If you have ever been enticed into working out more intensely because of a leaderboard on a fitness app or the fireworks that will go off if you hit your predetermined step count on your smartphone’s pedometer, you understand the pull of gamification.
By definition, gamification takes what makes games fun and applies it to a topic as a way of engaging and motiving people. Where it differs from merely playing a game is that gamification involves a requirement or purpose outside of the game. As a training element, most wouldn’t have imagined it a decade ago.
Think of gamification as another tool, said Sam Caucci, founder and CEO of 1Huddle, a workforce tech company that specializes in gaming technology. “When sprinkled across the organization, it can make work more fun, help people feel connected to others and make people feel more rewarded as they grow through organization.”
The workforce is changing, Caucci said, and the younger generation is far more connected with gaming technology. “Five years ago, you didn’t have a lot of Gen Z in the workforce. Now you do,” he said. Technology is instinctive for this group of digital natives who grew up in a world with smartphones, mobile apps and the latest gaming technology.
Gamification has actually been around longer than Gen Z, Caucci pointed out—it is the evolution of gamification that has advanced as of late. “I’m seeing a surge today in the number of software companies adding it as a feature to sexy up a boring function,” he said. That makes it increasingly important to better understand gamification and how it can be effective. One c-store company doing just that is Circle K.
Rethinking Engagement
Circle K continues to scale up with the gamification journey its European counterpart started in 2019. The platform landed in the U.S. about a year ago and continues to gain momentum after starting with a small group of 50 stores and finding that the early results in the states matched the results in Europe. Since that first U.S. test group, the organization has been working to scale it up in a larger way and build internal excitement around the new gamified platform. “We saw the exact same data in the U.S. as Europe—both showed increased sales and engagement,” said Kristian Styrmo, director of people development for Circle K Europe.
For the convenience retailer, the idea of gamification started with the realization that there was a need to rethink employee engagement and training, said Styrmo. “We looked into future trends in the training space and the decentralized model of Circle K operating in many countries and felt there was a gap; we needed to deliver a different infrastructure to maximize potential,” he said.
I’m seeing a surge today in the number of software companies adding [gamification] as a feature to sexy up a boring function.
Reflecting on Circle K Europe’s journey with gamification innovation, Styrmo said the most important piece—the one he continues to keep top of mind and would recommend to others—is to remember the end user. “You cannot start with the corporate side,” he said. “Instead, directly connect with the end user to understand what they think and what makes them excited.” Maintaining an end-user focus is something Styrmo believes is worth obsessing about. “You have to obsess about the end user. The product is for them. Our job is to give them the tools to grow.”
The tools revolve around different virtual training modules with game play baked into the format. Styrmo explained that the intent is for each session to include deliberate learning objectives, while also being engaging enough that the user would intrinsically want to repeat the module more than once.
Circle K’s gamified training program, dubbed CK Star, includes a series of “episodes” that engage store associates in different on-the-job scenarios. Employees earn points by completing each episode. It’s about immersing users in real-life, store associate-level situations.
In the gamified platform, users enter the 3D world of a Circle K location, where Circle K employees walk around the store training the user on situations that they will experience daily when dealing with customers. Employees use either their own mobile device or a Circle K tablet. The virtual format shows the user performing the task they choose. Users score points as they progress through the session, receive constructive feedback along the way and can see how they measure up against colleagues at their store and all Circle K stores globally. The session ends with some level of praise and encouragement to continue mastering more skills and a note that suggests continuing to play to improve their score.
The entire approach challenges the traditional idea of training “because you want to complete it,” Styrmo pointed out. “It is fun; you want to do it again.” He hopes employees want to repeat the game up to, say, 10 times, to build retention through repetition.
While gamified training modules certainly appeal to a younger demographic, Styrmo said that Circle K wants it to work for all demographics and did not target a specific age group. The end goal was about moving the majority of the workforce to a new engagement level, he explained.
To note, Circle K’s gamified training methods remain a part of a bigger mix of traditional forms of training. “We’re not ready to go fully gamified,” said Styrmo. “We have established that the technology is interesting. Now we have to see how to use it more.”
Styrmo and his team are currently investing time into how exactly to expand the technology. “We are testing how wide and deep we can go with it,” he said.
Gamified: A Beginner’s Guide to Branching
Gamification elements like the ones incorporated by Circle K Europe are readily available today, said Jeff Kahler, president of Ready Training Online, a production and learning management company, and the NACS e-learning and education partner.
Content “branching” scenarios are one of the most common components of gamification today, Kahler said, along with leaderboards and badges. Branching allows users to make different choices as they go through their gamified journey, explained Kahler. Leaderboards encourage competition, such as a Peloton user pedaling faster on a stationary bike to rank higher than others on the ride, and badges are earned rewards, such as points or even an emoji.
