First of all, a cliché: If you spend a lot of time playing games, you won't learn anything for life. Whether that is the case or not remains to be seen. The fact is that 97% of young people have almost 10,000 hours of gaming experience when they start working life. For comparison: When a soccer player has his first matchday in the Bundesliga, he has around 10,000 hours of training behind him. When he founded Microsoft, Bill Gates had around 10,000 hours of programming experience. Today's young people are gaming professionals and have hardly trained anything as much as their gaming skills. So the question is, how can the world of work take advantage of this? How can she make the most of the skills she has learned over the years, direct feedback system, etc.? What can the world of work learn from games? But also what she shouldn't copy.
Anyone who has ever played a game knows what ambition and doggedness you can develop when a level or task cannot be solved straight away. How you vow to only play Candy Crush for five minutes and then realize three hours later that you've only just completed one level. How to lose track of time while fully immersed in a game. And shouldn't this feeling also be crucial for your daily work? Shouldn't you also completely lose time at your desk while tackling a task? Shouldn't you accidentally do a lot more there than you actually wanted?
The term gamification deals precisely with this apparent balancing act between the real (working) world and games. According to the Gabler business lexicon, it is “the transfer of game-typical elements and processes into non-game contexts.” Essentially, games make something more difficult than it needs to be by building in hurdles and artificial obstacles and getting a reward straight away at the end. A badge, a smiley or an increased score. Games have a direct feedback system; in Angry Birds you can see immediately whether you have killed the pigs or not. Things are different in the working world, where feedback often comes weeks or even months later at the annual performance review. By then the action has usually been completely forgotten and the learning effect is therefore much smaller.
Slowly, more and more companies are adopting exactly these approaches from the games world. They make work playful, entice people with small rewards and thus stir up competition among employees. Create leaderboards and ranking lists on specific topics so that everyone can immediately see how they compare to their colleagues. The HR department can also find out the strengths and weaknesses of individual employees.
Gamification may sound like the Holy Grail of HR management. But as with all things, there are two sides to the coin. Researchers at IBM have found that gamification can also have negative effects. Some people are put off by seeing the high scores, the many rewards, or the badge collection of their colleagues. They don't want to compete with others and shy away from competition. Not everyone is a gamer and not everyone has the corresponding skills portfolio that gamification is aimed at. But probably other qualities, other skills that are important for a company. Creativity, for example, is often limited by the predetermined paths of a working world influenced by games. Because creativity cannot be measured directly, cannot be proven based on hard facts and is therefore difficult to classify into a game-based reward system.
Ideally, gamification in the world of work is voluntary. Just as in many companies employees are now free to decide what time they start working and whether they work from home or not, a gamified workplace should be the free decision of a responsible employee. Everyone should be able to decide for themselves whether they would like to collect stars, points or badges or not.
Today's young people are gaming professionals and have hardly trained anything as much as their gaming skills. So the question is, how can the world of work take advantage of this? How can she make the most of the skills she has learned over the years, direct feedback system, etc.? What can the world of work learn from games? But also what she shouldn't copy.