Recently, at the Gamification Summit in San Francisco, I met Brady Wicken from the consulting company Slalom Consulting. And lo and behold, while during my full day gamification workshop showing a fun example of how you can mash time recording with the block game Tetris, Brady mentioned a gamified version of a time recording system that they had implemented in their organization. I simply let Brady speak about the motivation to use a gamification approach for that system:

Project Management is one of these management tasks that beg for being gamified. Tasks need to be completed in time, team members collaborate, and issues raised in time so that they don't come as a big surprise for everyone. Surprisingly though, not many gamified solutions are available for project management. One of them is PropsToYou.

Instead of going the overly simplistic route of introducing leaderboards, points and badges to nudge team members to engage better with the project management system, Alden Gannon and team from Six Fish choose the way more advanced path to reward mastery and collaboration. While the project management system PropsToYou still has points and badges, they are reflecting the personal best of team members and not how each members fares in comparison to others. Alden makes the case for following Dan Pink's advice in the author's best selling book Drive to use Motivation 3.0 to make rewards count and not corrupt the intrinsic motivation in his two recent articles Part 1: Rethinking Engagement and Achievement Inside the Enterprise and Part 2: Toward Gamifying Mastery.

In my previous article Rethinking Engagement and Achievement Inside the Enterprise, I outlined a few of the challenges that incumbent gamification platforms face as they move from marketing tools to enterprise productivity solutions.  Inside the workplace, teams need to depend on the authenticity of awards if they are going to base vital processes like performance reviews on them, they’re loath to set teammates or teams against each other for a reward of any consequence, and they already have plenty of carrot/stick motivators. They’re searching for something more.

Workplace studies and behavior science show quite clearly what that “something more” is.  We long for real achievements at work, and recognition for them. We long for flow states -- where concentration is so effortless and creative that you lose all sense of time.  We long for mastery -- that 10,000 hour goal that you keep chipping away at through breakthroughs and endless roadblocks. This is the realm of true satisfaction with work and the source of its intrinsic motivation. Having just read the advice of a noted gamification specialist that “you can’t over-reward the player in the first 10 minutes”  to keep them engaged, it seems like we’re talking about two completely different worlds: instant gratification vs. true mastery.

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.