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Adding Gamification to Your Adoption Strategy

8/12/15 12:02 AM

An important statistic in any collaboration strategy is the measurement of adoption. The problem, however, is that most organizations fail to understand the lifecycle of adoption, and do not have strategies in place for the constituencies within each phase. Many of us are familiar with the technology adoption lifecycle developed by Everett Rogers in his book Diffusion of Innovations, and popularized (and slightly modified) by Geoffrey Moore in his highly-respected book Crossing the Chasm, both of which examine the ways in which new ideas and technologies spread and are adopted within different organizations and cultures. As new innovations, ideas, and technology enter into the organizations, there are "innovators" who embrace what is new, and "early adopters" who follow the lead of the innovators and try to adapt what is new to existing practices, guiding "early and late majorities" and organizational "laggards" toward adoption. While most of us understand these precepts, many fail to translate this information into actionable strategies for identifying where an organization fits, and what to do to move employees forward.

What is gamification, and how does it fit into your adoption strategy?

Gamification is an innovative concept of driving and influencing end user adoption based on the concepts of game mechanics and social computing. Within gamification strategies, game concepts are used to motivate staff to be more productive and have more fun at work.

Using tools such as badges, leaderboards, community-driven recognition, and other social collaboration tools, gamification leverages our natural desire to come together for a common cause. It is goal-oriented, it generally incites a stronger emotional investment in the activity, and supports community. Within a corporate environment, gamification can help shape preferred behavior by rewarding individuals through recognition (or even financially) for following the right steps, completing activities on time or with few or no errors, or for helping others.

Within collaboration and knowledge management platforms, such as SharePoint, gamification techniques are increasingly being used to help guide and nurture employees through the adoption lifecycle. The overall goal of gamification is to drive engagement -- a very important aspect of adoption. Engagement is more than simply measuring the number of employees who have logged onto a system in a given month (the most basic metric for tracking adoption), but a measurement of activity within that system.

Engagement is about utilization: if employees are engaged and using a system, a process, or tools, the organization will be better able to measure the utility and value of that system, process, or tool. In terms of improving collaboration, how can you measure the success of your SharePoint environment or your community-building initiatives if nobody is actually participating?

In a Beezy-sponsored webinar later this month, I will be joined by fellow Office 365 MVP and gamification expert Jussi Mori (@jussimori), co-founder and principal at Peaches Industries, to outline some of the ways that organizations can harness different gamification techniques to improve SharePoint adoption. Here is our abstract:

The Power of Enterprise Social and Gamification to Boost User Adoption

While enterprise social collaboration is something widely discussed, the idea of utilizing Gamification is still widely misunderstood. When you talk about Gamification, you might think about Points, Badges, and Leaderboards (PBL) within your application or intranet, with the goal of driving user engagement through the roof. This scenario is only partly true. The fact is, adding simple Gamification elements to your environment might have a positive short-term effect on user engagement metrics, but these tools may only appeal to a small sub-set of your users – and even then, will not likely provide lasting improvement.

In this webinar featuring Microsoft MVPs Christian Buckley and Jussi Mori, we will look beyond PBLs and help you to envision how enterprise social and strategic use of Gamification can provide lasting value and increase end user engagement within your environment. We will examine the core drivers of successful enterprise collaboration, discuss the factors that motivate people, and share real-world scenarios of how you can apply these principles within your own organization to drive user engagement and adoption. Specifically, we will provide customer examples where Gamification was implemented successfully, and show you how this could be adapted to improve productivity and efficiency in SharePoint and Office 365.

The webinar will be held on Wednesday, August 26th at 8am PST and you can register here.

Employing gamification techniques can be an effective method for boosting your SharePoint adoption, but it requires careful planning and effective measurement to be successful. We invite you to join this informative webinar to learn more about how gamification can move your organization forward on the technology adoption curve, and help your employees to become more engaged.

And, of course, contact us to learn more about how Beezy can power your gamification strategy.

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