Changing Behavior Through Gamification
Changing Behavior Through Gamification
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A number of vendors are providing technologies for gamification, which integrate with various enterprise applications and social collaboration platforms, such as Salesforce [18] and Jive [20]. For example, Badgeville [19] provides a suite of products designed to help organizations shape behavior. Their product captures user behavior in various applications, and sends that data through a rule engine which runs on its servers. The behavior engine provides organizations with the ability to write sophisticated rules that determine how rewards and recognition, such as badges, leveling up, and even monetary rewards, are earned. Achievers [16], another vendor in the gamification space, provides a dedicated social platform, and develops customized solutions, to help organizations use gamification to achieve a number of business benefits such as recognizing and rewarding employees as a means of decreasing turnover, increasing motivation, and driving results. The Achievers platform is designed to leverage our inherent desire for validation. It provides a simple management tool for supervisors to manage the recognition process. Managers are provided with a points valet that they can then use to distribute recognition points among their employees. This recognition can be shared on social platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
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Employees can also redeem their points for real-world rewards. Leaderboards are also provided as part of the platform, to show the rankings of employees. The appeal to friendly competition is designed to encourage employees to repeat positive behaviors. Bunchball [17] is another company working in the gamification space. Like Badgeville, it provides a platform for tracking user behavior and recognizing desirable activity to promote deeper engagement. One of their gamification solutions for encouraging sales behavior integrates into the Saleforce.com [18] platform. The gamification solution is designed to motivate sales professionals by using techniques like leaderboards that, for instance, can be populated with data pulled from a platform like Salesforce. It also provides the sales manager the ability to easily manage the challenges set for their team from within Salesforce. It shows each salesperson their current status, total points, what they need to reach the next level, featured challenges, and overall team standing.
There is some recent work in health games that looks at using games for promoting healthy behaviors.
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crucial to look to the literature on persuasion, behavior change, and human learning, and to carefully map the game-design toolbox to the behavior-change objectives. The study of learning and behavior change has a long and broad history, which recently has included a specific sub-field called, persuasive technology [14]. One key insight is that behavior change often follows a stereotyped pattern of stages and that different kinds of behavior-change challenges are key in 2 each stage . We refer to this as the behavior-change lifecycle. Our view is that the key to using gamification is to make significant and sustained behavior change is to understand those challenges, and to develop specific gamification techniques for the challenges at each stage. In this paper we will use a five-stage model, outlined in the figure below, which we have adapted from the behavior-change literature:
Figure 1: A five-stage model of the behavior change lifecycle In the next section we will outline some key challenges typically encountered at each stage of behaviorchange, and will identify approaches to using gaming techniques to facilitate each stage.
Our particular behavior change model has been adapted from the model proposed in [15].
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Copyright 2012 Accenture. All rights reserved. Accenture, its logo, and High Performance Delivered are trademarks of Accenture.
of the deeper consequences resulting from being unable to address a customers concerns adequately. A simulation environment could demonstrate customer attitude shift to the employees, and help them see the significance of losing customers and its effect on long term company profitability.
Stage 3: Learning how: Understanding the mechanisms underlying the target behaviors
Buying in to changing behavior doesnt mean you know how to do it. Employees need to understand how the resources available to them can be used to execute target behaviors. If there are intricate mechanisms and/or processes involved in translating user behavior into target objectives, how do those mechanisms work? Once youve bought into the effort to acquire new behaviors in some area, the next step is to acquire an understanding of the mechanisms involved in that area so that you can make detailed choices about how to behave, and acquire the knowledge necessary to execute behaviors. For example, if Im committed to start exercising at the gym, that doesnt mean that I know how to use the weight machines or what my specific goals should be as I progress. I need to understand how to operate the weight machines in a way that makes it vivid enough to stick with me. Or, to pick an enterprise example, lets think about a customer-support person at a company that makes office equipment. Even if I recognize that my answers are not effectively satisfying customers as well as they could, that doesnt mean that I can just start giving more informed answers: I need to master the background material. If I dont understand the mechanics of how the equipment works in enough detail, or I dont have enough experience with how the equipment fails, and how to diagnose the failure, then I will have difficulty moving beyond reading a canned script to performing real problem solving with the customer. Key challenge: Employees dont have the background knowledge to select and perform target behaviors. They dont understand the principles involved in target behaviors or dont understand how detailed background knowledge ties to achieving a larger mission. Gamification Approach: Dynamic system games represent a way to teach the mechanisms underlying certain kinds of behaviors. They provide a way to demonstrate the mechanisms and processes involved in systems, which can be a physical system or a social system. An example of such a game is SimCity where the player is given the goal of founding and developing a city, while maintaining the happiness of its citizens and maintaining a budget. The game helps the player develop an understanding of the intricacies and theories of urban planning. The game helps players understand the mechanisms that make a city work and what kind of planning activities need to be carried out to manage a city. Analagous games, involving running a company or business unit, are sometimes used to train managers for new responsibilities. They can help trainees see the mechanisms by which management decisions ripple through the organization, and the tradeoffs involved with various decisions available to them. Other analogous games, which involve simulating physical devices, can be useful when the target behaviors require an understanding of the physical principles at work in those devices.
