More on Gamification and Careers

Extrinsic Rewards and the User Journey

A couple of small bits this week whilst I pull together more substantial work (I’m not a machine!!) First a small revisit of my Flow and User Journey work. In various conversations I have had about the use of rewards in a gamified systems the general question is always “do you need rewards at all”. My answer is that it can’t hurt if it is done properly.  One thing that occurred is that during the on-boarding phase and into the habit forming phase of a user journey, rewards can play a key part.Charles Duhigg presents the idea that habits are formed when three key things are put together. Cue, Routine and Reward.

Slide11 More on Gamification and CareersTaken from http://charlesduhigg.com/how-habits-work/

Check out his pages for more info, I won’t go into that now. The point here is that during the habit forming phase of the user journey, rewards can play a part. Once you head in to the mastery phase, rewards needs to give way to more intrinsic forms of motivation (remember RAMP? Also a full article on RAMP I did for Gamificaiton.co). So here is a new image, that takes into account the change from extrinsic to intrinsic over the course of a users journey.

Flow User Jounrney Motivation More on Gamification and Careers

Career Motivation

Lastly, after a conversation with a few people about gamifying work, I realised that there are things we have to consider before traditional gamification methods. In many cases, get this right and you won’t need the shiny extras. (this is an extension of my Gamification of a Career post)

  1. Make me feel that what I do is valued by the people I work with and the people it affects and build a sense of community.
  2. Let me do my job my way and trust me to do it, in return I will trust you to do yours.
  3. Let the challenge of the role increase as my skills expand and don’t be afraid to let me develop beyond my role.
  4. Give me a reason to be doing what I am doing, beyond pay.

You may notice that this again follows R.A.M.P. Relatedness, Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. The last one is more important than people realise. The reason is not just so that you get paid. It could be to work towards the core values of the company. It could be that your work directly improves the quality of the company. it could be that what you are doing will help others in the company and beyond.

Once you have covered some or all of those, you may find that you don’t need leaderboards and badges!

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2 thoughts on “More on Gamification and Careers”

  1. I would still be working for my previous employer if the organization had just been willing to develop motivations 1 through 3. I had already provided number 4.

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  2. Pingback: Links for May 1, 2013 | Andrzej's Links

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