How Employers Have Gamified Work for Maximum Profit
From scoreboards to trackers, games have infiltrated work, serving as spies, overseers and agents of social control
By Vincent Gabrielle
Deep under the Disneyland Resort Hotel in California, far from the throngs of happy tourists, laundry workers clean thousands of sheets, blankets, towels and comforters every day. Workers feed the heavy linens into hot, automated presses to iron out wrinkles, and load dirty laundry into washers and dryers large enough to sit in. It’s loud, difficult work, but bearable. The workers were protected by union contracts that guaranteed a living wage and affordable healthcare, and many had worked decades at the company. They were mostly happy to work for Disney.
This changed in 2008. The union contracts were up, and Disney wouldn’t renew without adjustments. One of the changes involved how management tracked worker productivity. Before, employees would track how many sheets or towels or comforters the workers washed, dried or folded on paper notes turned in at the end of the day. But Disney was replacing that system with an electronic tracking system that monitored their progress in real time.
Electronic monitoring wasn’t unusual in the hotel business. But Disney took the…
