Adding Points, Rewards and Badges to Organizations and Learning

While it’s fun to get a high score on a video game, it is just as fun to let others know you are the one who got the high score. Game designers are aware of this and early in arcade games, they created a leaderboard to add a social component to what was then essentially a solitary endeavor. The leaderboard is a list of the tops scores in the game so whoever played the game could see all the player’s names or initials and score. It was a simple invention but created a powerful motivator to play the game again and again and gave players a chance to socially interact in discussions around the game and high scores.

Leaderboard

It also gave bragging rights and social capital to the individuals who achieved the high scores. Many organizations have sales leaderboards but what about leaderboards in operations, most forms processed correctly without errors, most customer complaints handled satisfactorily.

In addition to leaderboards, games also provide players with instant reward in the form of points. Sometimes those points are directly related to the activity. In football video game “Madden NFL 12” when a player scores a touchdown, the team earns six points. In the social networking game “Mafia Wars” points are earned by completing jobs or winning fights which are both activities directly related to the narrative of game which is running a criminal empire. In other games like Super Mario Brothers, you can earn points by collecting coins which is not essential to the goal of the game which is make it to the castle and rescue Princess Toadstool from Bowser. How about a dinner out on the company every once in a while after so many forms are processed?

In addition to points, many games have extra abilities or prizes that can be earned for accomplishing certain tasks within the game. In the video game Call of Duty, rewards can be translated into an upgrade of weapons or the ability to have special tactics available. For example a kill streak (killing eleven opponents without being killed yourself) enables you to “call in the dogs” which provides dogs who sniff out enemies.

Perhaps an operations person could earn a chance to go visit a customer? Or to attend a sales meeting.

There are two views on rewards and badges, one is to make them as easy to get as possible early in a game so that players are hooked and want to continue playing. The other school of thought is to avoid easy badges that are not related to activities that are rewarding in and of themselves. For example, in Call of Duty have a kill streak of eleven is a good accomplishment itself the ability to call in the dogs is nice but not the main motivator for trying to get an eleven kill streak. It is generally better to link activities within the game to reward than to have random rewards.

Unfortunately, elearning courses and classroom instruction do not offer easily trackable progress reports like leaderboards, badges or rewards. Won’t it be great to have a corporate leaderboard so employees could know how well they were doing? Or have badges employees wear to know how accomplished they are? Sounds like the gamification of work would provide some added incentive to employees.