What’s Gen Y’s game?
People have always played games at work – tic-tac-toe, solitaire, let’s-bitch-about-the-boss – but nobody thought work should be a game until Gen Y turned up with their Xboxes and demanded that work be fun.
Employers have gotten the message. Badgeville, a startup that helps companies use online games to attract customers, secured $12 million in funding. Arcade shooting games have been reinvented as training simulations for semiconductor factories. Microsoft offered users Ribbon Hero 2 to help them learn the Windows operating system. Even the British government got in on the act with a multiplayer game called Idea Street that captures employee innovations in government departments. Gartner Group estimated last year that more than 70% of the world’s largest 2,000 companies would have at least one gamified application by 2015.
Is gamification working?
Idea Street is one of the most trumpeted successes. Launched in 2008 in Britain’s Department of Work & Pensions, it gamifies business improvement. Almost one in twenty employees participated in the first nine months, creating 1,400 improvement ideas of which 63 were sufficiently popular to be taken forward to implementation. Cost savings are expected to reach $30 million by 2014.
But… The most popular suggestion on Idea Street was scrapping end of year performance appraisals. The suggestion that generated the highest cost savings was encouraging the use of email signatures. $30 million in savings over six years sounds good, until you find out that figure represents 0.00002% of the department’s annual budget. There is no evidence that Idea Street or other gamified business applications are delivering serious business advantage.
And someone should tell Microsoft that a winking paperclip is irritating, no matter what the format.
Okay, forget business impact. Isn’t gamification all about engaging Gen Y?
Gen Y love games – they are even a growth market for golf – and they thrive on rapid rewards, increasing challenges and social cooperation. But fun only translates to engagement when the activity is directly relevant to the business. So far, no corporate game has met that challenge.
Here’s why: Work isn’t a game. Games can be played on a whim, rebooted and hacked. Success strategies and skills are pretty easy to learn. Reward systems are clear and characters neatly divide into friend or foe. Results follow quickly on actions. Rewards are clear and frequent. Progression is rapid, the journey exciting.
Is your job like that? Mine ain’t. Work is not a controlled environment. Success comes not from skill mastery but from developing deep behavioral competence, especially in our dealings with others.
Games don’t develop these capabilities: they damage them. Recent studies show high technology use shrinks our capacity for empathy and focused effort. We exaggerate our own reactions and underestimate the reactions of others. We can’t be bothered to stick at a task when so many other interesting things are going on. We slip into behaviors that are fine in a fantasy context but disastrous in real life.
How do we change Gen Y’s game?
All of us who manage Gen Y need to stop playing around. Here are four things we can do to help Gen Y make the leap from gaming to work.
1. Be the authority figure. Gen Y are used to parents being in charge, and a lack of clarity is the biggest reason they don’t settle into work. Give clear boundaries and structures. Tell them the rules, show how their work fits with bigger organizational objectives and demonstrate how to set goals and monitor progress.
2. Focus on developing their empathy and creativity. A Harris Interactive poll found 96% of Gen Y want a job that requires creativity and 97% want to have an impact on the world. Help them understand that true creativity consists of mastering previous achievements then taking the next step, and that caring about the world involves more than clicking “Like” on a Facebook cause.
3. Wean them off constant feedback, and constant technological interruptions. Structure tasks to encourage focus (e.g. by setting time limits) and agree strict timetables for feedback and oversight, gradually increasing the time between review sessions.
4. Remind them of realities. Nobody gets to be the boss on Day 1 and an entitled attitude might work with bragging your way into a nightclub but gets you nowhere in business. Also, it is no longer the American century: Chinese students at US colleges may have problems with socializing and barely understand their lectures, but their performance is as good as the home team’s and they are better at sustaining hard work. Gen Y is facing stiff competition. Do they still want to play?
