While speaking at a recent HR conference in Las Vegas, I had occasion to meet Jane McGonigal, game designer, speaker, author, and probably the world’s biggest advocate for gamification, the idea of adding game incentives like points and prizes to non-game activities.
While within the HR community gamification is still catching on (I find a number of my clients don’t even know recognize the word) gaming, in all forms, is incredibly popular. When the latest Call of Duty video game was released in November, one in four workers planned to call in sick. Look at it from a productivity standpoint: The amount of hours it took to create all of Wikipedia’s content in 12 years … is spent every three weeks playing Angry Birds.
During Jane’s keynote speech, she cited the 2012 Gallup study that found that 71% of American employees aren’t fully engaged in their work, making it “impossible to innovate” and costing $30 billion in lost productivity annually.
It’s no surprise that she believes gamification can help. Evidently she’s not alone. A study by gamification company Gigya showed that gamification increases website engagement by 29 percent, website commenting by 13 percent, and social media sharing by 22 percent. Here are some recent employee gamification success stories. keep reading…
Here’s a quick look at some of the newer recruiting-technology companies you may not have heard of, from gamification to screening to a significant new “social resume” tool launching right now. keep reading…
Remember the UK company Reckitt Benckiser that launched a Facebook game a couple years’ back? The consumer-products giant is out with a new game, one that’s a takeoff on the “Would you rather?” game that — depending on your age — you may have played late at night in college. keep reading…
The Hilton in Istanbul
In part 1 of this article, I highlighted my top 10 recently implemented bold and outrageous practices in HR and talent management.
The goal is not to recommend these practices, but instead to more clearly define the leading edge of current practice.
In this part 2, I will highlight 13 additional practices that define the leading and “bleeding edge” of HR. If your goal is to “push the envelope” in talent management, this list can give you an idea of where the average ends and the truly bold practices begin.
Although every firm cannot directly adopt the practices listed here (some are reprehensible), I find during my corporate presentations that merely becoming aware of these bleeding-edge practices can create great energy and a strong desire for individual HR functions to do more and be bolder.
Additional “Bold and Outrageous” HR and Talent Management Practices
Here are my selections for the remaining top recently implemented bold approaches that define the bleeding edge of HR practices. keep reading…
This is one amazing week. Over there in Switzerland, physicists say they’re pretty sure they’ve discovered the “God particle.” If you’re a physicist it’s a really big deal. The rest of us were all pretty happy for them, even we can’t tell a Higgs Boson from a bison.
What you didn’t know, though, is that now that they’ve found it, it won’t be long before you’ll see the effect it has on recruitment.
How’s that? keep reading…
