Episode 56 – Luke Jamieson | The power of gamification

In this episode I chat with Luke Jamieson, founder and CEO of PLAYFULLi.

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Transcript

Murray Guest  

Luke, great to catch up with you on the podcast. I know it’s very interesting times even I’ll be saying unprecedented. It’s a word I’ve used so many times this year, I’ve never used before. How are you doing, man?

Luke Jamieson  

I’m doing okay. Business is obviously pretty tough. But I’m trying to find new ways to think about how I do what I do. And, you know, not capitalize on the situation, but find creative ways to work around it. So I think the challenge for today’s podcast is to not mention the C word. That’ll be how we gamify this this podcast.

Murray Guest  

I love it. I know. And I saw a list the other day of some of the organizations or startups that evolved out of the GFC. And people sharing that to provide some inspiration around what is possible in a crisis. That’s the other C word, we can use that one. And about what that can mean and similar to you, my work has changed quite dramatically. Work that was scheduled is being postponed. And that’s the word I’m using at the moment. But certainly thinking about how I can pivot and how I can innovate and what I do and provide a really quality service to clients online. But it is interesting times, and I, you know, really look forward to talk about what it is that you do because you do some amazing things with a whole range of different companies. And for people that have no idea when we talk about gamifying or gamification, can you give me the best description that you can about what that really means?

Luke Jamieson  

I hope this is a long podcast. So look, in my terms, I think gamification has a bit of a bad, has somewhat a bad name to it, in some circles, it had a bit of a rise in the in the 90s. And that mostly came from I think marketing companies trying to use it in the wrong way, or use it in a way that hooks people on their product gets them to use their product more promote their product for free. And people just, it almost became a form of manipulation. And that’s not really what I do, that’s where it came about for me is that I used to, I spent 15 years in the corporate sector running contact centers, managing, you know, lots and lots and lots of staff, you know, hundreds of staff at a time. And what I noticed is one of the times I hated most was having to go and do the performance benchmarking and setting key performance indicators for the next year. Because it would generally go something along the lines of CEO has these metrics that they need to achieve, they get divvied up between the executive, they then get rolled out. And you have to figure out how you do that at a granular basis. So you divide the goal by the number of people by the number of years, but the number of widgets you need to produce, pretty standard stuff. And we do it right across every industry. And the thing that I noticed was that it just wasn’t all that engaging. And no one liked doing it. And we all tried to push people to meet these goals. And we didn’t recognize all the value that people were adding and in contacts and as there’s a diverse range of people and more often than not, they were more qualified than I was, definitely smarter than I was. And yet, I’m asking them to do this sort of, these mundane tasks so that we can just tick a box. And you would have people who over the years became more and more valuable, but they will never sit at the top of the leaderboard. They were never shooting lights out. And so for years, I would feel like their contribution wasn’t valued. And what the way I saw it was that there’s got to be a better way to measure people and start measuring behaviors and the things that we value in people. And so I started to explore how to do that. And through doing that, essentially, I created this this form of gamification without actually thinking it was gamification. I’m just, was saying this is a more engaging way to measure the diversity of people in our behaviors. And it really worked. It was a huge success, and we saw higher employee engagement, lower attrition. Our recruitment costs obviously went down, customers satisfaction went up. And, you know, that was when I was like, Okay, well, that’s, that’s good. That’s, this is clearly something that works. And I started to learn more about gamification, and the game mechanics that you can apply to work to make that more engaging. But then understanding the behavioral psychology under that, were different game mechanics motivate different people. And so I started to understand, started to really look into the behavioral psychology around that. As I said, this was going to be a long explanation.

Murray Guest  

It’s a really good explanation. And the sense of, as you said, at the very start, the perception and maybe the frame people have developed around what they think gamification is. And when you started talking about that, I was thinking back to some of the make, let’s make something fun, and even a little bit addictive. And I remember some of the sort of fitness apps and things like that to sort of encourage usage, encourage that. But what you’re explaining is, you know, I will, I’m hearing in an organizational sense how we can get people more engaged. And in a, maybe I want to understand, is it a competitive way, but not in a unhealthy competition way around those KPIs.

