{"id":1232,"date":"2012-05-11T14:38:36","date_gmt":"2012-05-11T18:38:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/antipaucity.com\/?p=1232"},"modified":"2012-05-11T14:38:36","modified_gmt":"2012-05-11T18:38:36","slug":"the-pros-and-cons-of-gamification","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/?p=1232","title":{"rendered":"the pros and cons of “gamification”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Slashdot has a post on gamification<\/a> in the workplace today.<\/p>\n

One of the myriad replies was from a poster, gomoX<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

gomoX started well, too:<\/p>\n

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

but then goes into describing (and then having shredded by many responders) their “Good system”:<\/p>\n

* 1 point for solving a ticket
\n* 15, 10, 0, -10, -20 points for 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1-star\u00a0customer ratings<\/strong>\u00a0on those tickets
\n* -100 points for SLA missed
\n* 200 points bonus for doing 10 5-star tickets\u00a0in a row<\/strong>
\n* 1000 points bonus for doing\u00a0those 10 5-star tickets in a row in less than one hour<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/strong>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):
\n* 10 points for creating a Knowledge Base article
\n* 15, 10, 0, -10, -20 points for 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1-star customer ratings on those articles
\n* 20 points for having the article you created used by other techs to solve a ticket
\n* 50 points for having the article you created used by customers to figure out the ticket themselves<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’ve written in the past about support organizations<\/a>, and have a guide<\/a> on effective support cases available, too. And I stand by my previous assertions that “gaming” and the metrics mindset are a Bad Thing\u2122 – when they’re the BASIS<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0of management\u00a0reviews, promotions, etc.<\/p>\n

The big problem with the InvGate concept is stated so\u00a0cheerfully, I had to read it twice:<\/p>\n

You get a performance metric in the amount of points an agent gathered during a period of X …\u00a0It even has a “ka-ching” sound effect when you get points!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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

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

There are ways in which gentle, informal “competition” can be a Good Thing\u2122 … but those are few and far between in the professional<\/em> environment of support work.<\/p>\n

\n

A friend of mine pointed me at a [potentially] NSFW site<\/a> with “badges” you can earn that was pretty funny (excluding the cussing).<\/sub><\/sup><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 …
Continue reading the pros and cons of “gamification”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7,41],"tags":[347,481,738],"keyring_services":[],"class_list":["post-1232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","category-technical","tag-gamification","tag-metrics","tag-support-2"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1232"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1232\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1232"},{"taxonomy":"keyring_services","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fkeyring_services&post=1232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}