Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/149047
HRO Today Forum Wharton's Kevin Werbach and Pontoon's Michael Beygelman opine on gamification. A Win-Win Introducing gaming in the workplace can increase engagement and retention—when done right. By Mitchell Joseph At last month's HRO Today Forum in Philadelphia, a number of speakers introduced new and exciting ideas aimed at helping companies get the best out of their employees. Perhaps the most novel and intriguing of these concepts was a presentation on gamification in the workplace given by Professor Kevin Werbach of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and Michael Beygelman, RPO president at Pontoon. Werbach cited the example of Keas, a business service that has gamified health and wellness for employees, offering companies the opportunity to reduce healthcare costs "by putting people on teams, giving them points, getting them to compete, using missions and challenges, using quests and badges. Only now the point is not to play a game," said Werbach. "The point is to get healthier and achieve that business objective for the companies." In the presentation, HR Gamification: Not Just Playing Games, Werbach, the author of For the Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business, began by listing some of the important features of games, including things such as points, levels, avatars, and progression. Gamification co-opts these components and repurposes them to situations and objectives that are not traditionally viewed as games. As Werbach put it, "What we can do in gamification, is take those kind of elements, the same elements that go into a game, and put them in something that's not a game." If utilized correctly, Werbach said that game thinking can help companies to motivate their employees and greatly increase productivity. Another essential consideration in gamification is what Werbach called, "aligning the incentive." He cited a Bostonarea startup called Objective Logistics as an example of proper incentive alignment. The company has gamified the performance and scheduling of shifts for restaurant servers, giving these employees greater visibility of their performance relative to their peers, as well as offering the restaurant increased knowledge of which servers are most effective. This system offers valuable feedback to the servers, while also allowing the restaurant to make more informed decisions when scheduling shifts. The top performing servers can be rewarded with the most lucrative JULY/AUGUST 2013 | www.hrotoday.com [51]