Welcome to the latest in a series of brief interviews with guest experts from KnowledgeBrief’s Innovation Programme, providing a window into the experts’ latest ideas and new advice for executives.
Following the Innovation Day in April, Craig Weightman (CW) from Staffordshire University gave us an interview to discuss how gamification, the implementation of game playing elements in a business setting, can offer a potential solution to employee engagement.
KB: What’s the key business challenge that organisations need to address that your research tackles?
CW: With employee disengagement costing the UK industry £340bn per year and this disengagement resulting in an ever-growing number of people reporting mental health problems at work, it is vital that organisations find a way to make work more meaningful and intrinsically rewarding.
For years, the games industry has been using, trying and testing methods to get players hooked on their products; these players choose to come back to the game over and over again to spend time working hard at achieving goals. This work is also accompanied with a sense of joy and satisfaction.
Imagine a thriving workplace that maximised these qualities.
It therefore makes sense to redesign company cultures and workflows with this understanding as a framework, tackling engagement, employee satisfaction, and productivity issues simultaneously.
KB: How does your latest research approach this? What do the results indicate?
CW: My latest research focuses on how subconscious behaviour demonstrated in games can reveal our inner talents and personality characteristics.
How we play a game comes from who we are, fundamentally. Furthermore, we sometimes have skills and positive tendencies that we are not necessarily aware of. However, games focus our attention such that we tend to react quickly and more naturally to given stimuli. This behaviour can be recorded in order to feedback to the player who they are authentically.
Additionally, in games research, we know that we are more satisfied in game play if we can identify more strongly with the character we play. We love the chance to express and challenge ourselves rather than feel like we are expressing some random character.
Given this insight, it is important that jobs, tasks or even entire careers be matched more closely to the individual, providing them with a way of expressing themselves and showing that they truly can contribute. Mining and channelling in-game behavioural data can help us to do this.
KB: What advice would you give to executives, based on your findings?
CW: Any game’s design can be broken down into 4 basic elements: defined goals, feedback, clear rules, and a sense of voluntary participation. This combination of elements is what will generally create a sense of engagement.
Through goals, an individual knows what they need to achieve and can measure how close they are to this target via a feedback loop that is as tight and immediate as possible. Human beings love to see that their actions directly affect the world around them. The clear rules provide something to navigate through so that the journey is not a straight path but instead provides a challenge. Finally, if we feel we have chosen the activity ourselves, we feel in control of the situation and are therefore far more likely to persevere with the task at hand with full resources.
Also, research suggests that we tend to be happier undertaking satisfying work. This is something that games provide. A lot of this play involves a great amount of time spent working hard at challenges. This is supported by the fact that, globally, in excess of 3 billion hours a week are voluntarily dedicated to gameplay.
Along with craving satisfying work, we also love the hope of success, which carries us through times of temporary failure, we love to show off our achievements in a social context, something that social media is designed to take advantage of, and we want to feel like we are part of something bigger than ourselves, that our lives mean something.
My advice to executives is that they need to look at their processes and workflows to check if they leverage all of the above. Then re-design accordingly.
KB: What did you learn or take away from meeting with the executives in the KnowledgeBrief Innovation Programmes?
CW: There is a perception, across industries, that the sum and substance of gamification is badges and leader boards. After meeting the executives on the Innovation Day and discussing the fundamentals of gamification and leveraging successful game design techniques in work-based contexts, it seems that many went away with a new perspective and fresh ideas. I am optimistic that we could be moving into a new era where people have more satisfying and joyous work and feel that they are truly contributing.
With thanks to Craig Weightman, Researcher and Lecturer at Staffordshire University.