Winner: Intuit Inc. - Gamification: Speedboats and Battleships
Intuit’s Speedboats and Battleships game was its first attempt at gamification. Gamification promises to help companies take mundane and sometimes mandatory tasks—such as completing surveys, reading articles and watching videos—and entice employees with simple game mechanics. Badges and points act as virtual carrots to encourage employee participation.
The premise of the game was to increase employees’ awareness of Intuit’s competition, get a better understanding of Intuit’s own products and do it all while having some fun.
When the game kicked off in November 2012, employees logged into the intranet homepage and saw a “Speedboats and Battleships” profile box with their directory photo and points total at the top of the page. Clicking on the “play” button took them to the game homepage. Once there, employees selected online “missions” that allowed them to interact with content Intuit wanted to reinforce.
Missions included answering trivia questions, watching videos, reading articles, visiting Web pages and completing exercises. Employees earned points and badges based on the level of difficultly of each mission.
The game homepage also featured a real-time leader board that displayed their ranking compared to others. The final element on the page was a real-time activity feed that showed the tasks people were working on and the points and badges they had earned. After completing a mission, a small popup appeared on their screen congratulating them.
Intuit seeded the game with weekly incentives that stimulated participation over the entire life of the game. In fact, week two was actually the highest week for participation. More than 3,000 employees played, each completing an average of 10 tasks. And, this was also during the typically slow time of Thanksgiving.
Honorable Mentions:
- Allstate Insurance Company - Building Connections, Strengthening Relationships
- Eczacibasi Group - Be Green
- Lehigh Valley Health Network - Mission Central
- United States Postal Service - USPS News Link Digital Employee Communications