In content branching, the user has multiple decision points, each choice leading down a different path to one of several possible conclusions. Branching allows the user to learn by making a choice, Kahler explained, and immediately see and feel the impact of those choices, which of course connect to the employee’s tasks and responsibilities. Moreover, branching creates more interactivity than watch-and-do training videos of yesteryear.
Kahler provided a store level choose-your-own-adventure example of branching as it relates to suggestive selling. The gamified user watches as a customer walks up to the foodservice counter. The customer says, “I’d like to order a footlong hoagie.” The user then sees a few options, all of which start with the employee asking, “Would you like to add…” The choices for the employee to finish that sentence are: A., cheese for an extra 75 cents; B., double meat for an extra $1.99; or C., bacon for an extra $1.19?
“After the user makes the selection, the training opportunity would be to show the user the related cost associated with each option,” Kahler explained. “Although the cheese option may be the most inexpensive option, there may actually be more profit in it than the double meat option.”
There is no actual “wrong” answer for the employee, Kahler said. “It’s a training opportunity to tell employees, ‘You could have done this differently, but you’ve not necessarily failed in your mission.’”
Overall, the more interactive, the better when it comes to gamified approaches, said Kahler. One big piece of advice he has for anyone looking at integrating gamification into their training is to first understand what gamification means for your organization. “I have people call me all the time and ask about gamification. My first question is, ‘What do you want out of it?’” Knowing that answer, he said—whether it is to reward, train or even use gamification for a competition of some kind within the organization—guides the rest of the conversation about integrating gamified solutions.
Justifying and Expanding
One of the critical points for success in a program of this magnitude is having corporate leaders willing to invest and to justify the investment, Styrmo said, adding that putting numbers to it is an expectation.
After half a million repetitions of the gamified training, Circle K data show employees repeat the training several times. “That tells us we are building something compliant, and they want to engage with the platform,” said Styrmo, who shared the results of Circle K Europe’s success during the virtual NACS Convenience Summit Europe in June. The stores that have been doing training have seen a lift in merchandise sales, he said.
You have to obsess about the end user. The product is for them. Our job is to give them the tools to grow.
Additionally, 90% of employees report they like the training and think it will help them in their jobs, and turnover declined by 5%. “We have not seen this level of engagement in training before,” Styrmo said. “The hypothesis was that if we delivered more engagement, people would be more inclined to stay, and this is turning out to be the case.”
On top of the internal results, a recent human resources award added some panache to the Circle K Europe innovation. Circle K Europe’s gamification strategy earned the Best HR Technology Strategy award as part of HR magazine’s HR Excellence Awards 2020.
“It’s really the start of a longer journey for us,” said Styrmo. “There are a lot of lessons to be learned when working with employee engagement, both from the perspective of working with innovation in general and in experimenting with engaging employees. The big question to ask is: What’s the opportunity within that space?”
Making It Fun to Fail
Considering taking the next step toward integrating gamification? If you want to encourage repetition with gamified training, a few specific components tend to keep the user coming back, said Sam Caucci, founder and CEO of 1Huddle. Here, he outlines three keys to a great game:
- Offer choices. The best games give the players choices, Caucci said. Allow players to customize their profile, create an avatar and pick colors. “Don’t make them watch a module and not be able to get out of it,” he advised. Offering choices can include allowing them to choose their own mission, per se. He described this example: “Renee, you are being onboarded at Karen’s Convenience Company. Here are three things you need to do, and you can do them in any order.”
- Ensure the player feels good about something. The idea here is that as the player starts to succeed, a new level of difficulty emerges. Caucci cites Duolingo as a good example, where the first two or three levels of the language-learning app are easy. “It gets you sucked in, and then the challenge starts to emerge, but it makes you feel good in the process,” he said. “In a retail brand today, using technology to tell employees they are doing a good job is an awesome use of technology.”
- Make sure the user feels important as a player. “As I succeed, I can see the way my store is succeeding,” is how Caucci connects this idea for front-line workers, such as cashiers. Popular games today are team-oriented, he said. “It’s a big movement in game-play today.” Examples include online video games such as Fortnite and Minecraft, where groups of people can collaborate to play a game.
When designed the right way, a user in a gamified system will just try again if they fail. “I always tell leaders, reading from a PowerPoint is not challenging,” Caucci said. “Let people fail and struggle and gain confidence and get better. Games and gamification make it fun to fail.” He likens it to beating a level in a video game where players simply keep trying until they get through the level. “There are so many great parallels to the workforce, we just have to tap into it and create an environment where people don’t get upset if they fail, they just try again.”