by Yu-kai Chou
There is also an interesting combination of both Core Drive 1: Epic Meaning & Calling and Core Drive 5: Social Influence & Relatedness in this behavior.
Core Drive 5 is apparent – when you believe the social norm is to recycle towels, you have a stronger tendency to do so, especially when there is high relatedness. However, there is also an odd sense of Epic Meaning & Calling that’s called into action. No one will notice, regardless of whether you recycle your towels or not, so why should that social influence affect you? This ties back to the Elitism Theme of Epic Meaning & Calling. Because you feel that you are part of a larger group, you need to behave like people who are in that group – it’s a cause beyond yourself, even if your group will never find out what you have done. The action, or inaction, calls your integrity into question.
Of course, if the hotel tells you that your picture and your towel-recycling behaviors will be broadcasted to everyone who has stayed in your room and recycled their towels in the past (assuming there are no privacy concerns), then there will suddenly be an even higher level of Social Influence & Relatedness towards the Desired Action (mostly in a Black Hat way, which we will cover on Chapter 14).
To further reinforce this concept, consider another study that was done to examine social conformity, featuring public-service messages that were hung on the doorknobs of several hundred homes in San Marcos, California. The messages all encouraged residents to use fans instead of air conditioning, but used different reasoning and motivations for doing so.
Some messages told residents that they could save $54 a month on their utility bill. Others messages explained that 262 pounds of greenhouse gases per month would be saved from being released into the environment. The third message informed people that it was their social responsibility to protect the environment by switching to fans. A fourth message informed the residents that 77% of their neighbors already used fans instead of air conditioning and that it was “your community’s popular choice!” By now, you can likely guess which one was the winner. Compared to the three other messages that utilized weaker forms of Core Drive 4 and Core Drive 1, the strong Core Drive 5 message on “everyone like you is doing it” emerged as the winner by a long shot, with residents reducing their energy consumption by 10% compared with the control group. All other groups reduced consumption by less than 3%.145. As the research suggests, simply informing your users on how their fellow “elite” users are behaving is a simple way to significantly boost the Desired Actions towards that activity.
Social Influence vs. Epic Meaning within a Team
An interesting dynamic between Core Drive 1: Epic Meaning & Calling and Core Drive 5: Social Influence & Relatedness can further be seen in team relationships and leadership practices.
Within a group, the leader is often motivated by Epic Meaning & Calling. They are typically the one with the long-term vision for the group and understands how it plays out with each individual on their team. For that vision to succeed, they are often willing to sacrifice their own well-being in order to fulfill that higher meaning which they are passionate about.
The team members of the group, however, are often motivated by Social Influence & Relatedness. They are performing the tasks because their team leader wants them to, and they don’t want to be thought of as slackers - an element of Loss & Avoidance). They don’t necessarily believe in the higher meaning and vision to the extent that it drives their behavior, but if the leader is compelling or charismatic, they will commit to the Desired Actions toward that vision.
Generally, the leader’s goal is to motivate each teammate to feel driven by Epic Meaning & Calling. The leader is successful if everyone becomes passionate about the higher meaning of the project or company mission and is willing to make some personal sacrifices to successfully push their shared agenda forward.
On the other hand, if the leader loses that Epic Meaning & Calling and becomes solely motivated by Social Influence & Relatedness, the team will start to crumble from within. Now the leader is no longer motivated by the higher vision of the group, but only working to please their teammates. They have now become an insecure leader, and an insecure leader is an ineffective leader.
When you are leading a team, never lose sight of that Epic Meaning & Calling. Of course, you always want to pay close attention to the feelings and motivations of each teammate, as well as the Core Drives that motivate them. However, if making them feel good becomes the priority you think about day in and day out, then you may end up with a happy group that goes nowhere and fails in the end. The opposite is true too: neglect your teams’ well-being and you’ll have a sad group that’s burnt out and struggling to fulfill the mission.
Corporate Competition as an Oxymoron
Alongside this theme of leadership is the concept of competition in the workplace. When potential clients reach out to me for internal gamification support, many of them ask me about competition in the workplace and how to properly implement it to improve workplace productivity and office dynamics.
Almost every company I talk with assumes that competition always makes things fun and is critical for a robust office culture. Unfortunately, while competition in the workplace can be very useful in different scenarios, it can often backfire and demoralize team morale in the long run.
The problem of competition in the workplace is that it is easy to measure the temporary surge in activities, especially among the top 10 percentile that usually drive a major portion of the measured metrics. However, it is more difficult to follow the gradually decreasing motivation among the other 90% of employees, as well as the anti-collaborative stress that competition generates in the workplace.
