The global crowdfunding market (including P2P lending) in 2015 is estimated at USD 34.4 billion, an amazing acceleration from $2.7b in 2012. Meanwhile, Millennials are recognized as the key agent of change in the process referred to as the “socialization of finance”. Why is crowdfunding such a good fit for digital natives (and “digital adoptees”) and what are the key takeaways for gamification design? Continue reading Three Lessons for Gamification from the Millennial-Driven Crowdfunding Revolution
Tag: gamification
What’s Up in Gamification #19: Employee Engagement
Non Fun Fact of the week: 65% of employees feel they don’t get enough recognition. This is immediately related to the universally deplored lack of engagement in the workplace and one area where performance gamification can be instrumental. Yet, asks Causecast founder Ryan Scott, do we even know what employee engagement is? Continue reading What’s Up in Gamification #19: Employee Engagement
What’s Up in Gamification #18: The Insurance Industry
As “one of the last big offline industries” and possibly one of the most customer-UNfriendly ones, the insurance industry can now only go the way of rapid customer-centric digitization. And gamification can be instrumental in this process. Continue reading What’s Up in Gamification #18: The Insurance Industry
Digital Games and Edutainment for Financial Literacy
With just one-third of the world’s adult population being financially literate, it will take massive public-private efforts for the children of today to reverse this trend in the future. Realizing they have a high stake in financial education, bank and credit institutions are increasingly investing in gamified ‘edutainment’ targeted at young children and teenagers. Continue reading Digital Games and Edutainment for Financial Literacy
The Millennial Mindset from a Gamification Perspective
When it comes to attracting and retaining millennial employees, neither Fun nor Fear card will do – they seem neither impressed by ping-pong tables nor afraid of the job market. But two other “F”s, as in Flexibility and Feedback, have been shown by research to carry far greater weight. What other factors shape the millennial mindset and make gamification a highly promising tool to help tackle the biggest threat to employers – the alarmingly low engagement and resulting absence of loyalty? Continue reading The Millennial Mindset from a Gamification Perspective
What’s Up in Gamification #17: US Election Special
Hours away from the election results, professional political campaigners in the U.S. must already be busy poring over data, analyzing both camps’ strategies and tactics, and revising their arsenal. One instrument that is certain to feature more prominently in the election campaign toolbox after 2016 is gamification.
Besides the official apps released by both campaigns, the Apple App Store and Google Play offer a plethora of news, poll tracking, and voter motivation apps, as well as a variety of satirical and more or less openly partisan, Trump-punching, Hillary-bashing, wall-building, and e-mail sorting mobile games, all of which can be useful for future reference and development of full-fledged gamified platforms.
The official apps:
Hillary 2016
Hillary Clinton has gamified the election with her new app, QUARTZ
Clinton Campaign App Taps into Mobile Game Craze, The Hill
Clinton camp resurrects dead Facebook tool, Politico
America First
Amazingly, Donald Trump’s New App Is Not a Joke, Gizmodo
Is Trump’s New ‘America First’ App Designed to Connect White Nationalists?, Blue Nation Review
Trump’s “America First” mobile app offers badges and “many more features” coming soon, Fast Company
Jane McGonigal’s Pokemon Go inspired Swing Voter Go!
Inside The Election Video Game That Was Built To Defeat Donald Trump, CSEC World Congress
Anti-Trump election game comes from MoveOn.org and game scholar Jane McGonigal, VentureBeat
The Underbelly: Swing Voter Go!, Ludonarrative Assonance
Parodies and controversies
Turn your Clinton and Trump burns into points with new app, CNET
Prepare for the Clinton-trump Debate with a Political Drinking Game, Kill Screen
‘Hide It Hillary’ mobile app game banned by Apple; titles like ‘Punch Trump’ approved, The Washington Times
So you’re foolish enough to make satire for the App Store, Medium
Voter motivation
Tech really wants to fix this election, TechCrunch
Need to Register to Vote? There’s an App for That, MediaFile
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Portrait of Millennials at Work and the Case for Gamification
With up to 71% not engaged or actively disengaged, research shows millennial employees are constantly on the lookout for better career opportunities. The enormous cost of employee turnover resulting from the high millennial job-hopping rate is a problem employers simply cannot afford to ignore. Can gamification offer solutions for both sides of the equation? Continue reading Portrait of Millennials at Work and the Case for Gamification
What’s up in gamification #16
This week is marked by the year’s biggest event focused on Engagement, Gamification and Enterprise Solutions based on Games – the Gamification World Congress Conference, Madrid, Oct 26-27. Our What’s Up is dedicated to the 5 finalists for the Award “GWC Best Contribution to Industry 2016”, who are also among the 40+ reputed speakers at GWC 2016: Continue reading What’s up in gamification #16
Workplace Gamification: Can Employers Afford Not to Engage Millennials?
What are some key takeaways for employers and gamifiers from recent sociological surveys by Gallup, Deloitte, Motivaction, and other reputed research agencies? And in what areas and ways is gamification likely to have the strongest positive impact on millennial employees?
As they mature into the dominant living and working generation, millennials are transforming the modern workforce, workplace, and work culture. In recent years, they have understandably become the most researched, analyzed, and commented demographic group.
