At the end of the 80’s, Action Man was ‘Toy of the Decade’. Before the age of video games millions of kids used Action Man in real games, and the fantasy they created was as vivid and involving as pressing buttons on a Play Station.
Our very own Kevin Thomson managed the ‘Action Man’ brand and, as Brand Manager he studied games activity with child psychologists in focus groups across the country.
What’s this got to do with ‘employee engagement’? A lot, as we’ve pointed out. Games are part of life’s fantasy, we grew up playing them, they helped us experiment with and make sense of the world.
For hundreds of millions of people they still do, not just ‘game geeks’ but every age and games genre from successive board game devotees to the 50+ million people on Farmville to the whole family on the Wii. It’s not hard to see how work can be seen as one big game; with the board set out before us in the workplace like RISK or chess.
We have our visions, and missions, and role playing from CEO to the ‘front line’. We have our uniforms, our enemies (the competition – or is it the customer?). We have our stories of successes and failures, winner and losers. The ‘Masters of the Universe’ in the finance industry even created a real life Monopoly of our properties with lots of losers and a world recession.
Work is a grown up version of the games we played as kids. But the world of games just got a lot more sophisticated. The difference today between real toys in real games, and stories in the £ multi-billion video games industry is the ability to analyse every move you make, across billions of interactions.
Games companies with millions of people as players like World of Warcraft, can observe the billions of interactions as they play. The psychology is laid bare as the buttons get pressed. So today we have a new game to play, rather awfully called ‘gamification’.
Gamification is the application of gaming in other non-game environments. It’s a new way of exciting customers and staff. It comes to the fore as we see the real power of applying the psychology of games to non-game environments at work including recruitment, retention; engagement; product branding, on-line promotion and advertising.
Gamification may be a silly word but the seriousness of it lies in achieving greater performance through applying games techniques.
Proof that ‘gamification’ works at work? Check out the videos in David Zingers blog ‘Employee Engagement What’s up with Gamification. In our report Brand Engaged 2011 on FTSE 100 companies, we highlighted Reckitt Benkiser who use a Facebook ‘game’ to attract and retain staff.
That’s gamification. Brand equity increases as you engage people through involvement, attract staff and customers, and make your mark and build your brand in all your communities, especially your internal ones.
Ian Buckingham is a founding partner of engagement consultancy, Bring Yourself 2 Work.
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