This is How NTT Data Got a 900% Increase in Employee Engagement via its Internal #Gamification Initiative!

In this powerful and deeply informative short video [bottom of page] global technology innovator NTT Data CTO Imran Sayeed highlights some simple yet truly epic steps that his team has taken to evolve and to radically accelerate the impact of their employee engagement gamification initiative.

 

NTT Data's Core Engagement Behaviorization Goals and Technology:

The NTT Data gamification project which targets team-based, cross functional collaborative learning and best practices knowledge sharing,  increased their employee participation from 400 to 4000 employees in just a few months That's a 900% increase!

“Gamification is just a fancy buzz word for Behavior Reinforcement.” - Imran Sayeed, NTT Data CTO.

 

At first they introduced a virtual token economy (also known as a points levels and badges program) awarding their employees Karma Points for key target behaviors like logging in, posting and sharing interesting value generating content and forming new Centers of Excellence Teams across the organization.  

NTT Data experienced an initial burst of  employee engagement when they incentivized or positively reinforced their Karma Points system with tangible back up reinforces  like IPods and IPads.

Certainly they could have achieved exponentially more sustained engagement with the system had they built a reinforcer assessment process into their program and data-collected around individualized ( far less expensive and far more frequent/effective tangible rewards) based on each employee's individual reward language. The rich predictive behavioral analytics data from such a process would have created even higher performance gains.

Next level gamification will systematically assess for social and tangible reinforcement responses based on different classes of social reinforcement, discovering and delivering the most effective mix of tangible and social incentives for the most precisely sequenced behavioral development and performance goals.

 

Guaranteeing Performance by Definition- It's Not Intrinsic vs Extrinsic Motivation But Positive Tangible vs Positive Social Reinforces 

Positive reinforcement by definition increases any behavior in follows. So by it's very definition it can't fail to get results.

In effective engagement behaviorization, precise language and technical behavior design are just as important as they are in radical application development programing for apps and games design in terms of the final product and its continuous improvement.

This means extending not just functional design but functional behavior analytic design goals into the gamification platform.

The NTT Data Gamification team has since replaced their so called “extrinsic rewards program”. They now provide top performers with so called “intrinsic rewards or motivators”, which are better explained as positive or additive social reinforces.

 How, when and how often social reinforces are delivered with in a gamification process will radically increase the effectiveness and reinforcement value of a point and level system. 
 

Combining certain reinforce classes can also radically explode behavior change speed and effectiveness. For example combing social and tangible reinforcers.
 

The vast majority of the reinforcement events that shapes and sustains human behavior are actually fully unconscious. Some of the most effective contingencies are unknown to the person responding to them. It’s time for big data to unlock and harness these powerful behavioral processes.

Introducing real-time functional behavior analytic design elements into future gamification programs may literally represent not just and ultimate game mechanic but an ultimate source of competitive advantage for the world’s leading gamification companies and their customers.  

Sayeed actually injected his highly effective employee facing gamification initiative with healthy doses of positive social reinforcement himself, by visiting top performers in the program as he traveled from city to city.

 

Really interesting assignments are also awarded, which themselves, re-defined engagement-behaviorally, represent a manipulateable chains or collections of analyzable positive and negative social and tangible reinforcement contingencies and response classes.

 

Engagement-Behaviorization's Answer to Those Trying To Game Your Gamification System

One of the major challenges NTT Data has experienced in the implementation phase of their gamification initiative was the tendency of some employees to try and game the system. Sound familiar?

The Solution here is to apply the same Engagement-Behaviorization technology to reliably replace the undesired user behavior (cheating) with more desirable target engagement behaviors or to shape these through successive approximations.

This means locating and eliminating the sources of reinforcement for the cheating behaviors, perhaps by actually formalizing and incentivizing the cheating process itself. This would mean rewarding and recognizing top cheaters for improving the system.