CONNECTIONS

An Edelman perspective on making meaningful employee

connections that deepen engagement, build trust
and accelerate business performance

JUNE 2017

GAME CHANGER
Using Gamification to Support Lasting Change

By Vanessa Hammett, Employee Engagement, DC

Liz Swiker, Employee Engagement, DC
You dont have to look far to find gamification in your daily life. Whether its earning points for
recycling, continuing a Snapchat streak, or achieving a Starbucks reward, brands and companies are
tapping into our primitive need for competition and recognition to capture our attention.
Gamification is a trend that has been seeping into the workplace for nearly a decade consider
Googles famed in-house currency Goobles, SAPs carpool competition or Deloittes eLearning
program.

At Edelman, were turning to gamification to tackle a pressing business challenge: engaging

employees in organizational transformations to meet the needs of their customers and an ever-
evolving marketplace. This may come to life through a new strategy, a new organizational structure, a
new operating model or process, or new behaviors and sometimes, all the above. While
gamification is fun, it has a business purpose and benefit: a study by Aberdeen Group found that firms
incorporating gamification in their contact centers achieved far greater annual revenues compared
to all others (23.8% vs. 6.9%).

In this edition of Connections, were building on our previous recommendations with focused learnings
on using gamification to turn dry, complex topics (like a new organizational structure, new product
lifecycle or behaviors) into an interactive experience that allows employees to practice and interact
with elements critical to embedding lasting change:

Reframe your thinking: youre a gamemaster now.

In traditional employee communications, we tell
employees what they need to know about a
company transformation. With gamification, we
lead employees to find answers on their own and
help them practice the salient points along the
way. Start by asking yourself what every
colleague needs to know when they step away
from the exercise is it the strategy itself, key
performance metrics, behaviors, activities or
tools? Build these key learnings clearly into your
program and reinforce them by encouraging
your audience to think critically as they discover
them: whats new, whats different, what stays
the same?
For a consumer goods company, understanding
the purpose of several new roles in an operating
model was a critical takeaway. Accordingly, we
designed probing questions at each stage of the
game to stimulate thoughtful conversation
around the why behind the new roles and
responsibilities.
According to the CEB, organizations are
experiencing more change and uncertainty
than they did at the peak of the global
financial crisis, and 73% of executives expect
that to continue increasing. Therefore, we
must continually work to create and enhance
connections between people and strategy.

2017 Edelman
Leave an impression.
Done right, gamification engages colleagues
personally in the change and creates a
memorable and energizing experience. Heres
how:
Get rid of PowerPoint.
Strategies, processes and behaviors can be
difficult to grasp when they are just words on a
page, presentations or a complex chart. Skip
traditional presentations altogether and opt
instead for cards, a board game or a mobile app
that make an abstract process tangible
literally. One of our clients was surprised by how
engaged colleagues were when we used a
board game to explain a complex topic that fell
flat when it was previously introduced in a
traditional format. By leveraging gamification,
colleagues not only paid attention but thought
about the possibilities, asked relevant questions
and understood an end-to-end process that was
critical to business success.
Acknowledge your unique culture
Use true-to-life scenarios, stories and examples to
make the transformation real, and have others
validate them. With our consumer goods client,
we soft-sounded our game scenarios and
examples twice to ensure relevance: first with the
organizations top 40 leaders, and then with a
group of cross-functional colleagues. For another
client who wanted to embed new behaviors in
the organization, we turned the mic over to
colleagues and asked them to share examples of
what key behaviors meant and how they could
be demonstrated in their jobs.
Tap into your colleagues competitive spirit
Using a point system can encourage
participation amongst teams, so long as it is
simple enough to not detract from the overall
objectives of the game which, in the context of
change, is far from having winners or losers! For
one client, the competitive spirit was so strong
that many teams worked ahead because they
were so excited to solve the problem.
2017 Edelman. For more information, contact us at employeeengagement@edelman.com.
Do it right: stand up for the resources and
leadership support you need to get buy-in
for gamification
What is standing in the way of making the
change successful? Is it colleagues time,
leadership consensus, participation, people or
dollars? Secure the resources you need by asking
yourself and your leadership the cost of not
getting it right. One client fought tooth and nail to
have five hours of every colleagues time to be
able to deliver the game exercise. Another
refused to proceed with planning until consensus
was reached by leadership on key elements of a
process change. Still another decided leadership
needed to be visible by playing the facilitator
roles in the game. These conversations were
difficult, but necessary, to instill the importance of
the effort in the companies paths forward.
Gamification is a powerful part of the
communications mix that can help employees
embed transformation in their operations and
create lasting change. Weve learned it can be
rewarding for employees and for the business: for
the concepts weve developed, our unique
approach to gamification resulted in an
employee effectiveness rating of over 90 percent
across clients. In a world where just breaking
through to employees is a challenge, thats a firm
step toward lasting change.
About Us
Edelman Employee Engagement helps organizations
build engagement and trust to accelerate business
performance. Our global network of employee
engagement specialists develop engagement strategy;
deploy the tools and processes to deliver it; create the
multimedia channels and content that support it; and
design the insight mechanisms to measure it.
For more information, visit us at ee.edelman.com, follow
us on Twitter at @EdelmanEE or email us at
employeeengagement@edelman.com.