Gamification of the workplace
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
Its utility is limited to tasks that are commensurate, however. This means you can't really apply it to creative work. It's difficult to compare a developer to another using the kind of simple metric that easily lends itself to gamification. Even if you use something as general as time, you'll fail, because the question is time to what? Unless you've got two people working on different implementations of the same feature, you'll still be measuring different things. (And if you do have two working on generating two independent implementations of the same exact feature, any gains from competitiveness will be more than offset by wasted time.)
Other tasks, like data entry or content generation, do have easily comparable metrics, like rows per minute or clickthroughs. So it should be expected to work better there.
The people I know at companies where everyone is explicitly ranked and rated in a way that's made public (e.g., Intel) mostly dislike the pressure it adds and the comparisons it creates. If pay and promotions are based off these leaderboards, then this has all the advantages and disadvantages of the Intel system, and there's nothing new here. If the leaderboards are just "flavor", then this is just another form of lucite plaque, and there's nothing new here.
At 5 years you get a nice pen. At 10 years you get a larger carpet in your office. At 20 years you get a silver picture frame. At 30 years you get a nice retirement party with free shrimp for your friends.
Yes - really - I knew LOTS of people at old Ma Bell would hang on underpaid for several years just to get the free shrimp for their friends at the retirement party.
All of these come at the expensive of opportunity, interesting work, and money.
Gamification doesn't mean "playing videogames designed to teach you about work". I got the sense that that's what many of the companies in the article are using, HR "games" for employee training. Proper gamification is a feedback loop that pushes the person to do better in their actual job.
I love this quote from Chris Dixon: "The next big thing will start out looking like a toy". That's certainly the prevailing attitude about "gamification". http://cdixon.org/2011/09/28/some-lessons-learned/
/not a MSFT employee - but that's how my MSFT friends describe it
(disclaimer: I'm a Microsoft employee with about 3 years served.)
However it is neither fun nor productive. The majority of the official classifications are mismatched and/or inapplicable (but nevertheless required hoops to jump through), and getting any change approved requires heaps of paperwork. About this time last year I threatened to quit with an offer letter in hand from a startup; my company promised to match my salary to the offer. A year later, I'm only just now getting the rest of the raise and promotion, because of the skill qualifications, achievements, etc. that we had to get filed and approved.
That certainly makes me feel happy about the “gamification” of my industry.