Will enterprise gamification tools be used against you at your job?
Tags :gamification IBM Connections Lotus Connections social networking
I watched and somewhat participated in a conversation about enterprise gamification addressing the negative side to employees as well as the rewards. Alan Lepofsky kicked the conversation off with the following tweet Talk about #gamification always focuses on rewarding positive actions. Do you think negative behavior should also be surfaced? #socbiz | |
You can read the threads from there. I wanted to bring out a quick theory I developed.
With the current enterprise gamification engines a employee is rewarded with badges or other tidbits for completing specific tasks and activities inside some piece of software. Examples for gamification engines for IBM Connections are Bunchball and Kudos. Both include rewards andbadges for filling in your profile, uploading and sharing files, joining communities and making comments on others.
Now my theory is that this can be used against the employee as any other productivity benchmark can. Your manager, HR department or supervisor can quickly pull up your profile on the enterprise collaboration software and see you have not earned any badges or marks from the enterprise gamification engine. Will this now be used against you as not being a team player and working with others?
What about simple productivity? Can they say due to your lack of file sharing you are not producing content valuable to the enterprise? I personally do not know of any company that states that the enterprise gamification system will not be used against you. Many do not even say how it benefits you in any way.
This has nothing to do with the gamification engines at this time, as they are not offering markers or badges that are negative, it is just a view into how interpretation may be done at some companies.
Make sure you go watch my interview of Bunchball founder Rajat Paharia in IdoNotes Episode 123 on YouTube.
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On Monday, April 30th, 2012 by Chris Miller