Many competitive workplaces create an unhealthy environment where employees put self-interest above corporate and even customer interests. Instead of working towards a win for the company and a win for the customer, the individual simply focuses on beating the internal competition and coming out ahead of their colleagues.
Even though competition in general creates an adrenaline rush and adds a sense of urgency to an effort, most human beings do not like to be in a constant state of competition. When our ancestors were focused on surviving in the wild, this adrenaline rush was meant to be used in short bursts for survival purposes, not as a prolonged condition.
Mario Herger, a colleague and one of the leading experts in gamified competition in the workplace, points out that competition is often contrary to the essential meaning of the corporation. Corporations are formed to bring people together and pool their different strengths in a collaborative way146. The fundamental design of an effective corporation taps into its collective talent to build something greater than its individual parts.
If members of a basketball team were competing against each other instead of their opponents in an important match, they would play more selfishly, avoid passing the ball, and try to feature themselves as the star player. In fact, in both professional and collegiate basketball, besides standard stats such as 2-Point Shots, 3-Points Shots, Rebounds and other personal performance metrics, there is an important stat called Assists. Assists represents the amount of passes to teammates that immediately led to a score.
Studies have shown that most successful offensive teams have a high percentage of assists associated with their scoring efforts. This is because assists lead to higher quality shots, which in turn, result in higher shooting percentages and greater success on the floor. In fact, it has been shown that NBA teams with higher assist numbers win about 72% of their games147. Under the premise that whatever is measured will be improved, emphasizing on assists will lead to more collaborate play and teamwork, even if the player is still driven by a self-interest to succeed.
When we implement competition in the workplace, we need to thoughtfully analyze the risks as well as the benefits, in determining whether there might be any significant and long-term harm to the employees and ultimately the enterprise.
Adding competition-driven stress to the daily challenges that employee
s face can often increase the probability of burnout and skewed performance. Employees may become more motivated to make each other fail and even look for new opportunities elsewhere. In my own experiences, when people around me constantly talk about quitting their jobs, more often than not it is because of dysfunctional people dynamics between their bosses and/or coworkers, and not because the tasks themselves are too difficult.
One well-known example of a dysfunctional workplace competition was GE’s “Rank-and-Yank” system, where the bottom 10% of the organization’s employees were fired on a regular basis. Another was Microsoft’s “Stack Racking” system, where an employee’s expectations for promotion were based on how they were ranked among their peers.
A personal friend of mine who worked at GE many years ago stated, “The Rank-and-Yank system there made sure that everyone hired people weaker than themselves so they were never in danger of being yanked. When we interviewed a brilliant candidate, we made sure they never got the job because it would put ourselves in jeopardy or potentially result in a smaller bonus.”
A Vanity Fair article by Kurt Eichenwald cites that “Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed — every one — cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft.148” Peter Cohan from Forbes stated that, “[Stack Ranking] directed [Microsoft employees] to prevent their peers from getting outstanding performance reviews and brag about their accomplishments to each member of the management committee that determined their relative ranking.149”
As you can see, workplace competition can be extremely destructive to company morale, especially during weak and uncertain economic conditions where people are preoccupied with getting laid off. On the other hand, collaborative team dynamics are much more common in start up companies because employees often get paid with equity. In that case, employees only “win” if the entire company stays competitive against the industry giants that are stagnant and competing internally. It’s a collaborative Group Quest as opposed to an individualized Leaderboard which compels the employee’s motivation to fulfill their company’s mission and create subsequent equity value.
So how to implement competition correctly?
Mario Herger suggests to consider the following when designing competition into the workplace.150
When competition works:
In situations where players aim to achieve mastery of the task
In gain-oriented scenarios and mindsets where players focus on becoming the winner
When contestants reach their Individual Zone of Optimal Functioning (IZOF), which means their anxiety and arousal level reaches a heightened degree of focus151.
When players care about the welfare of the team
When players are primed to overcome obstacles, and not what they will do after reaching the goal
With situational anger to confrontations
When there is an even matchup and players feel that they actually have a chance
When players care about the competitors (competing against your friends instead of every stranger in the world)
Competition does not work:
In learning-focused environments
In prevention-oriented situations and attitudes where players focus on not being the loser
When teams are too harmonious and competition becomes awkward
When creativity is required
When the competition is regarded as skewed and there is little chance to win
Though game mechanics and elements can be used to motivate employees and promote the behaviors that the company wants to see, each competitive initiative should be well thought out and designed with considerable finesse. Arbitrary use of game elements modeled on competition may be useful for short-term sales campaigns, but may be disruptive and anti-productive in the long term.
