Assessing the Effects of Gamification Applications and its Benefits for the Workplace (PDF)

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2014 in the subject Business economics - Miscellaneous, grade: 1,0, University of Mannheim (Chair of Information Systems lV), course: Bachelorarbeits - Modul, language: English, abstract: At a time, when enterprises and companies struggle with low levels of engagement and motivation but games are as popular as never before, it is not surprising that the answer and cure-it-all to those problems seems to be Gamification.

Gamification is the use of game elements in non-game contexts and promises to transfer the astonishing ability of games to engage people to the workplace.

The reason for the recent emergence of Gamification is the transformation of the nature of work and the workforce itself. The design of enterprise software has shifted to a new era that largely focuses on what is pleasurable. This shift in focus is due to millenials, also referred to as digital natives who have just started to enter the workforce and have different expectations, attitudes and skills compared to previous generations. Millenials have grown up with social media and mobile technology and prefer to use the same technology at home and at work. In particular mobile technology for mobile devices supports the development towards a playful and intuitive interaction. As digital natives are used to this kind of technology they engage and interact differently with each other in the workplace. In order to engage and motivate them, companies have to change their traditional ways of interaction. Gamification is one of the first steps towards this change and seems to be the answer to what is pleasurable to people.

As Gamification is a fairly new topic, there is few research on its effects so far. Gamification is said to motivate employees and engage with customers at the same time and even though there is little proof for this assumption, learning theory works in favor of it. The number of papers published on Gamification has grown significantly during the last years, but there is no clear understanding about which overall results they yield and under which circumstances those are valid. As more and more companies implement Gamification mechanics due to its promising concept, its success has to be measured reliably.