game may diminish if you make an incorrect assumption! Gabe Zichermann suggests breaking down rewards into SAPS. What is SAPS? Status, Access, Power and Stuff.
Measurement. Want a better chance of gaining decision-maker buy-in? Measure people’s engagement in your game and how this links to the target behaviour. Why is this shown as a caveat?
Do many of us rush to design a clever and fun game — then forget the commercial pragmatism bit? Especially once the business case is signed and funds committed.
Yet can you can don a behavioural scientists “lab coat” and measure this linkage? Can you illustrate how your game has resulted in an uptick of the target behaviour over time? If so, you are nicely positioned to show decision-makers this year’s power of the game you have designed.
Your game must also tie into the organisation’s bigger picture, including future changes. Again, why is this listed as a caveat?
Decision-makers who will fund your game may already have this in mind. But do you? Have you considered the changes in behaviour as part of this investment and how you can help make this change stick? Long-term behaviour change results from one thing. Repeated, regular target behaviours. This needs to keep happening well after your change project is over.
Adding to your change playbook
If your game can tap into what makes people tick, you have a good chance of getting people to opt into your game. Giving people a choice to opt-out reduces risk. For example, a risk of embarrassment or wasted time. Yet there are many other potential perceived threats to your game-players social standing!
Change leaders can take a leaf out of User Experience and behavioural design professional’s playbooks. Gamification can apply to a range of changes — the thought process for a timesheeting application rollout is a great example of this. It goes without saying that if the user experience design of the system is well-considered, this will make change leaders jobs so much easier.
Our book — The Change Manager’s Companion — is available now. You can also check out our online course on Change Management.