Employee engagement

The Foosball Fallacy & The Beanbag Illusion

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0 1 Blog2FreePlayInstall The Foosball Fallacy amp The Beanbag Illusion


Ah, the modern office. Where engagement is measured in beanbag density and the number of foosball tables per square metre. Welcome to the illusion factory.

I call it The Foosball Fallacy—the misguided notion that plonking down a few shiny toys in the corner of your open-plan office will somehow spark authentic employee engagement.

You’ve heard the logic:

“Let’s make work fun! We’ll add a games room and a cereal bar. People love cereal.”

What you get instead is superficial fluff. A workplace that looks like a startup, sounds like a pinball arcade, and still has an engagement score flatter than your last quarterly review.

Then comes The Beanbag Illusion, which is even cosier. Quite literally.

It’s the belief that providing comfort—softer lighting, flexible seating, and yes, beanbags—translates into meaningful culture. But here’s the thing:

Comfort is not culture. You can’t outsource purpose to interior design.

Employees don’t stay because they’re well-fed and slightly reclined. They stay when they feel valued. When they can grow. When they have autonomy. Mastery. Purpose. (Yes, you’ve met RAMP. You should really call them more often.)

These illusions persist because they’re easy. Buying a beanbag is simpler than building a feedback culture. Installing a foosball table is quicker than coaching line managers on trust.

But they’re also empty calories. Momentary boosts with zero nutritional value.

If you want real engagement, ditch the gimmicks and get serious about what drives people. Not perks. Not ping pong. People. Read More ...

Gamification: Pervasive User Centric Design

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A spelling mistake, auto-correct and a lack of concentration led me to researching totally the wrong thing recently.  I was looking into a blog on Persuasive design, but ended up looking at articles on Pervasive design by mistake! It triggered some ideas and things I had been thinking about a while back, so I ran with it and am glad I did.

A few years ago, I remember reading about Pervasive Games. The difference between a pervasive game and a “normal” game is that the pervasive game breaks the magic circle and integrates in some way with the players real life and world. You may remember I wrote about the magic circle a while back. This is essentially the barrier between the virtual world and the real world that most games don’t tend to cross.

 

 

Pervasive games break this boundary.

A great example of this is Google’s popular Ingress. This is a location based game, where you have to physically be in specific locations in order to play the game. So whilst the game continuum is within the virtual world – it is played out in the real world.

Of course, this is exactly how at least one popular form of gamification works – fitness apps like Zombies Run or FitBit. Whilst the data collection and feedback happen in the application, the actual activity occurs in the real world.  In fact, if you look at almost all gamification could be considered pervasive design.

If we consider work as the real world and gamification as the virtual world, gamification is constantly crossing the barrier into work. You have to do real work to progress in the gamified system. In education, you have to learn and achieve to progress in the gamified system. You have to succeed in the real world to succeed in the virtual world!

The second thing that had me thinking was the idea that this is extremely user centric in its approach – i.e. the user is at the centre of the design decisions and the experience. If it is not about them it just will never work!

So you could say that gamification is Pervasive User Centric Design! This is what I will tell the next company to talk about if I can’t convince them just to use gamification!

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