6 Things to Consider Before you Implement a Gamification Strategy

Gamification has been my main learning opportunity and new professional skill for over two years. I went live with my first gamification effort in August 2011 at an educational company and now I am working as a gamification expert for one of my favorite clients. It's a lot of fun working with teams that are committed and enthusiastic!

There are many positives and negatives about implementing gamification, from matching a cultural fit to ensuring that there is top down support for the effort. 

Top down support is the place to reality check first. If your leaders aren't sold on the idea, it's likely that some of the necessary pillars for success will not get put in place before they want to "hurry up and launch it!" Make sure they know what they're getting into and how it affects the bottom like.

After experiencing this gamification effort and watching implementations succeed or fail, what kind of tips can I offer to a company considering using gamification to engage their employees? Here are six that are vital.

1) "Just what the hell is gamification? Is it all Nintendo and no real work?" Ensure everyone knows what gamification is: a way to use proven techniques to encourage, engage, and reward people for doing the things the organization wants them to accomplish.

2) "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it." Be sure that you can quantify what you REALLY want your employees / customers to accomplish. It has to be measurable. 

3) "Know your audience." Make sure the experience is genuine to your product or service and a good cultural fit for your community. If there is a disconnect, you can bet they won't participate.

4) "Honesty is the best policy." If you make a mistake, own up to it immediately and completely. People forgive mistakes. People remember cover-ups. This is especially true with customers on the internet. The internet never forgets and it's awake 24 hours a day.

5) "Gamification is NOT 'fire and forget." Successful gamification efforts are seriously supported. You measure and adjust. You redo your onboarding until it shines. You find ways to continually delight your community. Continuous upkeep and tweaking of the experience is vital to long-term success. New features are introduced as they are needed, and those are carefully chosen by the right people, which may in fact be your community. 

6) "Are you committed?" Gamification is a big undertaking, but the results can not only be measured, they can significantly affect your ROI. Making the shift to gamifying your company in any way requires a lot of trust (with everyone in your company), and a commitment to constant self-reflection. Are the company's needs aligned with its processes? Do we know what our staff are supposed to be doing? Are we providing the right service to our customers? If you are ready to question everything so you can align your gamification efforts with those of the organization and your community or employees, you are on the right path.

Without a Community Engagement Manager, 

your community is not really connected

In order to keep the above maxims alive and thriving, you require a dedicated, driven, healthy "Community Engagement Manager" to continually understand the feelings of the staff and align their goals and needs with those of the organization. They are also responsible for the overall health of the community as well as leading the product direction for the gamification efforts. 

Only a special person can juggle these needs and lead your community exceptionally well. It's a non-stop challenge to keep people interested, and if the point is to keep them engaged, they need to be well nurtured. 

I'd love to hear your thoughts! Do you know an amazing "Community Engagement Manager?" What qualities do you think they should bring to the table? What is their real job title?

Why does re-engagement matter?

What makes you remember to go back to a website? What makes you decide to see your dentist at the right time? Unless you're making notes yourself, you are being RE-engaged.

What made you think of that PARTICULAR webpage, store, or restaurant?

I am putting together my thoughts on how re-engagement works and how it has (or hasn't) evolved over the years now for a talk I'm giving at Captivate Conference in October, and I'll share it online when I'm done with it, hopefully as a video.

How do you get your users to come back, even after they've had a fully awesome session with your product / service / website experience? That's the real trick, I think, and people don't have that considered as part of the overall plan. They tend to tack it on later, once they notice that those heavily involved users quit coming back.

Whether it's an email, TV ad, banner ad, snail mail, text, or phone call, what reminds YOU to go back to a product or service? Why does it work?

PS Tickets are available for Captivate here! A 15% discount (that expires SOON) can be used here.

Creating a Rock Star Culture in your organization

CREATIVE CATALYSIS

Pretty simple, but this is the core idea.

It is kind of weird to think of yourself as a catalyst. It occurred to me because I have had a lot of employees tell me over the years that my personal involvement has made or broken the projects on which I have worked. It has been explained to me that "when you're there, things just seem to go right and people are happy; when you are gone, we lose our rudder and flounder." I think there is something to how I think or how I problem solve that must be part of why this is a recurring theme from my employees, so I wanted to spend some time working it out.