Luke Jamieson  

So, sort of, you’ll notice I didn’t use the word fun, anywhere, because I think fun sometimes is a byproduct. If you set out that you’re going to make something fun people automatically think, well, we all have different definitions of fun. Competition is an interesting one, that that is a mechanic that some people really warm to, but others hate. And it really polarizes a lot of people. And I think our traditional KPIs that we set for people really focus on those people focus on the ability of who’s going to be the best who’s going to compete, and it always ends up being very short term benefit. For me, it’s around understanding, there’s a whole heap of mechanics that are beyond just competition. There’s community and building networks and socializing with people, there’s understanding your product knowledge and deeply becoming a subject matter expert in something that, they’re great skills that we want in our organizations, yet, we don’t often recognize a reward that things like just achieving your own personal goals, some people like to compete against themselves. And often we don’t give the the environment to enable someone to keep competing against himself. They like competition, but don’t like it against other people. And so using using, you know, some game mechanics, like like ghosting, where you see your own performance, and you’re trying to outperform your own performance, that’s a really strong motivator for some people. Whereas other people like peer to peer competition, they, you’ll see people who love competition, that’s against somebody who is at sort of an equal level to them, allowing them to have a, you know, iron sharpens iron kind of approach to to competition. But then you’ll see people who just like winning, and it’s not about competition, they’ll happily, they’re the guys you see down at the basketball courts dunking on three year olds, because they just feel good about dominating over somebody. So everyone’s motivated in a different way. And gamification, just so happens to be a really great vehicle to enable you to reward and recognize all of those different core motivators, whether it’s social, self competing, competing against others, teamwork, all those sort of things.

Murray Guest  

So something that I’m just wondering about, too, is individual KPIs versus team KPIs. And how that falls into this approach. And where you are helping teams improve overall versus maybe benchmarking against other teams, or best practice.

Luke Jamieson  

Yeah, so the way I approach it is not trying to shove the same old KPIs into a brand new shiny platform and expecting a different result. You know, that’s putting lipstick on a pig, in my opinion. Yeah, no. For me, it’s trying to recognize the behaviors that get those outcomes. I think if the Royal Commission into banking and finance taught us anything, it is that measuring just outcomes is really bad for business, bad for the community and bad for employees. And there was a real drive through that to start measuring behavior. And I think a lot of organizations in that sector have all sort of looked at each other and gone well how do you measure behavior? How do you you know, we’ve got all this data on people’s lag metrics, KPIs. We don’t really have, how do we start to measure those leading metrics like behaviors. And so that’s what I really focus on is, is using gamification as a way to measure leading metrics such as behaviors. And an example of that might be, particularly in a contact center, we want people to give great customer service, what does great customer service look like? Well, it’s knowing your product, or how do you know your product, or maybe that’s reading and going through your learning management system or your knowledge management system, and engaging with that and learning. So their behaviors that we can see interactions with, so let’s measure those things. So the more you interact with your knowledge management and learning management systems, the more the more we get, we’re going to reward you. and that in turn provides you with somebody who’s more knowledgeable, who provides a better service to a customer, who then gives you a better satisfaction rating.

Murray Guest  

Yeah. And if you contact a contact center, you make that phone call, 99% of the time you hear that message, our calls are recorded for training and development purposes. What’s your perspective on, so I like to think that those recordings are used in some way to improve quality of the connection, that customer service. But where does that fit in with the gamification? 

