#MotivationHacking

I am a huge fan of incorporating gamification techniques into enterprise software – but its rarely done right, or measured correctly to know if it generated business value you were striving for in the first place.

Gamification is an innovative concept of driving and influencing end user adoption and engagement based on the concepts of game mechanics and social computing. Within gamification strategies, game concepts are used to motivate staff to be more productive and have more fun at work.

We’ve all experienced some sort of gamification strategy in play. At a past company, they invested a lot of time in various leaderboards, pitting sales and product teams against each other as a form of motivation. And it worked really well…for that company culture. Using tools such as badges, leaderboards, community-driven recognition, and other social collaboration tools, gamification leverages our natural desire to come together for a common cause. It is goal-oriented, it generally incites a stronger emotional investment in the activity, and supports community. Within a corporate environment, gamification can help shape preferred behavior by rewarding individuals through recognition (or even financially) for following the right steps, completing activities on time or with few or no errors, or for helping others.

Within collaboration and knowledge management platforms, such as SharePoint, gamification techniques are increasingly being used to help guide and nurture employees through the adoption lifecycle. The overall goal of gamification is to drive engagement — a very important aspect of adoption. Engagement is more than simply measuring the number of employees who have logged onto a system in a given month (the most basic metric for tracking adoption), but a measurement of activity within that system.

Engagement is about utilization: if employees are engaged and using a system, a process, or tools, the organization will be better able to measure the utility and value of that system, process, or tool. In terms of improving collaboration, how can you measure the success of your SharePoint environment or your community-building initiatives if nobody is actually participating?

An important statistic in any collaboration strategy is the measurement of adoption. The problem, however, is that most organizations fail to understand the lifecycle of adoption, and do not have strategies in place for the constituencies within each phase. 

In a webinar next week entitled Gamification: Motivational Hacking! I will be joined by fellow Office 365 MVP and gamification expert Jussi Mori (@jussimori), co-founder and principal at Peaches Industries, and Tal Ben-David from CardioLog Analytics (@cardiolog) as we walk through the basic of what gamification is, how it can work inside of SharePoint or Office 365, and most-importantly, where to start in measuring your gamification activities to ensure that what you are doing is actually driving business value.

The webinar will be held on Tuesday, February 16th at 8am PST and you can register here.

Employing gamification techniques can be an effective method for boosting your SharePoint adoption, but it requires careful planning and effective measurement to be successful. We invite you to join this informative webinar to learn more about how gamification can move your organization forward on the technology adoption curve, and help your employees to become more engaged.