Want to get more from your team? Try digging for gold — gamification gold

Universal desires power gamification

 Gamification isn’t new. Sales managers have been using competition as a motivation tool for decades. What is new is the application of competition and other game mechanics to other areas of the business – IT included. Gamification is behavior hacking. It helps you to adapt people’s work behaviors simply by being clear about what you want from them – and how they’ll be rewarded in return. It works because it’s applied in a positive, mutually beneficial, non-exploitative way. It’s more about dangling the carrot than wielding the stick.

 Game mechanics play on game dynamics, the basic human desires of reward, status, achievement, self-expression, competition and altruism. These desires are universal, applying to all ages, genders and cultures. By satisfying these desires, gamification creates a positive and compelling user experience. The objective is to pull people together and activate them to achieve business objectives. In this case, the group is the IT department and the objectives are (at a high level) to improve service quality, increase IT agility, reduce costs, and generally squeeze more business value out of technology.

 Through gamification, you can add an element of excitement to a normally mundane activity. For example, resolving incidents for end users is repetitive. By dovetailing game mechanics into existing processes, you add a motivation layer and make the process rewarding for the service desk analyst.