They’ve been called lazy, entitled, self-centered, narcissistic. And while it is easy to bypass these and many other casually assigned labels, when the most reputed global sociological agencies use terms such as ‘unattached’, ‘disengaged’, ‘disruptive’, and lacking in loyalty, employers must take heed.
“One foot out the door” even as they onboard
As employers and HR departments have known for years, low engagement rates are bad enough since they immediately affect productivity and job satisfaction. But when combined with high personal goals and expectations, with openness to change and mobility as yet largely unrestricted by family commitments, low engagement spurs job hopping.
High employee turnover directly hurts companies’ financial performance.
The Deloitte Millennial Survey found a “remarkable absence of loyalty” among millennials. Gallup confirms – 60% of millennials say they are open to a different job opportunity – and explains this tendency with prevailing indifference and disinterest (71% of American millennials are not engaged or actively disengaged at work).
Gallup further estimates that “millennial turnover due to lack of engagement costs the U.S. economy $30.5 billion annually”.
Source: The 2016 Deloitte Millennial Survey
In terms of gamification and Yu-Kai Chou’s Octalysis Framework, this means that the ‘avoidance and loss’ core drive can safely be disregarded when designing work engagement programs specifically for millennials.
They are not afraid of the job market and in fact expect and hope to have varied career paths and multiple jobs and roles. The findings also suggest gamification efforts should concentrate on fostering the apparently absent sense of “ownership and possession” (core drive 4), which is directly related to loyalty. |
It is important to stress that what underlies the high job-hopping rates is not necessarily the quest for better pay and financial incentives. While pay remains a decisive factor, all too often, millennials are on the lookout for.
Jobs as Development Opportunities
According to Gallup’s report, How Millennials Want to Work and Live, 59% of millennials say “opportunities to learn and grow are extremely important to them when applying for a job”.and
87% say development is important in a job.
Similarly, Deloitte’s Millennial Survey concludes that “where Millennials are most satisfied with their learning opportunities and professional development programs they are also likely to stay longer. It is, therefore, disappointing that less than a quarter (24%) of Millennials are “very satisfied” with this aspect of their working lives”.
In a sense, Millennials turn the tables on employers by approaching job searching as enlightened consumers who know what they need and want. Most notably – a clear-cut, merit-based progression path. What this entails for company management and HR teams is higher priority status and more resources allocated to training programs directly linked to career advancement and financial benefits.
This opens up great prospects for gamification as it is arguably most effective precisely in education and training. In terms of Octalysis, the data about millennials’ eagerness to learn, and desire to grow, brings to the fore core drive 2, Development and Accomplishment. |
Personal Values and Interests
This is another defining characteristic highlighted by most studies of millennials – they strive to stay true to their values and ethics:
Deloitte found that to 64%, personal values are “very influential” when making decisions at work.
To quote the Gallup report, “while millennials can come across as wanting more and more, the reality is that they just want a job that feels worthwhile ― and they will keep looking until they find it.”
Source: The 2016 Deloitte Millennial Survey
Millennials want jobs which pay well but which also engage and interest them. As a result of their reluctance to compromise on this point, entire industries, such as insurance, utilities, wholesaling, are shunned by this generation of job-seekers:
Source: The Hartford’s 2015 Millennial Leadership Survey
Why this should matter to employers? Besides being highly selective based on their personal interests, millennials approach and judge brands and products, companies and charities by the same standards and critical questions, most notably: are they people-centered, ethical and reliable. They are less impressed – and hardly inspired – by financial performance, business expansion and profits.
Consequently, unless they want to risk alienating – and ultimately losing – their millennial employees, companies need to build their reputation on a people-first (employees AND customers) basis.
A Generation of Leaders
Millennials’ self-reported ambition to grow and develop professionally is matched by their thirst for knowledge and skills and their confidence in their own impact and leadership potential. Together, these point to the one area where training would be most welcome and is perceived as insufficient – leadership skills:
Source: The Hartford 2015 Millennial Leadership Survey
According to Deloitte 2016 Millennial Survey, more than six in ten Millennials (63 %) say their “leadership skills are not being fully developed.” And the 2015 survey found that only 28 percent of Millennials feel that their current organizations are making ‘full use’ of the skills they currently have to offer.”
The research concluded that “supporting leadership ambitions builds loyalty” – millennials who feel their company is helping them develop their leadership skills and supports their ambitions are much more likely to stay with their employer beyond the average two-year tenure.
Source: The 2016 Deloitte Millennial Survey
In this context, a millennial-targeted gamified system must be integrated and communicated as part of a general employee-centric framework together with training. Gamification can enhance the sense of progression and hence, millennial employees’ well-being by:
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Check back soon for Part II: Portrait of Millennials at Work and the Case for Gamification, with more highlights from millennials research on the importance of: the sense of purpose, competitiveness, flexibility, feedback, connectedness and social media, and expectations from managers. These findings will be viewed in terms of the opportunities for gamification specifically aimed at attracting and engaging millennial employees.
Featured image: Motivaction
What’s up in gamification #15
As highlighted in a Business Insider Intelligence report, the gamification market has grown from an estimated $400 m in 2013 to $2.8 billion in 2016. This week’s selected recent articles take a closer look at the use of gamification and games as behavioral assessment and sourcing/filtering tools in unbiased, skill-based recruiting worthy of the 21st century. Continue reading What’s up in gamification #15