Enterprise gamification of the employee development process at an infocom consultancy company

Abstract: Gamification is a new trend that seeks to engage people and change their behaviour by implementing game-design thinking in non-game contexts. Recent analytics predicts that more than 70 % of the world’s 2000 largest organisations will have at least one gamified platform by 2014, which indicates that gamification is, and will continue to be, very important in the future of IT-strategy and digital marketing. Purpose and problem statement: The purpose of this Master’s thesis is to increase the knowledge of enterprise gamification, and to develop a proof of concept on how to apply gamification on Cybercom’s internal competence model to increase usage and the employees’ understanding of the model. The following research questions were formulated: How does gamification work and what are the underlying psychological factors? How can Cybercom implement a game layer on their employee development process? Method: This thesis has used a combination of a qualitative and a Background: Gamification is a new trend that seeks to engage people and change their behaviour by implementing game-design thinking in non-game contexts. Recent analytics predicts that more than 70 % of the world’s 2000 largest organisations will have at least one gamified platform by 2014, which indicates that gamification is, and will continue to be, very important in the future of IT-strategy and digital marketing. Purpose and problem statement: The purpose of this Master’s thesis is to increase the knowledge of enterprise gamification, and to develop a proof of concept on how to apply gamification on Cybercom’s internal competence model to increase usage and the employees’ understanding of the model. The following research questions were formulated: How does gamification work and what are the underlying psychological factors? How can Cybercom implement a game layer on their employee development process? Method: This thesis has used a combination of a qualitative and a quantitative approach to accurately capture the complex relations of the employee’s motivations and obstacles for using the competence model, which is their employee development process. Data was gathered through a thorough literature study, internal interviews with employees, meetings with companies, specialised at gamification, and internal quantitative surveys. The gathered data served mainly as input for psychological frameworks and frameworks related to game design. Results: The analysis showed that the employees of Cybercom are motivated by self-actualisation but not by competition or status, which means that the game layer needs to focus on the individual development and not by comparing progress. By analysing the employee development process, it was concluded that the main activity of the game should be to write a log of the employee’s activities. The game layer also needs to focus on increasing ability (usability) since their motivation only can be raised to a certain degree due to limited in-system time. The results also include an account of the underlying psychological factors that explains the effect of gamification. The suggested game design is also presented in the proof of concept of this thesis.