Gamification: Motivational Hacking for SharePoint

Editor's Notes

• #23: Foldit: Mason-Pfitzer Monkey Virus / Crystal Structure Proteine, Took players 10 days to crack the structure. Scientists could not do for 15 years.
• #32: Improving Collaboration & Adoption still the secret to a successful intranet, one that serves as a detailed knowledge hub but also leads to increased employee productivity and all the good stuff that comes with increased employee productivity. In our previous webinars in this series we spent time drilling down into how you can only improve what you can measure and (2) while this still holds true there needs to be a shift to a more social mindset, be it in your analytics strategy or improving out of the box social capabilities. We have now introduced the exciting gamification element that in a way can be seen as the secret fuel in the mechanism of driving increased productivity and individual employee innovation.
• #33: It is important to recap the measurement pillar, the fact that any analytics strategy needs to be underpinned by SMART goals. In our last webinar we spoke about how SMARTER goals (1) (2) is infact the more correct term for a working analytics strategy. We focused on giving some examples of what is meant by the “shift to social” (3)…. And really whats important to stress here is that what has been focused on previous webinars is still a foundation for when we speak of Gamification and looking back to trying to improve IT and Business collaboration. So really no matter what topic we are speaking of increasing and tracking user behavior that matters is always going to be at the core. Of course this is often easier said then done, because for every organization and every intranet, strategies and behavior differs…
• #34: So lets refine how we can focus some of our gamification initiatives when it comes to our Intranet using advanced analytics. We really want to try ensure that we use metrics that fall into categories that can be linked to clear KPI’s (or SMARTER goals) and also ensure that Social is still at the heart of our metrics. (1) This is why it is likely that the focus will be on more portal growth metrics, things like community activity and social metrics that can be clearly tied back to individual employee engagement and adoption.
• #35: If we drill down into what I will call “portal growth” metrics, we start to get an idea of community development. These metrics can be more targeted to team leaders, site owners or even company divisions. Are people contributing and which ones are active and leading to discussion? Once we know this we can drill down deeper into who these influential users, leverage them to help spread ideas. Also what is the influential content, can we pick out something innovative in the highly discussed topics, lets make more of this content available on portal etc.
• #36: Speaking of drilling down and Surfacing the content ….. We can see how easy it is to drill down to a content level and pick out something innovative in the highly discussed topics, lets make more of this content available on portal, lets publicly recognize communities and content that generated activity. - What I did not show here is how easy it is to tie back this content to a specific contributor, and this is where the gamification (i.e. self fulfillment) becomes interesting. Perhaps adding a column of content contributor could make these winning metrics when thinking of motivational hacking.
• #37: If we now focus on the second box, of Social activity, we can directly focus on the user and his/her social activity. Who are the interesting employees that others want to follow. Who are the employees that spend time browsing content, learning, re using, contributing, improving and motivating other employees through all this activity. Again lets recognize these employees.
• #38: I think those metrics give a clear idea of how we can easily use analytics within and intranet environment and give employees ‘stature’, ensure they see a link between collaboration and PERSONAL growth. If we focus on distribution, once we have created reports in the context of gamification. How do we ensure the information is visible to whoever needs to see it… Web parts Distribution Lists NB: Not every approach to gamification is going to work. Some employees may find certain ratings/tasks trivial while others may not. Often the trick is to follow a lean method, pilot reports and initiatives, often multiple pilots at the same time (reportS). - Having a report centre to organize these reports is crucial.