An Insider's View: Capgemini's Gamification of 120,000 Employees

NOV

2012

An Insider’s View: Capgemini’s Gamification of 120,000 Employees

by gamifeye

capgemini gamification, gamification HR, Leaderboarded, UK gamification

Last week UK gamification startup Leaderboarded made a big splash in the tech scene when it announced a collaboration with Capgemini to bring gamification to its 120,000 employees.

This week, Sam from Gamifeye caught up with Orlando Kalossakas, Business Intelligence Consultant at Capgemini, to get some insider insights into how this system works and the effect it’s having on employee behaviour.

Sam: What was the main motivation for using gamification in Capgemini?

Orlando: In Capgemini there are over 120,000 employees, so it’s crucial to make sure that everyone is on the same page when talking to other people about the company. To make this happen and to be able to reach out to as many people as possible we realised we needed develop an engagement strategy that would catch the attention and the hearts of all employees. We finally settled on an operation called “Brand Days”.

S: Who was responsible for strategy?

O: Within Capgemini we have gamification experts. To mention a couple of names we have Scott Sinclair and Guy Stephens, both leading consultants in this area. After talking through various options with them, our internal marketing team developed a strategy that centred around gamification. The result was an employee challenging quiz that included extrinsic and intrinsic rewards.

S: So how exactly does this quiz work?

O: By logging in to a certain page within Capgemini’s corporate intranet employees can take the quiz and score a certain number of points for every question they answer correctly. These points are then collated on a leaderboard which is provided by Leaderboarded.

But it doesn’t stop here. You can earn extra points by inviting colleagues to take the test. You can also earn extra points by completing certain other actions, for example, writing a little paragraph on “Why it is so so great to work for Capgemini?”

Finally, and we’re pretty proud of this bit, by using a specific hashtag within our internal business social network Yammer, we were able to track how fast people were engaging with the quiz and the topic overall. Through this we were able to award additional points to the most active users.

S: What sort of impact did gamification have on employees?

O: This was a very well thought-out strategy as we wanted to raise awareness about our brand and company to all employees taking the quiz. The impact in the office was pretty big. For a whole week the only thing people had on their minds was getting to number one on the leaderboard.

S: Will gamification be a long-term strategy at Capgemini?

O: All in all, I am sure we’ll be using a lot more gamification in the future. At the end of the day it’s fun and has worked pretty well for us. We also had an internal discussion to talk about what we’d learned from implementing this strategy and about how we could improve future gamified systems. And it’s fair to say we made mistakes. We’re only human! But it’s been a huge learning curve.

A huge thanks to Orlando for speaking to us at Gamifeye. Go ahead and leave comments below if you have any responses.

Featured image by albertoalerigi