DIY from PVS-Studio: Gamification of Achievements

To be honest, talking about work, then let's admit: even the most beloved business can get bored from time to time, nullify the mood and wear out monotony. Therefore, in our PVS-Studio office, we try to color our everyday life with bright colors. Today there will be a story about one of such innovations - gamification of the achievements of our team.



This is my first article on Habré, so let's get acquainted. My name is Galina, and I am a designer at PVS-Studio. Yes, yes, it is I who draw those very cute unicorns. But today about the gamification of the workflow, although it will not do without pictures :).



Gamification is the transfer of principles and mechanics from the gaming industry (primarily computer games) to non-game life situations. The scope of this phenomenon is quite wide: you can turn into a game, and training, and work, and the interaction between people, and various routine processes in our lives, up to making purchases in the store.



Why is it so relevant for us today? Most of the people who are already working in IT, had a computer from the cradle, grew up with a joystick in their hands and studied the world of games with interest. The game industry itself grew at a frantic pace and turned into art: complex visual, plot and logical techniques of the game grabbed our attention and found a balance between the complexity of passing and ease of perception. Against this background, and other areas of our lives, now we have to learn to capture the attention of generation Y, to be bright and interesting, which game mechanics help a lot.



Here are a few common mechanics familiar to us since childhood (they can be called differently in different sources and classifications):

• Levels
• Glasses
• Lotteries
• Quests
• Collecting
• Penalty system
• Countdown

Etc.



For our experiment, we took the “Status” mechanics according to the classification from SCVNGR (“Playdeck” project). With her, the motivation of the player, in our case, the employee, is to obtain some status or a higher level. They took as the basis the good old board of honor. Well, remember, there were those from the Soviet Union, with photographs of workers? Only here the goal is not just to get the proper honor and respect, but to get as many statuses as possible and fill your entire board with your photo!



As a result, we came up with the following nominations:

1. Half-year standman is the one who most often participated in conferences with a stand. We thought that cheerleading best conveys the spirit of a standman who is ready to go to different cities, cheer for his product and talk about it.
2. Half-year reporter - the one who participated most in conferences with reports.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
3. Diagnostics of the month - the one who most of all rolled out the new PVS-Studio diagnostics in a month. Serious and honorable nomination.

Several nominations for the Habr home site: The best author of the month and half a year (by the number of likes), the most prolific author (by the number of articles), and, of course, the troll of the month (here already in the calculation of comments). How do you think we portrayed Habr? I suggest clicking on the picture to see our option :).

And a couple of just-for-fun nominations:

1. The most fashionable is a stylish employee, selected once a week. This we determine by the reaction of employees at the sight of a mod. :)
2. Most striking - this employee is selected by secret ballot. Nomination means a person who in any way was able to stand out and touch the hearts of colleagues over the past month.

After all, we put together this bunch of unicorns in A0 format and sent it to the printing house for printing on a simple coated paper. I wanted us to be able to change the nominations at any time: add something, and remove something. Therefore, not a stand was chosen, but a paper format. The corkboard served as a substrate, and we pinned photographs on the pins.

Now everything is ready! It turned out lamp and craft. What do you think?

Ekaterina Kate_Milovidova presents her work to her colleagues.

Is there a result? Yes, there is, although it cannot be argued that it happened solely due to the developed competition. An additional factor was the technical director Andrei Karpov, who has been walking for two months now and is looking for “volunteers” to write more and more articles. And now, thanks to the regularity of publications, our company has become a leader in the Habr. It is clear that if we relax a little, we will again fall down in the ranking, but it’s nice anyway.

In conclusion, I would like to note that our motivational experiment has become a bright event in the team. Of course, we did not set ourselves the goal of replacing material motivation with intangible, rather this is a way to say thank you to our colleagues and encourage them to compete well. Do you think such experiments are needed in an IT company? Would you like such an achievement poster in your office?