Luke Jamieson  

Yeah and they definitely do. I would say that that 90% of the used case around recording calls is around training. The 10% is probably around reviewing that call and making sure where was it where was an error occurred, and being able to mitigate a complaint or something like that. So the data is used. The challenge with that is that there’s so much recording, and usually only 1% of calls are listened to. So you only get a small sample of what actually comes out of those those pieces, where it can work in gamification really well is that that can be translated into data. So you can get things like voice to text and get sentiment analysis out of that. And then that can feed back in and you can start to get behavioral, behavioral metrics out of out of those sort of things. And you can also get your post context surveys using those, and the data that comes through that both text and score to use those and feed them back into gamification. And the reason I really like using those metrics is often in particularly in a contact center environment is that the conversation upstream from a manager level is usually around, usually around customer satisfaction, net promoter score. But then the downstream conversation is more around quality, process, procedure. And so by bringing in that data from a customer perspective, you start to make that conversation, both upstream and downstream. Now I’ll just say I talk about contact centers a lot, because that’s a really great use case for gamification. It’s, there’s lots of data, there’s lots of behaviors that we can use, but gamification definitely transcends just contact centers, it can work in retail, if it work in sales, can work in back office, it works really well with this any sort of repeatable behaviors.

Murray Guest  

Yeah, I, as you’re talking through that, I’m thinking in a manufacturing environment, construction anywhere where there’s to be honest, where there’s measures, and it’s about how those measures are being used. And as you’re saying, are we measuring performance? Are we measuring behaviors which help us achieve the performance? And what’s the, I guess the one thing I want to explore with you as well, what’s the attitude towards those behaviors? Because I can imagine you’re shifting that way people feel about the measures, and they’re more engaged to them. So what have you seen, because what, I’m a big believer that our attitudes drive our systems are another way to put it, our systems are only as good as their attitudes. Because you can have the best systems and KPIs and metrics in place, but if the attitude is not there, we’re not going to see an engagement to it. And so how does gamification shift those attitudes of people?

Luke Jamieson  

It’s, it’s, I think, it’s twofold. One of the first questions I always get is how do you stop people from cheating? You know, the minute you’ve talked about games, people associate cheating with that. And I always find that a really interesting question because when I then, you know, I counter often with the with the response of, well, how are people achieving their KPIs at the moment? Are there people who do it you know, through poor behavior and through good behavior and often it’s, Yeah, it’s guys that know how to game the system and churn and burn things just so that they can meet numbers, but…

Murray Guest  

Can I just say that that question in itself is an insight into that that person is asking that question?

Luke Jamieson  

Oh, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I look, I just find that that this, this concept of that by doing gamification means that everyone can now cheat people from you know, since the wheel was created, we’re working out ways to do less, or do it quicker or take advantage for their own personal gain. What I like about and the way that the way I approach it is around behavior. And by using behavior as the metric, you actually weed out a lot of that churn and burn mentality. And that’s because you then break down one metric into multiple metrics. So in the past, where it might be, we need you to do ten sales, and someone goes and sells the quickest, cheapest, easiest and lies and whatever it is that you need to do to get that sale. All of a sudden, that’s only a portion of the broader metric, then we start to bring in what are the other behaviors? Was it helpful? How satisfied was the customer? How? How was your approach to that? What was the language you used? How accurate were you in your in your portrayal of all of those things, these then become other behaviors that you start to measure. And sure, you can go ahead and knock it out of the park and do 10 sales. But if you haven’t built relationships with the customer, built relationships with your peers, helped your team, all those things? Well, you’re only going to get, you know, maybe a quarter of the way of where you used to get.

Murray Guest  

So how do people feel not overwhelmed or inundated with a whole new bunch of KPIs?

