GAMIFICATION+ and Pete Jenkins featured in Financial Times

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Financial Times Gamification Article

On Monday 1st June 2015 the Financial Times published the article “The games people play at work as part of the job” in Emma De Vita’s Working Smarter column. A picture of the article in the paper is shown in full on the right.

I thought I’d mention that I talked about the BreatheHR system as it uses some key gamification strategies, such as Kudos which enables employees to give instant feedback and praise to each other. It also links employee objectives to company goals and gives you a Performance Hub to show your progress towards these. Finally, I’m aware that they’ve just launched an Idea Wall feature to capture employee suggestions, and have some interesting plans to gamify this more.

In the article I also mention that I use Trello as my task management app, and I do use this occasionally but actually I more often use our own CRM.me system which has the same progress bar feedback mechanism but is fully integrated into the CRM so tasks are usefully linked to Contact, Company, Project and Sales Opportunity records.

Still, the article ends on a fairly negative note about gamification with which I disagree. There are now hundreds of case studies about successful gamification projects (take a look at Marigo Raftopoulos’s paper: How enterprises play: Towards a taxonomy for enterprise gamification  for more information) but also a more engaging job is a more fun one. Once you’ve covered your financial needs enough to be comfortable then the most motivating incentives to do your job are those relating to intrinsic motivators such as learning and socialising (i.e. working in teams).

About the author 

Pete Baikins

Pete Baikins is an international authority on gamification, a lifelong gamer, successful entrepreneur and a lecturer. As CEO of Gamification+ Ltd he mentors and trains companies world-wide on the use of gamification to solve business challenges. Gamification+ won the Board of Trade Award from the UK's Department of International Trade in January 2019.

Pete is co-host of the health gamification podcast Health Points and is also Chair of Gamification Europe, the annual conference for Gamification practitioners.

Pete is an Honorary Ambassador for GamFed (International Gamification Confederation), having previously been the Chair from 2014 to February 2019, whose aim is to spread best practices within and support the gamification industry.

After 15 years as a Lecturer on gamification and entrepreneurship at the University of Brighton he now guest lectures on Gamification at King’s College London and at ESCP Europe at post-graduate and under-graduate levels.

Over the past 20 years Pete has built and sold two businesses. One was in security software and the more recent one was a telecoms and internet connectivity business. He is also an Ambassador for Brighton & Hove Chamber of Commerce in the UK.

  • I totally agree with your statement that ends the article. I also just sent Emma an Email with some more facts and my sympathy for the way she feels about her work. And that she should change jobs if she doesn’t have fun at work.

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