Instead of taking the zero-sum approach to motivate the best performers, we should consider strategies which bring individual strengths together and produce effective cooperation. In the long run, this formula will generally outperform the individualistic paradigm of workplace motivation.
Cooperative play can help preserve and improve a positive corporate culture, as well as support and encourage the development of talent and skills. At the same time, it increases competitive strength where it really matters – outside in the marketplace.
Game Techniques within Social Influence & Relatedness
You have learned more about the motivational and psychological nature of Core Drive 5: Social Influence & Relatedness. To make it more actionable, I’ve included some Game Techniques below that heavily utilize this Core Drive to engage users.
Mentorship (Game Technique #61)
At the beginning of the chapter, I shared how powerful mentorship could be in a game setting such as Parallel Kingdom, but it is also a consistently effective tool in every medium of activity that requires sustained motivation.
American universities are well known for their student social groups consisting of highly active fraternities and sororities. Many fraternities have rather long and involved initiation rituals for their new members. During the rigorous process of joining a fraternity, a “Big Bro/Little Bro” system is employed where an experienced member in the organization will be matched up with a new potential member going through a semester-long training process known as “pledging.”
The Big Bro is there to serve as a mentor,not only providing directional guidance, but also emotional support to make sure the time-consuming process of pledging becomes more bearable. This practice has endured for over a century and shown to improve the Onboarding experience of members joining the organization.
Having a mentor helps employees better connect with the culture and environment in the workplace. This can effectively increase overall work satisfaction and lower turnover rates.
Unfortunately, most organizations require individuals to become proactive in finding their own mentors, making it difficult for them to find a good match. That is why it is beneficial for companies to create a systemized mentorship program that works to match their employees based on compatibilities. I would even recommend starting the mentorship relationship as early as the interview process, where the interviewer doesn’t just grind the interviewees but seeks to help them improve.
Saying things like, “If you manage to get an offer here, I will be your mentor and help develop your potential” would make your company much more attractive, whether the interviewee is hired or not. Furthermore, this would likely increase your acceptance rates from prospects receiving offers as potential employees, as they would feel that your company would take care of them from the very start. This would go a long way in accelerating their transition into the office culture and environment.
The other benefit for Mentorship is that it also helps veteran players stay engaged during the Endgame Phase. In the Four Experience Phases of a Player’s Journey, we learn that the Endgame is the most neglected and one of the hardest phases to optimize. Good mentorship design in the Endgame also makes veterans feel as if they’ve worked hard enough to prove their status and demonstrate their skills through mentorship with a new employee. (We will cover how to design for the Endgame in more detail in Chapter 20).
While the benefits of utilizing Mentorship within an organization are apparent, how can one utilize Mentorship to motivate people who are outside of the organization?
Mentorship Design within Customer Support
Mentorship can be an amazing way to super-charge a consumer-facing website, such as eCommerce marketplaces and the associated online communities.
One of the observations I have made while consulting for eCommerce companies is that most online community support calls are often not about technical problems or bugs, but rather focus on “how do I do this?” questions. Normally, the customer support agent will patiently walk users through a very simple training process to answer these questions. The sequence might start with something like, “Now click on ‘Settings’ on the right top. Great! Now scr
oll down until you see ‘Privacy.’”
This model is not very effective because:
Users are not exactly enthralled when talking to “customer service” operators because they believe these reps do not really empathize with their problems or understand their needs. This is even more so when the rep appears to be from another country (lack of Relatedness).
Costs for customer service can run very high, especially when the majority of the costs are on solving these “how-to” interface problems.
Newbies to the site don’t feel emotionally engaged with the platform nor the user community. They also aren’t motivated to behave well as stewards of the community.
The veterans of the website do not feel the fulfillment of reaching higher status and may start to feel emotionally unengaged.
The solution? Have the veterans support the newbies! What if each time a veteran logs onto the website, there is a little overlay widget where they can move a slider that says, “I am available for mentorship.” This enables them to become available to answer questions from newbies through an on-site chat interface.
In this case, whenever a new seller on an eCommerce marketplace has a question, they have the option to connect to a veteran seller - one who has “been there, done that,” and can help mentor the newbies reach their aspirational sales goals. The veteran mentor can provide useful information such as, “To adjust your privacy, you want to go to the bottom of settings. Oh also, make sure whenever you sell something, you upload at least four images. Those usually sell the best. I nearly doubled my ratings when I figured that one out.”
Of course, if the veteran expert can’t answer the questions, the newbie can immediately click a button that says, “Talk to an actual customer rep.” But people in general would love to have the opportunity to converse with experienced mentors who can not only help solve their interface problems, but also serve as great exemplars who they can aspire to become.