How we gamified our help desk with ‘Beer Cards’ and fuel productivity.

Prototype of beer printed on blank cards. Illustration by freepik

I was recently tasked with developing a solution that would help our support desk increase teamwork and efficiency. They have been falling slightly behind in closing their support tickets, and the management was looking for a simple solution to help them meet their targets.

The criteria are as follows:

• Low-fi (no need for fancy software)
• Something the team will likely adopt
• Something that we (software team) don’t have to maintain
• Fun and simple to maintain
• Resolves the productivity issues

This task was assigned to me after my manager heard me talk about the concept of gamification. Six months ago, I started a group in the office to review the book Actionable Gamification, by Yu-Kai Chou. We caught up each week and had lengthy discussions about each chapter in the book.

Being gamers at heart, we shared the same passion about the topic, and this was a great opportunity for us to put our learnings into practice and introduce gamification in the workplace.

One of the main ideas we had was to introduce ‘Social Prods’. These are actions that require minimal effort to create a social interaction, like the simple click of a Facebook ‘Like’ button.

We often find it difficult or awkward to appreciate someone for a job well done in a quick, basic interaction. What if we could replicate the Facebook ‘like’ button in real life to recognise effort?

What would that look like?

Our Solution… 🍺🍺🍺

After much brainstorming and deliberating over the medium of the solution, we came out with a set of cards with our favourite beers printed on the front.

I’m a huge board game enthusiast, and there is something delightfully tangible about board games where people put aside their screens, sit around the table together and interact with each other, laughing, joking, and talking.

This is a form of mindfulness that places you firmly in the present.

Avoiding a software solution simplified the idea and made it more human.

The concept of the beer cards is that each member of the team is given 12 beer cards at the start of the month. They have to gift all twelve tokens to each other in appreciation for being helpful or when they have done an amazing job.

At the end of the month, there will be a raffle draw and the winner will receive something silly that acts as a trophy on their desk. The more beer cards you have, the higher your chances of getting the prize.

Game Techniques At Play?

Below are the other game techniques at play behind the cards.

1. Social Treasures 💎
   They are gifts or rewards that can only be given to you by other players. The most common form of social treasure in the real world is a vote. Other than your own vote, you cannot get yourself more votes in an election or poll.
2. Mystery/Random Rewards 🎁
   Instead of giving users Fixed-Action Rewards where the steps to obtain them are known, you can build unpredictability into the experience by altering the context of how the reward is given by the nature of the reward itself.
3. Lottery 🎟
   This keeps users who are at the bottom of the leader board motivated because they still have a chance of getting the prize. As long as the user “stays in the game”, the chances of winning increase linearly.
4. Trophy Shelves 🏆
   Allows a person to implicitly show off what they have accomplished without really saying it.

I recently pitched my idea to the management team. They were as enthusiastic as I am and was given the green light to ‘GO’ ahead with the idea.

Next Steps?

I will be taking an iterative approach in developing this set of cards. Feedback given in each iteration will be used to fine tune the cards for the next iteration.

I will keep posting updates of our progress here. If this is something you’re interested in or would like to contribute to, please watch this space!

Follow our progress in my next article.👇👇👇

Beer Cards - Creating a real-life Facebook 'Like' button.