Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/295251
[ 39 ] APRIL 2014 | www.hrotoday.com Learning The 4A Model of Engagement For Employees The most basic tenet of gamification is the levels of engagement. The 4A model—aware, active, addicted, and amplified—is well understood in the context of retail and eCommerce, and should form the core of your user engagement strategy for any application, workflow, or portal that works with real people. Unless you measure the engagement scores of your employees, on an individual basis and in real time, and emit the right signals, your initiative is unlikely to connect with your employees, who will quickly drop off in pursuit of something else. For example, when I land on any eCommerce site through a Google ad, I am only an "aware" customer, and at this point, the site needs to let me consume. Blanking out the site and requiring me to login to Facebook is the online version of demanding that I swipe my credit card on the billing counter before I am allowed to browse the merchandise in the store. So it's no wonder that 98 percent of customers are dropping off without buying anything—and in many cases, without even bothering to window shop on the portal! It is easy to understand why most gamification initiatives fail. If you launch a gamified knowledge management portal, and expect employees to start contributing without a chance to do some "window shopping," it should then be no surprise that they leave, and never come back. What if your gamification solution could actually track your employees' behavior and engagement levels with the company, and emit the right signals, thereby pushing employees toward behavior that reinforces their strengths or addresses their weaknesses? Using innovative engagement analytics against past behavior, comparisons to industry benchmarks, and a big data store, organizations can understand what motivates and drives their employees, and guide them toward actions that create high-performance team members based on their unique level of engagement and skillset. For example, say you have an employee who has earned lots of kudos for her communication skills. Your performance management system can encourage this employee to share best practices or case studies. Alternatively, this employee can be suggested for a role in the sales organization. There is a lot of data out there about your employees that