Gamifying Your Work Environment

Concluding my exploration of the HBR article I wrote about last week. The authors conducted a study on leadership in MMORPGs trying to gain insight into business environments of the future. Today I want to dive into their second conclusion: The business environment is a factor in successful leadership. (As opposed to the thought that leadership expertise lies within the individual - leaders are born or made.) There are 2 elements:

• Non-monetary incentives


• Hypertransparency of Information.

"Players know exactly what they should be doing and, to a large degree, have the tools they need to manage themselves. This suggests organizations can benefit by selectively "gamifying" the work environments in order to improve the quality of leadership..."

Nonmonetary Incentives: The authors recommend companies find a way to adapt MMORPG incentive systems to their environments to improve leadership effectiveness and "shorten the lag time between successful outcomes and the monetary compensation for those who contribute to them." Scrap the end of year bonus and reward me on a project by project basis.

Hypertransparency of Information: Warcraft for example makes a TON of information available on my character to anyone with a web browser. Check my hunter out at his Armory page. All info about me as a player is readily available to anyone. Imagine that in a work environment. Suddenly, being the bosses friend doesn't hold any water. You need to produce.

"Player data is constantly and automatically updated. They thus provide a kind of streaming video of a player's resume, including information about what he or she is like right NOW." Imagine your HR database behaving like THAT.