Luke Jamieson  

Yeah, that’s it. When, one of the things I first do when I go into any business is talk to the people who it impacts the most. Because they want to understand what’s in it for them. And I usually start with just questions. How do you feel when you are marked? And I always use call a call quality as an example, because it’s very common. How do you feel that when you get a zero score in your quality, and often that becomes off something very, very small, you know, maybe they’ve done an absolutely fantastic call, given them the right information, engaged with the customer, however, forgot to maybe ask for the postcode in the security check. And that that warrants a zero call. People like, wow, that’s just crap, I can’t get myself out of this situation. I’m stuck for the next month. I don’t feel that what I did was valued. All of a sudden, you say well, how would you feel if, you know, we still we still capture when you’ve missed something crucial, like a security check. But we also recognize you for all the great things you did in that call, and how do you feel about it? And people are automatically Uh, yeah, that’s, that’s great. People often always are often asked that question as well in relation to demographics, how to older generations feel about all of a sudden this this gamification approach. Again, it comes back to me asking questions around, So how do you feel that your experience, your life experience, your work experience is valued here? And often they’ll be like, well, now I, you know, I’m often seen as the old fuddy duddy guy who, you know, isn’t really up at the tech. And if I then counterweight it, well, how would you feel if that experience and that your approach to work in your approach to helping your colleagues with your, you know, lifetime knowledge was recognized? They’re like, Yeah, that’d be, that’d be great. So you’re always finding ways and finding things that people want to be recognized for that in the past haven’t been able to get through gamification, and behavioral measurement they can be.

Murray Guest  

So from a process point of view, as you said, just start with the people, it’s going to impact the most when you go through that process, to sometimes new measures that you’d never thought of start to come out of the change. And you’re like, Okay, how do we bring bring that in? Because that’s a measure of maybe, that no one’s thought of? And it’s like, okay, that’s important to them. And that’s integrated into the process going forward?

Luke Jamieson  

Yes, so the data is a lot and, you know, our process is first discover what it is you’re trying to achieve. Let’s work out how we’re going to do that. And let’s validate whether whether we think that that’s going to work and can we measure it and how are we going to measure it? And sometimes the answer is, yes, we can measure it, but it’s a very manual process. And then it’s just a decision as to whether they’re willing to do the work to measure the things that they want or is it in the too hard basket?

Murray Guest  

So the thing that I’m also wondering about is like the postcode with a security check that type of thing where there’s say a human error is part of this process with a gamification. Does it also look at how do we implement some changes to reduce those errors happening again, as well?

Luke Jamieson  

Yeah, absolutely. So using things like micro learning, so when when you start to see trends and behaviors, you can have that either manually or automated, so that micro learning gets sent over to that person. So you know, they would engage with a online learning piece, or maybe it maybe it’s something that we would build in around having a streak facility, you might turn around and say, Okay, how many days can you go without forgetting the postcode? And then all of a sudden, you’ve gamified that from a streak perspective using that mechanic. So there’s a whole heap of different ways you can you can start to think about how do you combat those those behaviors,

Murray Guest  

There’s two things popped into my head as we’re talking through, and I’ll share each of them and grab your comments. One of them is Don Clifton, the inventor of the Clifton Strengths Finder, one of his quotes that I love, I heard a few years back, was no one is suffering from over recognition.

Luke Jamieson  

Isn’t that the truth.

Murray Guest  

Yeah, and he in this talk that I heard he was talking about as children, children say, watch me, mum, watch me dad, look at me. And he said, as adults, we still want that. But we don’t verbalize it the same way. Maybe some do in the office, but generally, we don’t. And he said, there’s this craving that we have as humans for that recognition. And what I love is this process is bringing back in the recognition for the work that people are doing.

Luke Jamieson  

Mm hmm. I mean, when we talk about the five love languages, I think that they translate as well into a work environment. For me, it’s definitely words of affirmation. I love that nothing more. And you’re right, we don’t get enough of that in in a corporate or work environment. And that’s because, you know, this is particularly I think, in Australia, that the tall poppy or the you know, your brown nosing or your, you know, attention seeker, or whatever it is, yeah. Or it just has such negative branding. I mean, I was saying to you before I’ve got three daughters, and they, you know, that right now they’re obsessed with Tick Tock like, I think every other teenager is at this point in time. And every day, it’s, it’s watch me, watch this new dance, watch this new dance. You know, I’m not actually sure when that when that tipping point is from watch me watch me watch me to I probably shouldn’t ask that. Because it’s, it’ll get seen as a bad thing. But I’m not sure, I probably lost our way on where we’re going with that. 

