You probably heard about the New York Times exposé on work practices at Amazon, where a constant chatter of metrics monitor employees. Yes, this is gamification in practice.
Many horror stories about a complete disrespect for the life part of the work/life equation.
But there also is a simple design problem inside: The Anytime Feedback Tool apparently allows employees to comment on the performance of colleagues without their own identities being revealed to the target of the comment. Combine this with stack ranking, where every group has to rate somone in the group as lowest performing, with potential for being let go.
As I discuss in The Art of Failure, we have to ask ourselves what the ideal strategy of an employee is in this situation? The simple answer is that it is likely much easier to back stab a colleague with the Anytime Feedback Tool, thus dropping them in the ranking, than it is to genuinely improve your own performance. It is plain game design: is there a degenerate strategy? Yes, there is. It will be used. Water will find a crack.
*
On top of that, Jeff Bezos’ rebuttal is that this “doesn’t describe the Amazon I know or the caring Amazonians I work with every day.”
This more or less proves the article right: When managers or CEOs say that they don’t recognize the negative experience of the employees it means either that:
- a) the company is organized such that the CEO will never hear about the negative experiences of the employees, or
- b) the CEO is unwilling to hear about them.
Most likely both, with a) being the results of b)
The danger of metrics, and gamification, is that it insulates you from what is going on because you only receive the data you have chosen to receive. There is no substitute for listening to people.
While I agree that this is a terrible example of a workplace, I think that framing it as a gamified workplace is too far from reality. Described practices are too far from other cases of gamification described elsewhere. And while some of the “mechanics” employed may seem similar to those used in gamification projects, they are not assembled in the way that is recommended and observed in most gamification projects. Nor there is any indication that the implementation of the practices where inspired by gameful design. Instead, the article clearly states that it was inspired by data-driven management, which just cannot be considered a synonym for gamification–although some gamification implementations also employ data collection and analysis, we cannot assume that every data-driven application can be considered gamification.
It is a terrible example of (data-driven) management. But in no way can this be considered an example of gamification, or an indication of the potential of a well executed gamification project.
Gustavo Tondello.
@Gustavo I fully understand your point. It is not framed as “gamified”.
However, and this was one of the points in The Art of Failure, there is little practical difference between the data-driven workplace and the gamified workplace. Gamification – and this is my argument – is easily used to mask a straightforward inhumane and purely data-driven organizational structure.