Over the past 30 years as an employer, employee, and a contractor, I have had the amazing opportunity to work within, evolve, or create corporate cultures in ways that generate the best environments for people to thrive. You always want magic to happen, but it doesn't happen on its own.

"This is the final piece?" 
- Ian Black, manager of Spinal Tap

THE ROAD MANAGER ANALOGY
I have always seen myself as a road manager for creative teams. The road manager is not the star. In fact, they are hardly ever even considered when things go right. But wow, when things go wrong, who do you think gets the blame? Yeah, you know what I am saying.

Spinal Tap is not going to be 
pleased with the monument.

To be a good road manager, you need to know what your band(s) need. That means while you may not the best guitarist, you need to know they need great amps, cables, strings and pedals to do their job right. Maybe you can't drum well, but you had better know they need to have special microphones placed at the right heights and locations for their efforts to get noticed. Even if you cannot hold a tune in a bucket, you should know that singers need their monitors to have just the right levels so they can match tone with the harmonies and their mics have to be set at the right height in the right place on stage. You get the picture.

Led Zeppelin with their manager, 
the late, great Peter Grant. 
He "got" it. You should Google him.

A road manager has to know a little bit about everything so they can anticipate their rock stars' needs. They have to know the team members' skills and personalities. They have to know how they're feeling that day and what kind of pressure they are under in their personal lives. All of this factors into the final result.

Once you have the stage set up, the marketing machine has gotten the fans to the building, the sales team has sold the tickets, the merch table is in place, and all the other details are handled... then and only then is it time for the REAL rock stars to come in and blow everyone's minds.

Where's Peter Grant? He's not 
even in the building because 
he's taking their money to 
a safe location. Really. 
Look him up.

The thing that is really frustrating is that when you are the best road manager, people wonder why they are even paying you because you make the rock stars' work look effortless!
The reason I'm writing this post is because I believe that road manager work can be nearly effortless once everyone is following the same well-known and moderated rules.

SETTING THE STAGE
It has been my experience that to create magical, emotionally compelling and memorable experiences for your users, your employees have to be in the right environment, both physically and emotionally. That environment allows creativity to soar in ways you cannot expect or predict. But how can you make that environment? What are the main ingredients?

This is the level of creative output 
possible when the environment is right.

Here are my key tenets for generating the best environment for catalytic reactions.

• Clearly defined corporate vision
• Clearly defined milestones / project goals
• Corporate culture is defined in meaningful terms with compelling examples of their application
• Hire and retain competent employees / healthy HR system
• Better equipment improves performance
• Invest in employees' careers
• Make mistakes faster than everyone else
• Celebrate the knowledge gained from mistakes
• Bring wrong is okay, if you admit it quickly and completely
• A core understanding that love, respect, honesty, healthy disagreement, and trust build the best teams
• “No surprises,” unless they are good
• Catch people being good as often as possible
• Have high expectations that are actually achievable
• Immediately celebrate milestones
• Authority and responsibility are given in equal doses
• Managers set and manage expectations and act as coaches and gardeners
• People don't get fired, they fire themselves by not meeting well-defined expectations
• Asking questions is a job requirement
• Social media is a huge win, even considering the drawbacks 
• Gamification is fully embraced
• Give credit where credit is due; after all, it's free*

When things go right, I feel like I'm on the front row. 
We need more of that.

So, what's the catalyst that makes the reaction work better? One part of it is that you have to know those above tenets and live them 24/7. 

Here's my secret: you actually have to care about the people doing the work. Love your rock stars, because they are the ones making the magic.

I wanna rock!

bjc

P.S. Thanks for reading. What do YOU think? What's your secret catalyst?

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* CREDITS
These tenets have come from a lot of sources over the years, and they are tried and true. Much credit goes to the book "Peopleware." It is epic. I have picked up a lot of these ideas through the years from other managers or other books or even making the same mistake over and over until I had to realize that the universe was trying to tell me that I was "doing it wrong."

Credit also goes to Origin Systems, where I spent 6.5 years learning within the most magical environment ever. They let me implement some of these and they also had quite a few of them in place that I got to watch work or colossally fail, depending on their implementation or who was implementing them. Origin was also insane, but that's another story. Or maybe it is a series of books, I never can tell.

The most credit must go to all of the employees over the past 30 years that helped me learn which of these tenets work at which time on which project. You guys rock! Or, if you were part of the "Billy's still learning how to do this correctly" part of my education, I'm sorry for doing it wrong.