We find ourselves at a pivotal moment in the nascent history of enterprise gamification. On the heels of driving user engagement in customer-facing web applications, systems like Badgeville and Bunchball are now turning inside the enterprise, applying their motivational approach to enterprise social networks like Yammer and inserting an award layer on established enterprise CRM, sales and HR applications. For the most part, these solutions retain their marketing roots, where the defining metric is engagement.

At heart, the customer of the first wave of gamification has been VP Marketing. Marketing concerns include page impressions, engagement and goal funnels -- not only increasing them, but measuring them. Gamification providers are seeking to woo new customers inside the enterprise, most notably product, sales and HR departments. But in our dialog with these new customers they voice common concerns when faced with adopting game-based motivation platforms.

• Cheaters always prosper. Gaming the system is a real concern not adequately addressed in existing systems. When engagement is the prime directive and players come from the vast anonymity of the internet, cheating causes little concern.  After all, cheaters are often highly engaged seeking ways to gain an advantage, and there are limited ways for other players to detect cheaters. Indeed, engagement-based systems are incented to hide cheating, as the only threat to engagement is the public embarrassment of acknowledging it, which could affect engagement of other players.  Inside the enterprise, we need to trust the awards if we’re going to use them for performance reviews, employee recognition or other vital processes.
• Leaderboards lead nowhere good. Competing against the nameless masses of the internet for points and badges is a far cry from competing against your own teammates for tangible benefits like salary and vacation time.  In fact, there is substantial behavioral science behind the assertion that intra-team competition can have a corrosive effect on morale, teamwork and creativity. A just-published article in Vanity Fair singles out the practice of stack ranking - ranking everyone on a team against each other - as the linchpin to the self-destructive Microsoft culture that crippled the company from within by subtly encouraging sabotage and paranoia. Inside the enterprise, the competitor is the competition.  Not your teammate.
• It waddles like a carrot, it quacks like a carrot. While gamification supporters like to cite Dan Pink's seminal work Drive in defense of the value of non-monetary awards in the workplace, they ignore that existing gamification systems simply replace one extrinsic reward with another. Existing platforms are largely pavlovian reward systems tuned to dole out badges at a rate that maximizes engagement. The enterprise is already well-equipped with carrot/stick motivators.

The cornerstone of this mismatch between existing gamification systems and enterprise applications is the emphasis on engagement.  A 2009 SHRM study ranked meaningful achievements and recognition for them second only to financial compensation in factors contributing to job satisfaction. Yet engagement systems weaken both.  Real achievements are undermined by the ease of cheating and ease of winning.  Engagement systems need to feed a steady diet of rewards to keep you involved. Real achievements are rare and deeply meaningful.  And recognition is diluted when everyone knows the achievements aren't real, or that your win is my loss in a dog-eat-dog cage fight.

We’ve discovered something truly magical in our industry -- the intrinsic joy of effort and accomplishment that comes from our common gaming roots, yet gamification systems have strayed too close to rote stimulus/response mechanisms that prey upon our lowest natures.  As we make the transition into the workplace, it’s time for a gut check.  Is there a way for gamification systems to support and invoke our intrinsic joy of accomplishment and reward creativity, teamwork and your unique talents without poisoning the well in the process?  Taken largely from the recommendations of Dan Pink’s Motivation 3.0, my next post will present a possible framework for win/win gamification. Stay tuned.

Part 2: Toward Gamifying Mastery

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Alden Gannon has 20 years experience leading IT teams and is the CEO of Six Fish, LLC, provider of PropsToYou, a gamified project management app based on modern behavioral science.