Stage 4: Initial adoption: Trying out the target behaviors, getting used to executing them
Once you have bought into the change effort and done the basic prep for it, youre ready for actually acquiring the new behaviors. Depending on the behaviors involved, this phase can be brief, or it can be a very long, multi-stage process in itself involving the learning, practice, and mastery of any number of individual skills. Key challenge: Employees are not yet comfortable executing target behaviors and lack practice needed to translate the theory acquired in the previous stage into execution. Gamification Approach: Skill-building games motivate players, provide guidance, and reduce frustration by monitoring players progress and providing continuous visible feedback in the form of scores, prizes, or
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advancement within the game. This reward system helps players understand what is working and what is not, and how they are advancing. This feedback continually motivates players during the acquisition stage. An example of a gamified approach that supports users during the behavior-acquisition stage is mint.com, a free web-based personal finance management service. Mint.com provides support to the users with extensive feedback on their progress on their financial goals. For example, if the user has a goal of saving for a car and has started saving (started a new behavior), Mint.com tracks a users expenditures and savings and provides feedback on how far he/she is from their current goal and what things can be done in terms of savings to reach their goal. Good skill-building games also provide a safe environment for behavior rehearsal, helping players practice behaviors during the acquisition stage. An example of such a training game is virtual tiny town[21], a game the United States Secret Service uses for dangerous scenario training, such as practicing behaviors of jumping in between bullets and the President in a virtual setting. The environment provides a safe practice environment for training agents to train for a rarely-occurring real life scenario that they might encounter at their job. An online example of such an approach would be a game that provides employees in a sales department the opportunity to practice the skill of making successful sales calls with a variety of simulated customers and scenarios. The game would provide the employees with feedback on how well they have performed on the sales call, and how they can improve further.
Stage 5: Mastering and maintaining: Perfecting target behavior through extended practice
The final phase of behavior change, after youve adopted new behaviors, is to maintain and refine new patterns. In many contexts, this can be a difficult phase because as the energy focused on behavior change dissipates, one can be easy to fall back into old behavior patterns. The biggest challenge at this stage is often just keeping employees interested and engaged: staying motivated and maintaining focus after the initial burst of energy has dissipated. Key challenge: At this stage, the behaviors should be understood but they will not yet be second nature. The challenge is to maintain the target behavior and refine, through reinforcement and ongoing feedback. Gamification Approach: The same kinds of behavior instrumentation games introduced in phase 1 can be used here in a different way to maintain and refine the target behaviors. Newly adopted behaviors can be tried out in the real world, measured and incentivized to motivate continual improvement and engagement with the activity. Social interaction and friendly competition with other employees who have recently acquired the same new behaviors can often play a fairly big role at this stage, with peers reinforcing each others new behaviors, and holding each other accountable.
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Key challenge
Dont know that Im doing something wrong
Dont fully understand that the value of the target behavior change is worth the cost of changing
Understanding the principles and mechanisms underlying the target behaviors Adopting the new behaviors
Dont have the background knowledge to Dynamic system games: Provide a way to select and perform target behaviors. Dont demonstrate the mechanisms and processes understand the principles involved in involved in carrying out the target behaviors target behaviors
Dont have comfort level performing target Skill-building games: Allow user to exercise the behaviors; need experience with specific behaviors with as much fidelity as possible in a mechanisms fun and safe environment The behaviors are understood, but not yet Behavior-instrumentation games (revisited): second nature. Need practice and Measuring real-world behaviors can ensure that reinforcement target behaviors are maintained and refined over time.
Table 1: Mapping of behavior change stages to the types of enterprise persuasive games that could address them
The behavior change framework we have discussed above is not meant to be followed slavishly. Applying the framework in any given enterprise will typically involve significant tweaks, driven by the kinds of skills involved, and the kinds of behavior-change sought. The key challenges at each stage will often take on differing flavors based on the specific nature of the behaviors involved. In some cases, it may be helpful to consolidate two or more of the phases, or to further sub-divide a phase to deal with specific types behavior change. But using this framework as a starting point should help organizations formulate a solution that aligns game techniques with the organizations behavior-change challenges.
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Conclusion
Most of the applications of gamification suggested in this paper are certainly more complex than very simple game-mechanics of badges and leaderboards that currently represent the most common gamification techniques. But our message is not an argument for more complex games, its an argument for matching the game mechanics to the actual behavior-change challenge at hand. As the range of behavior-change challenges is more fully understood by organizations seeking to use games, we expect an ever-broader range of gamification solutions to emerge which make relatively simple implementation options available for the full range of game-types required. Three keys to designing effective persuasive gamification solutions involve understanding the following: 1) the stages of behavior change; 2) the challenges that confront each stage; and 3) gaming techniques that can address each of those challenges. Persuasive gamification is not a one-size-fits-all endeavor. Understanding what stage of the behavior-change lifecycle current challenges a given employee is critical, because it is important that challenges at each stage are successfully addressed before helping the employees overcome the challenges of the next stage. We recommend that companies interested in enterprise gamification begin by assessing which behaviorchange stages represent their most important priorities in their businesses. If they first understand what stage of change challenges their employees and why, they can then develop specific gamification techniques to address the challenges at that stage with meaningful return. Start with gamification techniques that help users successfully complete the stage at which they currently reside before helping them succeed at the next one. The hype level surrounding gamification should not obscure the real value that intelligent use of enterprise gamification can unlock. We are already seeing effective use of game mechanics to engage the workforce, and maintain and intensify certain employee behaviors. As the gamification community becomes more skilled at mapping specific enterprise behavior-change needs to specific types of game elements, we can expect even more epic wins in the future.
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References
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About Accenture
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