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antipaucity

fighting the lack of good ideas

the pros and cons of “gamification”

Posted on 11 May 2012 By antipaucity 3 Comments on the pros and cons of “gamification”

Slashdot has a post on gamification in the workplace today.

One of the myriad replies was from a poster, gomoX, who was pushing his company’s gamified tech support tool (invgate.com/en/service-desk/gamification). I’m all for product placement and pushing when it’s relevant (and here it most certainly was), but I don’t like the general concepts in that particular tool.

gomoX started well, too:

Bad system:
* 10 points for solving a ticket
* 1 point por replying to a ticket
* 4 points for chipping into another tech’s tickets (allegedly to help out)
* -20 points for reopened ticket
* -100 points for SLA missed

but then goes into describing (and then having shredded by many responders) their “Good system”:

* 1 point for solving a ticket
* 15, 10, 0, -10, -20 points for 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1-star customer ratings on those tickets
* -100 points for SLA missed
* 200 points bonus for doing 10 5-star tickets in a row
* 1000 points bonus for doing those 10 5-star tickets in a row in less than one hour

It even starts to become fun! And if you plug gamification throughout the whole system, even this (taken from a “Knowledge Week” quest that lasted through a specific week in an InvGate Service Desk instance):
* 10 points for creating a Knowledge Base article
* 15, 10, 0, -10, -20 points for 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1-star customer ratings on those articles
* 20 points for having the article you created used by other techs to solve a ticket
* 50 points for having the article you created used by customers to figure out the ticket themselves

I’ve written in the past about support organizations, and have a guide on effective support cases available, too. And I stand by my previous assertions that “gaming” and the metrics mindset are a Bad Thingâ„¢ – when they’re the BASIS of management reviews, promotions, etc.

The big problem with the InvGate concept is stated so cheerfully, I had to read it twice:

You get a performance metric in the amount of points an agent gathered during a period of X … It even has a “ka-ching” sound effect when you get points!

Seriously? a ‘”ka-ching” sound effect’? Who does this encourage? Certainly not any of the professionals I’ve ever worked with!

Maybe there are groups for which this would work – but none that I would want to deal with over anything important or business critical.

There are ways in which gentle, informal “competition” can be a Good Thingâ„¢ … but those are few and far between in the professional environment of support work.


A friend of mine pointed me at a [potentially] NSFW site with “badges” you can earn that was pretty funny (excluding the cussing).

commentary, technical Tags:gamification, metrics, support

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Comments (3) on “the pros and cons of “gamification””

  1. Eric Hydrick says:
    11 May 2012 at 03:34

    This isn’t unique to gamification. Any time you have metrics, and people know those metrics tie into rewards, people will game the system to increase rewards. While gamification can be a good paradigm for dealing with metrics, there need to be a lot of different factors considered when addressing bonuses, raises, etc. to help avoid (or really at least limit) “gaming” the system.

    The “ka-ching” sound doesn’t bother me 1 way or the other. It’s childish, irreverent, and maybe unprofessional in the traditional workplace sense, but that’s part of the appeal of gamification. It’s fun, and it’s like you’re playing, so these things are to be expected. That said, I’d save the “ka-ching” for things that explicitly refer to dollars and use another sound effect for getting points if you must do noises.

    I’m starting to think that instead of 1 universal “score”, good gamification should take a more traditional RPG route, and measure a series of “stats”. In the context of the help desk system you mentioned, the “base stats” would be something like:

    Number of tickets closed
    Number of reopened tickets
    Number of times SLA missed

    You can also include some “ratings”, stuff like:

    Efficiency (Average number of days it took you to close a ticket)
    Proficiency (Average number of tickets reopened)
    Commitment (Number of times you missed SLA / Total number of days in measurement period)
    Satisifaction (How happy the user was with your work, something like “average stars received” if that’s the metric you want to use in this system, or scale of 1-5, etc.)

    You can adjust the math and measurements as you see fit, and reset stats periodically, but you get the basic idea. By tracking a variety of distinct attributes, people get a more holistic measurement of performance, as well as a clearer measurement of overall performance. It also allows managers to see any organic specializations forming (i.e. Employee 1 has very good user-satisfaction stats, even if they’re not the quickest, Employee 2 is great for quick turnaround on tickets, etc). If you don’t like this, you can counsel employees on where specifically you want them to focus for improvements, or you can use this to help assign work.

  2. Warren says:
    11 May 2012 at 05:19

    stats are all well and good – it’s the over-promotion of them that worries me.

    I don’t necessarily know how you collect the “team” data I alluded to, but I know that it’s far more useful than the individual contributors to the organisation as a whole.

  3. Eric Hydrick says:
    11 May 2012 at 05:33

    You could measure team stats in addition to individual stats, (either aggregating the data from everyone or averaging everyone’s raw data, depending on the stat in question). The big issue isn’t just the metrics, but also who’s reviewing/analyzing them. Do they look at the team data as the sum of the parts, or do they know the team members well enough to know that Jim got sick for half the week, Bob spent the week on a particularly tricky issue that took a while but spent 12 hours a day for 3 days on it, and that Steve was clearing out a backlog of simple issues that had been hanging around for a while and needed addressing?

    Relying on raw numbers alone is never good, but no metric system will ever solve that problem. What I’m proposing is a system that can (hopefully) give people a more detailed breakdown of what employees are doing well, where they’re doing poorly, doing so in a way that’s more difficult to “game”, and is easily adaptable to changes in focus from management based on the performance by the team/individuals.

    I’m not saying what I’m proposing is immune to “gaming”, but by taking multiple, distinct measurements, it should at least be more resilient against it.

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