Murray Guest  

But I think that recognition, as you’re saying exists as children as teenagers, and it does continue on. And it’s about what I think is I’m feeling is how we create an environment for recognizing all the good people are doing. I think it’s so often in KPIs and even in just business management styles of leadership, where it’s what went wrong, and let’s try and fix it. Let’s try and contain it and putting in place a corrective measure. But if we just pause and think about all the tasks that are happening in a team, day in day out, that are happening correctly, they don’t get measured quite often. 

Luke Jamieson  

Exactly. And that’s, that’s the that’s the thing that we want to see more of. That’s the behaviors we want in a workplace that create a great environment, great culture. And yet, we put measures in place that that are almost combating that in some in so many ways.

Murray Guest  

Is there an example, a story you could share for one of your clients you’ve worked with, where there was a real impact of you working with them, and helping them change the way they are measuring and looking at behaviors in this gamification.

Luke Jamieson  

It would probably be in most cases. And that’s because, and that’s because it is a new way of thinking when you when you turn around and say to somebody, we’re just going to throw everything you’ve got out the window and start again. You know, they look at you with these, you know, big wide eyes. And more often than not, people that are interested in gamification are more interested in in employee engagement. They’re not really thinking, let’s come up with a new way of measuring. They’re just thinking how do we how do we engage our employees, and the best way to do that is start with a clean slate. So when you go in there and the thing I often, I always say is I have no power to change what your measures are, what your KPIs are, short of me going to the board and the CEO and saying you’re doing it all wrong, which isn’t going to win any favors. I can’t change that. But I can change the way you achieve those KPIs. And when they understand that it’s, we’re not changing the what, the outcomes, but we’re just trying to change how we do it. There’s always that aha moment and so when you start thinking about changing those behaviors and changing the fact that that you’re changing how you’re going to get to those outcomes, instead of actually changing the outcomes, people people get it. And I think people are excited by that. And what we see. So here’s some some good stats for you. Two recent studies, one from Gallup, the other one from Fifth Quadrant, around contact center employee engagement. Two separate studies, both came up with a very similar figure. One came up with 24%, the other one came up with 26%, only 26% of of staff see themselves as engaged, where the rest found themselves, marked themselves as disengaged. So 75% of any contact center at any given time is feeling disengaged. And more often than not, they’ve got some of the lower customer and employee experience ratings when those employee surveys go around. And my personal opinion is that it’s because we only measure people on these binary metrics, which only engage roughly about 25%. So at playfulli, we’ve also designed a profiling tool that helps profile what are the mechanics and core mode of game mechanics that work for different profiles, and what are the core motivators of those different profiles and we’ve got eight different profiles of people. And traditional metrics only really work for 25%. So for two of those two of those profiles, and so for me the correlation to say alright, well if everyone’s just going to measure the same way that really aligns with those studies, when you start to measure people in different ways to measure people around their social interaction with others around their their knowledge and their their desire to teach other people on my own, the desire to have personal achievement in their work life, all of a sudden, you start to engage more people. And the results I’ve seen, one in particular, with one of the large financial services institutions that I worked with, was that they went from, they became a top decile. So in the top 10%, of 3000, companies in Asia Pacific, for their contacts and engagement, the customer satisfaction went up eight basis points, which isn’t a huge, doesn’t sound like a huge number, but in the corporate world, that that’s massive. And they saw a 17% reduction in attrition, and nearly a 50% reduction in recruitment costs. So just because they started to measure people on behaviours, not against metrics. And the hilarious thing about all of that, is that through what was being measured, none of the KPIs were were gamified, it was all the behaviors around that. And it was the first year that they actually achieved all of those KPIs in the history of that contact centre existing. So for me, that’s that that is just recognition that measuring people’s behaviors, recognizing their strengths, and and what they value is much better than just measuring some binary KPI on on a page.

Murray Guest  

So that’s the fantastic result. And I can imagine the, as you said, the impact that made to finances, to customer satisfaction, to the interface and so many different ways. The profiles you talk about when you, does that pass down to once you identify those different profiles, the different behaviors have been measured per individual to achieve the same result, or is it as a little bit different to that?

