A good company culture can engage your employees, inspire loyalty, and support them in reaching their goals. It takes work to maintain and can be broken in an instant. Treat your employees well and try to do the right things. It can do wonders for your bottom line.
I was the information architect and initial designer for a project called 100 for Good. It was in celebration of that company’s 100th anniversary. It was an app for employees only that allowed them to record “100 acts of good” in the community. An “act of good” was a loose term because we found it difficult to pre-determine what an act of good actually was. Some people entered things like “going shopping for a disabled neighbor”, but others entered things like “pulling a weed from my lawn”. I blame gamification. It can be quite the incentive. The goal was to further ingrain the culture of doing positive acts in the user’s community.
You can see from the main image how the gamification basically worked. People accrued points and received “badges” as they reached different levels. We created a leaderboard that showed where someone was in the rankings. Though not shown, the process of recording an act was 3 quick steps that required very little typing. The popularity of the app exploded. We planned a certain level of points and triggers that we thought would take care of the first 6 months of usage, but we realized after two weeks that people would reach the upper levels very quickly so we had to add additional levels and badges. At that time, the app was the fastest growing internal engagement process that had ever happened at the company, and we did it in record time. What would have normally taken a year took only 5 months.
We had a strong, talented, and focused team with our bureaucratic and technical obstacles removed as much as possible. This was a major contributor to the success of this project.
