Gamifying responsibility - Employee engagement in CSR.
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Can techniques from the world of consumer technology help drive behaviour to make employee CSR programmes more successful?
A company wide commitment to CSR is doomed to fail without an engaged workforce.
That’s what research suggests, which has found that between 70-90% of organisational transformation efforts fail due to poor employee engagement. If your CSR programme involves employee programmes such as matched fundraising, volunteering or Payroll Giving, a disengaged workforce means a lot of wasted energy and missed opportunities.Disengagement is most often due to a lack of feedback, recognition or coherent goals. Employees want to know about their ongoing progress—and they want to know that what they are doing can have a positive impact.One strategy gaining increasing traction in employee engagement is borrowed from an established technique in consumer facing tech - gamification.What is gamification?Gamification refers to the integration of gaming mechanisms and techniques into a product or service to enhance motivation and increase participation - capitalising on the natural human desire to play games.It works for employee engagement because feedback - in the form of points or levels - can be provided instantly, allowing employees to get a better sense of how they’re performing overall. Recognition can be given through rewards or prizes, and goals can be created either by competition or through a shared purpose within the game. These methods can make people feel part of a group driving the ‘power of the collective’ through team challenges and competitive activity that is exciting for employees.However, gamification can also be as simple as making an otherwise mundane task more fun, nudging people towards a desired behaviour - checkout the Ballot Bin for a fun example of this aimed at the UK public. For a new initiative you are developing - like a CSR programme - gamification techniques can create buzz and increase interest and long-term commitment amongst employees.Let’s see some examples.The consultancy firm Bluewolf successfully incentivised employees to go social by gamifying enterprise knowledge-sharing. Bluewolf gave each of their employees a public profile on the company website, and allowed them to earn points and rewards for internal and external collaboration, including things such as writing a blog post or sharing a piece of content on Twitter or LinkedIn. You can read about how they did it here.Gamification can, however, be more passive than this, and be accomplished without the need for additional technology. A programme from Sweden known as the ‘Speed Camera Lottery’, for example, rewards drivers who are captured on camera going at or under the limit with entry into a lottery - the prize for which comes from the fines of less responsible drivers. Although drivers don’t need to do anything except drive more slowly, it creates an experience out of the mundane and produces a collective feeling of participation. The same can be replicated in the workplace.Gamification is also already a popular mechanism for driving eco-friendly behaviour. Nissan Leaf’s Carwings Challenge, for example, allows drivers to earn points, rewards, and prizes by driving in a more environmentally friendly manner, and Xerox’s ‘Print Awareness Tool’ encourages workplaces to reduce their paper consumption through the use of points and competition among colleagues. What similar things could be achieved in your organisation?What can you do?We’re fortunate enough to live in an era where an organisation embracing sustainability and social responsibility has become viable commercial route to new markets and gaining stakeholder trust. Without employees on side, however, a business will never play the role it should in making a positive difference in society. Gamification as a way of galvanising employees to take up causes has not yet reached its full potential, and no one I have seen has yet used it in employee CSR programmes such as volunteering, fundraising or Payroll Giving. With the right amount of creativity and commitment, perhaps your organisation will be the first.
Bayan Golmohamad