How gamification can help solve the skills shortage [Q&A]
Almost all areas of the IT industry are suffering from a shortage of skilled staff. In order to prevent the skilled people you do have being poached by other companies it's important to keep them happy.
One of the methods of doing that is to improve their level of engagement. Martin Browne, customer experience chief technologist of communications provider DigitalWell, believes that the way to achieve better engagement is by using gamification, we spoke to him to find out more.
BN: How does gamification work?
MB: Gamification -- at its core -- is a method of facilitating micro-learning by providing people game-like incentives to absorb and employ knowledge that improves performance. It functions in the same way that a Las Vegas fruit machine or a modern video game might entice players to keep playing by offering incremental rewards or upgrades. In the workplace, it becomes more about driving engagement to influence business results. When people participate and engage with your gamification initiative, they learn the best way to interact with your business, products, services, and brand.
In more technical terms, gamification can connect people with knowledge management systems that have massive amounts of data, and grab small nuggets of information that employees need and deliver them at the right time either to assist a user with a current problem or to help them learn from a recent experience so they can handle it better next time around. It can be used for day-to-day routine operations, to help employees learn new products or services, for health and safety, onboarding, and many other applications.
BN: What benefits can it deliver?
MB: Substantial ones. Gamification is part of a bigger empathic trend that we're seeing for investing in the employee experience first, and reaping benefits beyond that for the business as a whole. As Doug Conant, CEO of Campbell's Soup, once said: "To win in the marketplace you must first win in the workplace". So, for example, we've seen productivity across the entire workforce of client organizations leap by 14 per cent within the first month or two of deployment. With the same kind of systems, it's also possible to measure the degree of any one employee’s engagement with the organization to 85 percent accuracy. Management get insight on when and how to tailor job descriptions, work arrangements, or career development for each person to ensure that they constantly feel as though they are growing. It's a boon for staff retention during a time when there's a shortage across the entire industry.
The benefits go way beyond the retention though. We've noticed that there is usually a near-immediate positive impact on the quality of customer service offered by the organization, which is why so many deployments tend to start in contact centers or customer-facing teams. Profitability tends to come next, with highly engaged organizations averaging 20 per cent higher sales than disengaged ones. In the long-term, organizations that have got this right tend to get better adoption of company initiatives, regardless of what they are. Ultimately though, properly engaged employees become brand advocates. That is to say they'll more likely engage in word-of-mouth marketing, share company content on social media, and improve your marketing reach and employer brand.
BN: How can this be applied to specific teams, cybersecurity for example or development?
MB: Cybersecurity and development are actually ideal applications of this kind of technology. When you think about the nature of cybersecurity, it's not the kind of subject matter an employee learns once and then refers back to for the rest of their career. It's actually the opposite, requiring a near-24/7 constant learning of new security protocols, new threats, new patches, and new products and solutions. Development is similar in that the more tools or templates you use, the more patches, versions, and augmentations there are during a product life cycle, let alone a career. At the same time, not all developments are relevant. In cybersecurity, for example, some threats are much more significant than others and no organization can keep on top of all of them, so prioritization is necessary.
The kind of learning, or micro-learning that these subjects require is ideally suited to a system capable of breaking down significant data into bite-sized chunks to keep employees on a consistent learning curve that never lags behind current developments too far.
BN: If an organization is considering gamification where should they start? What are some best practices?
MB: The most important and sometimes overlooked aspect of any gamification deployment is the motivation for doing it, the objectives of it, and the ethos behind it. Gamification is a way to improve the employee experience through engagement and empathy. Empathy that the employer has with its employees, the employees have with each other, and the organization has with its customer base and other external groups. You're creating opportunities for a flourishing, engaged, content workforce to stimulate growth in any possible area of the business in lateral fashion. So the choice to deploy must come from a genuine desire to foster community and see people prosper in their own individual way, accepting the fact that some of them may move on whether you like it or not for reasons well beyond your control.
If the appropriate mentality is there then the management of change works better if gamification is first inserted into existing training programs. Once underway, employees should be rewarded for completing tasks, offered badges for upskilling, and/or recognized for completing training paths. Rewards from outside the system can be offered too and should be researched because what motivates one person may differ from another. Storytelling is also critical i.e. develop a game that follows daily operations and tasks for a specific role using dynamic storytelling, and communicate the goals and processes of the game. It's essential that people 'work aloud' through it, solving problems, making judgment calls, and assessing solutions. Competition can also be helpful as long as it's friendly. Don't forget that gamification is great for breaking down silos and boosting collaboration, so make sure you're working alongside that rather than in opposition to it. Finally I'd say make sure the employee's learning path is clear, with objectives along the way and a specific goal at the end. After every objective there is an opportunity to reflect upon what might have made it quicker or easier to achieve. This kind of solicited feedback can be combined with AI-generated feedback later to fine-tune the system.
BN: Are there limits to gamification? When won't it work?
MB: Of course. Gamification is not a panacea. It's important to remember that you get out of it what you put into it, whether that's linking it to knowledge management systems or in terms of the effort and diligence put into its implementation. One of the more common pitfalls with gamification is that it's relied upon as a replacement for culture change in an organization. While it's fair to say it can support culture change, it can't deliver it like an in-the-box solution. The reason why I mentioned ethos and motivation when talking about best practice is that organisations need to make sure they’re not just seeking a quick fix. It works best when accompanied by a genuine intention to improve the employee experience first, and reap the rewards from that rather than the other way around.
Something we've learned from our experience with lockdowns is that technology cannot replace the interaction necessary for humans to survive. However, it can make those interchanges more meaningful by removing the day-to-day people management aspects and making those face-to-face discussions higher value. KPIs and peer review become systemic so there should be no surprises in appraisals because you've already aware of how you're doing. And that can be versus business targets, versus the team, or -- to paraphrase Ernest Hemingway -- versus your former self.
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