Luke Jamieson  

Yeah, essentially, what it does is it through a series of questions, identifies what someone’s most likely to be motivated by, whether it’s social competition, self improvement, or, or deep knowledge and teaching others. And that is then mapped to game mechanics to say, oh, here’s a whole set of game mechanics that really work for these profiling type those profiles. And some of them, you know, might be, they’re definitely more motivated by a team goal than an individual goal. Others might be more motivated by by risk. And so it might be around creating using mechanics such as limited time, so you’ve got a limited time to be able to get this or things like hidden easter egg in knowledge management systems and things like that, you need to go and find these these items, others it might be around collecting things, you know, I want to collect everything. And so you might create for that particular profile. Or in that particular behavior, you might say, Okay, so we’re definitely gonna have things that people have to collect, whether it’s items, badges, icons, whatever it is, you’re building these mechanics into each one of the behaviors. So you build multiple mechanics into one behavior, so that everybody is attracted to try and achieve that in their own way.

Murray Guest  

Fantastic. So with your solution at playfulli, does that include an actual digital solution that comes with the service you provide?

Luke Jamieson  

So the the profiling tool is, and so in and of itself, it’s, it’s probably only great when you when you’re ready to go down that gamification journey. And it’s a great starting point. For me, it’s often used in two ways. One, it’s all introducing the concept that their workforce is extremely diverse, and that they’re only motivating one type. As usually, that’s usually used as an eye opener. Or secondly, it is once you get into it, then saying, Okay, this is the makeup of your team. And this is how we’re going to use, these are the mechanics going to use to help motivate them. The profiling tool in itself, is is always a work in progress. It’s been, it’s been well and truly tested. It’s been tested with 65,000 people and validated by behavioral psychologists and behavioral scientist and a doctor of gamification. So it’s very robust. Then where it’s evolving to, is to become an online living, breathing profiling piece, so that you can, so that team leaders and leaders can see the makeup of their team, I think it will be in future use for things like recruitment, so to say, Okay, well, I want you to do this quick survey, so that we can understand which team you’re going to best fit into. And you can create really nice diverse teams. From there, I then partner with, I have seven different partners of gamification. And so other contact center, process procedure, gamification style companies, or learning management, and virtual reality style, gamification companies. So I have seven different partners. And depending on the client’s need, I will recommend one of those one of those seven, you know, they’re my partners I’m trying to grow that because as the as this space becomes more and more recognized, more and more platforms are coming into the market. And they all have different strengths and for different areas. So I’ve got a lot of partners so that I can make sure that I can recommend the right one for the right for the right situation, both from functionality and budget perspective.

Murray Guest  

Yeah, great. And I can imagine, as you and I were talking earlier, off air about the importance with those partners around you, like you just saying there as well that you don’t treat people the same. There’s just this opportunity to draw on the, I can imagine a call center that does finance versus a call center that does, you know, wine or travel or even a totally different business that you know, makes widgets. There’s a different solution to help them, based on their systems, their processes, their culture, and things like that.

Luke Jamieson  

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Murray Guest  

So playfulli. Where did that name come from?

