Forbes’ “Grandfather of Gamification”: Data Creates a Culture of Growth
Charles “Chuck” Coonradt is a consultant, CEO, and five-time bestselling author. His 1984 book The Game of Work has sold over 150,000 copies and remains on Amazon’s bestselling business book list. At Blue Margin, the book’s principles have anchored our methodology for helping businesses grow and develop healthy cultures through data.
Game of Work Inc. has built a legacy of transforming Fortune 500 companies’ operations by applying the psychology of sports to the workplace to increase productivity, profitability, and employee engagement. Chuck’s team has coached thousands of executives and managers, working with Pepsi, Boeing, the U.S. Air Force, Coca-Cola, Nordstrom, Coors, Wendy’s, Sherwin Williams, and Sysco, among others. He is a founding member of the School of Entrepreneurship at Brigham Young University and the Marriott School of Management. Jon Thompson, co-founder and CSO of Blue Margin, had the distinct pleasure of hosting Chuck to discuss how gamifying work transforms the workplace by increasing employee engagement and job ownership. Watch the video, listen to the podcast, or read the highlights below.
The episode covers four key themes: why employees who cannot see how to win will eventually stop trying, how data and dashboards make great coaching possible, why increasing feedback frequency reduces problem size, and how data visibility prevents workplace disengagement.
Gamify Work to Drive Employee Motivation
Coonradt has observed that people are drawn toward activities that identify clear goals and give them a clear indication of how they are progressing. That insight anchors everything he teaches.
It all started at a construction site. Chuck likes to tell the story of observing eight young construction workers apathetically drudging through their work until the lunch bell rang. Miraculously, the group instantly transformed, throwing off their vests and racing to the basketball court. They became focused, enthusiastic, and hardworking because they knew the score and knew how to win.
Why were these young men complacent in their work but zealous in their recreation? As Chuck observes, “the problem obviously wasn’t the raw materials.” There was nothing wrong with the men, but something was clearly missing from their work. From this observation, Chuck started The Game of Work consultancy in 1973 and authored the bestselling book by the same name in 1984. Nicknamed by Forbes as “The Grandfather of Gamification,” he is considered by many scholars to be the original gamification theory creator. His philosophy comes down to a single question: why do people pay for the privilege of working harder at recreation than they will work when they are paid? He answers it with five principles drawn from the motivation of recreation: clearly defined goals, better scorekeeping and scorecards, more frequent feedback, personal choice of methods, and consistent coaching.
The Benefits of Scorekeeping
In Scorekeeping for Success, Coonradt writes that measurement only becomes truly powerful when it is transformed into something tangible, relevant, and meaningful. That transformation is what he calls scorekeeping. The main purpose of scorekeeping is to facilitate meaningful, productive, and consistent conversations between a coach and a player. With appropriate feedback guardrails covering the type, frequency, and method of feedback, even employees working under subpar managers can improve their contributions and advance the company’s goals.
Read insights from industrial psychologist Dain Johnson on the importance of selecting KPI metrics that support organizational key results in this Expert Insight Series interview.
Even if employees are not asking for feedback, they need it to feel engaged. Only 19% of millennials report receiving regular feedback from their managers, though this generation comprises the largest segment of the American workforce and desires more feedback than others. Furthermore, Gallup data shows that when employees strongly agree that they have received meaningful feedback in the past week, they are almost four times more likely to be engaged than their peers.
Gallup describes meaningful feedback as “ongoing, focused, future-oriented, and individualized.” By their very nature, scorecards create that kind of feedback.
Jill Belconis discusses additional benefits of the job scorecard in this Expert Insight Series interview.
Scorecards Enable Grounded, Consistent Feedback
To gamify work for your employees, feedback cannot be based on a manager’s mood, a recent data point, or faulty observations. It must instead rely on empirical data: the scorecard. Without an accurate score, employees interpret manager feedback as a vague and constant pressure to “do better” because they cannot see a concrete path to success. Coonradt writes that what is needed is a scorecard that accurately measures performance against predetermined goals and destinations. With business intelligence dashboards, scorekeeping does not have to be a burden added to an already full plate. Dashboards keep score for managers and employees, provide insights into how to improve performance, and allow employees to self-manage.
Increase Frequency of Feedback to Decrease the Size of Problems
Coonradt has observed that increasing the frequency of feedback reduces the size of the problem. The manufacturing and distribution industries are particularly prone to taking a retrospective view into data. While point-in-time snapshots are useful, they are often too late to make meaningful adjustments. Instead, Chuck recommends using real-time data analytics to break down problems, then providing more frequent feedback based on this data. Refreshing dashboards daily or weekly is much more effective than a monthly or yearly retrospective. Doing so reduces the complexity of problems and makes employees more likely to respond with “oh, we can fix that.” Gallup workplace data supports this, finding that employees are 3.6 times more likely to strongly agree they are motivated to do outstanding work when their manager provides daily versus annual coaching.
In the past, the tools needed to provide real-time data to employees were only accessible to companies with large IT teams and budgets. Today, business intelligence software is accessible to companies of all sizes. Hear our founders discuss their experience as PE-backed executives without sufficient visibility in this podcast episode.
Use Data Insights to Engage Your Workforce and Prevent the Quiet Quitting Virus
PwC research found that 65% of U.S. employees were looking for new jobs, and U.S. labor data substantiates the phenomenon of the Great Resignation. Over the relevant period, employee quit rates effectively doubled, making workforce retention one of the most pressing operational challenges for mid-market leaders.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
An Alternate Diagnosis
While wages, benefits, career advancement, and flexibility each play a significant role in job satisfaction, Chuck suggests an alternate diagnosis for high turnover. He hypothesizes that humans are designed to figure out how to win at the game of work, and when an employee cannot see how to win at their job, they conclude there must be no way to win. As a result, they leave in search of satisfaction elsewhere.
Quiet Quitting: The Virus Infecting the Workplace
If these employees do not quit and leave, they may do something worse: disengage. Harvard Business Review has described “quiet quitting” as an increasingly common alternative to leaving a job. These unhappy employees choose to stay employed but are uninvested in their work and unwilling to go the extra mile. They become a workplace virus that infects those around them.
Use Data Insights to Promote Conversations and Healthy Company Culture
Per Chuck, the best action company leaders can take to prevent the quiet quitting virus is to keep score using individual KPIs that support overarching business goals, and to use scorecards to facilitate frequent, meaningful feedback. Power BI dashboards are well suited for this task and do not require a heavy lift to implement.
Contact The Game of Work
Looking to continue the conversation with Chuck? Interested in reading his books? Find him on LinkedIn or through his consulting firm, The Game of Work.
Blue Margin helps private equity and mid-market companies quickly convert data into automated dashboards, the most efficient way to create company-wide accountability to the growth plan. We call it The Dashboard Effect, the title of our book and podcast. If you would like to explore how Blue Margin can help you automate your data feedback and create a culture of growth and accountability, contact us here.
