Using Gamification Techniques Can Accelerate KM Adoption

Originally published 19-Oct-16 (24-May-18) and 04-Nov-16 (31-May-18)

My Lucidea webinar “Gamification Accelerates KM Adoption” focused on using gamification techniques to crack the challenging problem of building user engagement and ensuring that your KM platform is vibrant and widely leveraged within your organization.

Gamification can be very useful to knowledge managers as part of a strategy to encourage participation in knowledge initiatives. I began his webinar session with a definition of gamification:

“Applying the typical elements of game-playing, such as point scoring, competition with others and rules of play to other areas, in order to encourage engagement with a process or tool. In the case of KM, we are trying to encourage people to share knowledge or ask for help, or participate in knowledge exchange in other meaningful ways.”

Elements of gamification

I described a wide array of proven methods for increasing KM engagement and employee commitment, including:

• Badging–distinctive emblems that can be added to a profile to denote special status
• Goals–setting performance goals as part of normal performance planning; includes accountability
• Incentives–encourage compliance with goals by offering things people can benefit from; either tangible or intangible
• Recognition–praising, publication, promotion, public acknowledgement
• Rewards–can be financial or something else that shows “we appreciate your contribution.”

In my experience, typical game-playing elements such as point scoring are successful in building activity on a KM platform.

I provided an example of a SAFARIS Star framework. This is a great illustration of how you can give points out and weight them to encourage users to do the things you believe are more important. As you see in the image below, in the SAFARIS model, answering a question is the most heavily valued participatory element.

You can develop a similar framework. The important thing is that you define the things you want done, assign a point value to them, and automate the awarding, so that when people do those things, the points are automatically tallied and displayed…underpinning the all-important public recognition that is an important part of motivating people to participate in knowledge exchange.

To learn more, see:

1. Webinar Recording: Gamification Accelerates KM Adoption
2. Webinar Recording: Selling KM — Recognize and Reward
3. KM and Gamification Techniques: The Circle of Excellence
4. KM and Gamification Techniques: Examples of Tangible Rewards
5. Gamification Applications and Digital Badges
6. How to motivate knowledge sharing using gamification, goals, recognition, and rewards
7. APQC: Gamification in KM