Luke Jamieson  

Well, when I, when I decided to start, so I had implemented gamification across three different corporations in Australia. All really successfully. And I was speaking on the speaking circuit, I was, people were asking me, I was getting job offers left, right and center to come and work for them and do what I’ve done in other organizations. And I also had a whole heap of gamification companies coming to me going, Hey, how can we how can we work together, come on work for us. And there was clearly a gap in the market, there was a gap in the market from the gamification companies saying, look, we’ve got a great product, but people don’t know or aren’t ready to get into it because they don’t know how, and we need your help. Or you’ve got other people who are organizations who are like we’re interested but don’t know where to start, or they’ve gone and bought a platform and done exactly what I said earlier, go on and put all of their old KPIs straight in and expecting a different result. And then asking me for help. And so through that, I decided to take the bold leap and start my own business. And I wanted it to, I wanted the name of the company to invoke this thought that that play and work could be be involved together. And when I, when I set upon playfulli, it just stuck in my mind, and I kept looking for other opportunities, other other names, and I just kept coming back to it and kept coming back to it and did a bit of market testing with people and they just everyone seemed to really resonate with it. So yeah, it’s stuck. And yeah, I’m, you know, proud of the brand. I like it myself. So I think it can mean a lot of things to a lot of people and the beauty is that my no, with with every, every business that starts I think they evolve, and they pivot. And you and I did our Lego series play course, earlier this year. Because when I saw the Lego series play methodolgy, I thought, well, that’s actually really great. And I think that there’s a link between using play and work together. And I think that matches my brand. So I now incorporate that in the in the process of discovering what are the metrics people want and the behaviors that people want to measure. So that’s a that’s a great, that’s a really great tool to add to the toolkit. Sadly, it’s not not getting used a lot at the moment with the whole hands on learning, but trying to work on ways to do that via a digital medium.

Murray Guest  

Yeah, gotcha. I do wonder for people that are listening to the podcast right now, and they’ve got people in new working arrangements, maybe split operations, maybe working from home, all over the place. What’s your advice, from what you know, around behaviors that you would have for a leader that’s leading a team right now that’s in these different working arrangements?

Luke Jamieson  

For me, I think it’s the realization that it’s extremely different for a lot of people. So you know, everyone’s invoking these, their business continuity plans, and that continuity plans involve making sure that the technology is going to work, that people are going to be able to be communicated with, and that the OH&S is all sorted. What I think a lot of people never thought about was employee engagement in their BCP. And how do you engage your employees when you’re working remotely. And also, considering that a lot of people haven’t worked from home before, and it’s a completely different environment, they no longer have a routine, they no longer have the energy that they get from the people around them to keep going, that that feeling of camaraderie is lost, habits can form very quickly working from home, and they’re not always very positive habits. And there’s also a lot of distractions. You know, there’s family, particularly at the moment, there’s a lot of family around the home, there’s jobs to do around the home, that you’ve always had a need to get onto that. There’s, and there’s Netflix. And so there’s a whole heap of things that that can be very distracting from working from home. And so it’s trying to find ways to bring people together to connect, to share a common purpose, and to make something engaging in a way that helps people be self motivated. And that’s where I think gamification is really great. It plays really nicely around driving mastery, autonomy and purpose. And so using something like gamification, in a work from home environment, I think is is going to be I think, would be extremely valuable to organizations right now. Because all of a sudden, you’re connected to a common purpose. You’ve got clearly defined goals, which are often lost when you start to work from home. And you’re, you’ve also got this ability to self motivate and set these challenges for yourself and for others, in an environment that is otherwise very isolated.

Murray Guest  

Well, I think what you talked through earlier as well around the process you take an organization through, it really embraces the individual and individual’s preference, and their, their way, their behaviors to achieve the KPIs. And right now, as you said, there are people in so many different situations working from home. And for leaders to apply some of these principles you’re talking through and this approach, it actually embraces the diversity and individuality that’s happening right now for everybody. And, and says, Okay, how can we still do what we need to do, and do that in a way that works best with each individual in the team.

Luke Jamieson  

So I think in the fact that you, a lot of people right now, so anyone working from home, you’ve lost that, that ability to have real time feedback, you’ve lost that ability to have and going back to contact centers. Things like zoom aren’t an option. You can’t be on a zoom whilst trying to talk to talk to a customer. So that feeling of connection is lost, that and the thing that people are getting measured on is the lag measures. So at the end of the day, how did someone perform, without actually having any idea of that? What was the behaviors that drove that performance? And I think that people need to be very careful in this, in this new world at the moment around not just measuring the lag metrics, but saying how do we, how do we start tapping into what are the behaviors that people are doing at home? How do we reward great behavior? How do we encourage better behavior, how to create healthy habits? And I think that using a different way of thinking like gamification is a really, really solid way of doing that.

