The first time I suggested adding a manager leaderboard and achievement badges to a client's accounting system, he looked at me as if I had walked into a board meeting dressed as a clown. "Oleg, I run a serious business, not a kindergarten." Three months after launch the same client called me and asked to add another category, because the logistics department was offended that sales had a league table and they did not. Grown adults were offended that nobody let them play. So much for the kindergarten.
Gamification is the use of game mechanics where there seems to be no game: at work, in training, in shopping. And it is one of the most underrated and at the same time most cheapened topics in business automation. Underrated, because most managers consider it a toy. Cheapened, because those who do take it on often stick badges on everything and then wonder why nobody plays.
Why adults play
People played long before they started working. Hunting was a game with rules, roles and a reward. Knightly tournaments were the gamification of military training: instead of dull drill, a spectacle, a ranking, glory and a fair lady in the stands. Chess taught generals to think several moves ahead for centuries. Play is not the opposite of serious business, it is the oldest way to make a hard task understandable and attractive.
An adult brain works the same way as a child's, it is just better at pretending to be bored. We still need to see progress, get quick feedback, compare ourselves with others, reach clear goals and be recognised. Ordinary work gives almost none of this. A manager closed twenty deals this month, so what? The salary arrived on the same day as last month, nobody praised him, and nobody except the accountant opened the report on his results. Gamification gives back to work what regulations took away: the feeling of movement.
Where it works in business
Over years of projects I have singled out three areas where game mechanics deliver tangible results, not just smiles during a presentation.
- Customer loyalty programmes. Levels, cumulative statuses, challenges like "try three new dishes this month" work far better than a discount card with dry percentages. The customer comes back not for the discount but for the next level.
- Staff training and motivation. Onboarding designed as a quest, where a newcomer completes stages and unlocks access, sinks in faster than a forty-page folder of instructions. A sales league table, if it is fair, pulls up the middle and does not let the leaders relax.
- Product virality. Referral mechanics, shared achievements and competitions between customer teams turn users into agents of the product.
A separate word about reports. Every company has work everybody hates: filling in a customer card, logging the result of a call, closing a task in the system. We once built a simple mechanic for a sales team: a "card completeness" bar and a small counter of consecutive days without unfilled deals. No money, no prizes. A month later the share of complete cards had grown so much that the head of sales could build a proper funnel for the first time. People simply did not want to break their streak. It is exactly what language learning apps run on, and it works in a CRM just as well.
How gamification breaks
Now about the rakes, because I have stepped on them too. The first: rewarding the wrong metric. If You give points for the number of calls, You will get lots of short, pointless calls. Players always find the shortest path to points, that is a law of nature, and if that path does not match the interests of the business, You have raised an army of optimisers with Your own hands. The second: a game nobody can win. If the top spot always goes to the same experienced manager, everyone else loses interest within two weeks. You need leagues, personal records, comparison with Your past self and not only with the champion. The third: a game turned into punishment. The moment the ranking is used for public flogging at the stand-up, the game is over and sabotage begins.
A good game makes the right behaviour the most interesting. A bad game makes it the most profitable, and people start cheating.
How to introduce it without a circus
My practical recipe is this. First find one behaviour You genuinely need that rarely happens now: filling in data, repeat purchases, completing training. One, not ten. Then think about what feedback a person could get for that behaviour right now, not at the end of the quarter. A progress bar, a streak, a level, a place in a league. Build a minimal version, launch it with one team and look at the numbers after a month. If the behaviour has not changed, the problem is not the people but the mechanic, so change it. If it has changed, expand it.
And most importantly, make the game part of the system, not an add-on bolted to the side. If points are counted by hand in a spreadsheet, in a month nobody will count them. If they are calculated automatically from real data in the CRM, the warehouse or the training system, the game lives on its own. That is why in Forma we build in the ability to create such mechanics on top of real accounting events: a sale, a shipment, a closed task. But You can start with the simplest thing: a board in the corridor and a marker. A serious business does not have to be boring. A boring business, by the way, usually loses to a serious one. Have a good game, colleagues.
