The quest to gamify recruiting, punctuality and task management

There are things every company has to do — attract new employees, encourage them to be on time, and ensure they get things done — but which few find very fun to do. That’s why the prospect of gamifying traditional business activities holds so much promise, and is attracting so much interest from the academic world.

In fact, out of the dozens of research projects that were discussed at the Gamification 2013 conference in Stratford Ont., late last week, many focused on ways organizations could inject an element of play into what are normally very formal settings. CommerceLab was on site at the University of Waterloo’s local campus to take notes and capture how some of the ways we work may soon change.

Playing to Recruit

We all know what the traditional hiring process looks like. A company places a “help wanted” ad of some kind in a newspaper (or, increasingly, an online job board) that lists the basic activities of the role, then sits back and hopes for the best. According to Sam Chow, however, the companies that stick with this approach may be missing out on some of their best candidates.

“You’re not necessarily engaged with (a help wanted ad) if you’re not already interested in that job or that company,” said Chow, a Master’s student in industrial and organizational psychology at the University of Calgary. And for the firms doing the hiring, “You don’t normally just want anybody to join your company, you want the best of the best.”

As Chow’s research (conducted with Derek Chapman) showed, some organizations are beginning to realize gamification can offer a potential alternative. Hotel giant Marriott, for instance, is using simulation games to show what it’s really like to manage one of its properties, while a firm in Denmark has a game simulation about operating an oil rig. The power of such games, he said, is the way they might influence jobseeker attitudes: specifically beliefs (the cognitive element of what they believe to be true) and their feelings about working in certain organizations. For those who believe hotel managers do little more than hand out keys, for instance, gamification could be a wake-up call.

“By creating a more challenging game, you get people to believe that this job is more complex and challenging than they previously thought. They might actually enjoy their experience working as a hotel manager,” he said.

Emotional aspects of jobseeker attitudes could be even more important, Chow added. He pointed to the U.S. military, which employs more than one million people but needs to recruit some 50,000 a year. There are many, however, that might dismiss the prospect of a military career based on an aversion to violence. Gaming simulations, on the other, could walk them through many other diverse roles in the military that have nothing to do with holding a gun, including paramedics, strategists and so on.

“It’s a way to jump in, experience various positions,” he said, while acknowledging that the approach has its limits. “It has potential as long as you have real value within your game. You can’t gamify every recruitment process, but you can try. It’s just another option.”

Playing to Improve Punctuality

There are daily lab meetings where Joao Costa works as a Ph.D. student at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT), and for some time Costa noticed there were several people showing up late. This is, of course, a phenomenon which permeates almost every workplace, but Costa and his colleagues, including Lennart Nacke, James Robb and Rina Renee Wehbe, decided to see if they could create a gaming app that would get people to show up a little more regularly.

All those involved in the meetings were given access to an Android app where, like the social networking service Foursquare, they would “check in” when they arrived for a meeting. They would be given a score based on whether they made it early (gaining 100 points if they were early), within 15 minutes after it started (50 to zero points) or from 15 minutes onwards (up to -50). Those who skipped entirely got -75 points. A leaderboard showed the stats of everyone who participated.

Costa said the experiment offered some interesting results in terms of how the leaderboards, in particular, influenced certain behaviors. “For those who were already punctual, their interest increased in the meeting itself,” he said. “Those who weren’t keen lost even more interest.”

There was also a sense, in some cases, that being a part of the game was a hindrance: they would have to stop what they were doing to check in, and could lose focus on the purpose of they meeting as they assessed their points and the scores of their peers. Some were more interested only in being in the top rank of their particular friends, rather than being most punctual overall.

Costa said further studies in this area should have a control group without an app, and a  larger duration — the UOIT experiment collected only two weeks of data. There would also need to be some way to account for leaves of absence, he said, and measures put in place to ensure that people didn’t somehow cheat to influence their score. On the plus side, however, he said the game seemed in some cases to increase the appeal of arriving at a meeting and being more aware of punctuality in general.

“We noticed more than once someone say, ‘Oh, I’m ahead of my supervisor,’” he said.

Playing to Avoid Putting Things Off

Dennis Kappen almost winces as he recalls the times he has forgotten to pick up his kids from an activity centre.

“You’re looking into a six-year-old’s eyes and they’re wondering, ‘How can you do this to me?’” he said. The Ph.D. student at UOIT uses it as an example of a common task which is not always made easier by even the best task management applications. “The activity of inputting the tasks into a task management app is really a mundane and a boring task itself,” he points out. That’s why he and his colleagues Jens Johannsmeier and Lennart Nacke conducted a study to deconstruct the effectiveness of gamified apps like Task Hammer and Epic Win vs. more traditional task management software.

In the initial study, which ran over a four-day period, Kappen’s team looked at ease of use, satisfaction and motivation using a combination of survey questionnaires and in-person interviews of 14 participants. Overall, those involved seemed to like the visual stimulation of the gamified apps, and the prospect of being rewarded for their achievements.

Kappen added, though, that it’s clear the mere presence of badges and leaderboards is probably not enough to excite additional engagement in the gamified task management apps. These tools are competing with more traditional task managers, he suggested, which can be seen as faster and more efficient to use.

“What is going to make a business application’s success is motivational user experience design,” he said. “It’s about defining the motivational aspects of what drives a user to complete a task, and then think about what the design of the game could be.”

Gamification 2013 ran Oct. 2-4, 2013