Murray Guest  

Yeah, yeah. I think whatever the new normal is, after this current situation we’re in is going to be quite different to what we had before. And I’d like to think that there’s this embracing of the people at a core, as opposed to being employees and who they are as people, and what are their individual needs, and how we can be more recognizing of their needs going forward, as opposed to that everybody stays the same, as you now I’m focused on strengths. And this is just tapping beautifully into that as well.

Luke Jamieson  

Hmm. Yeah, this is, this is about providing our, and this is the biggest  global work from home experiment, right? And yeah, yeah, this is, this is the time to really start finding out ways to help people master their roles, find meaning in it, whilst not losing the purpose of why we are, we’re doing something, and I think that purpose of why we’re doing something is we have an opportunity right now to all band together, because we’re all, we’re all going through the same thing. That purpose is starting to become either really evident for some people, because they know, I know now, I now know why I do what I do, and I know my role super valuable. But you didn’t have the output side of things going, What, what’s the purpose of me actually doing this job? I’m sitting at home, you know, wasting away, I’m not real happy? I don’t I don’t, I’ve lost my purpose of why I get up and do this job. So I think that there’s right now that that’s going to be, that needs to be a huge focus for any organization. Are they moving towards driving their purpose home? And why they do what they do. Or are they, or is it fading away?

Murray Guest  

Yeah. And I think, again, to help us wrap up this wonderful conversation, right? It’s definitely about knowing your people. Hmm. Such a great opportunity, as you said, this work from home experiment, knowing our people, and what motivates them. Luke I want to thank you so much for your time today, it’s been so good catching up and talking about the great work that you do, I want to make sure that there are links in the podcast notes to your website, and to actually the blog that you’ve published a couple weeks ago, which I loved reading, about play and the importance of play, to make sure that that’s there as well. In all my podcasts I ask a question, what’s the definition of inspired energy? So I’d love to finish on that and get your definition for today.

Luke Jamieson  

Look, my definition is probably a personal one. It is that my energy comes from creativity, the ability to create new thinking, new ways of doing things, taking traditional models and flipping them on their head and seeing how they work upside down. So for me any ability to show creativity, whatever it is I do, that’s where I get my energy. And that’s what what inspires me to do more of it.

Murray Guest  

I love that. And that is different from other definitions. And I think that is totally, totally relevant right now as well because I’m actually seeing different people starting to be more creative and sharing that online because it seems like they’ve got a bit more time or they’re at home. So my daughter, my eldest daughter was painting yesterday, I haven’t seen her paint for 15 years, it was fantastic. And you could see the energy she’s getting from that. So that creativity, thinking differently, and I can hear from what you do you bring that back into organizations as well mate. So love that. Thank you.

Luke Jamieson  

You’re welcome.

Murray Guest  

Where’s the best place to connect with you online?

Luke Jamieson  

LinkedIn is a great, great spot. Love that, love that platform. And that’s where I put out a lot of my blogs and thinking, you can follow me on twitter at gamifyluke. And of course, check out my website, which is playfulli.com and it’s playfulli.

Murray Guest  

Good good cuz you put the I in play. Does that make, have you ever said that?

Luke Jamieson  

No, I haven’t. That’s, you know, people always ask me about, is it play fly or play fully or? And I say I don’t care. As long as you remember it. 

Murray Guest  

Yeah. Good. Good. So anyone listening, if you’ve got something out of this, I’m sure you have, please share it on social media, tag myself and tag Luke and the hashtag inspiredenergy. Check out what Luke does, as sure you’ve heard today’s been, up to some amazing things and he’s got so much to offer. Not just call centers but lots of areas in business. Luke, I look forward to seeing you for a hug sometime in the near future mate when this is over. 

Luke Jamieson  

Yeah that’s right, beyond the elbow bump.

Murray Guest  

Yes, mate. All right. Have a good day everyone. Thanks. I’ll see you later. 

Luke Jamieson  

See you later.