Gamifying Blue Collar Work: serving the underserved community
by Alisa Ivanitskaya
In 1996, when Sean D. Dessureault was driving underground in his Wagner haul truck, he would accidentally fall asleep. The work shift that lasted eight hours consisted of repeating the same operation eight times: loading rock, driving in the tunnel, off-loading rock, repeat. Nothing added variety to the monotonous sound of the tunnel ventilation. There was not even a possibility to talk to other workers. Dessureault would accidentally wake up when his truck would scratch the wall of the tunnel. The labor was mundane in a zinc-lead Nanisivik Mine, one of the most northern mines in the world. The life outside of it was not much better as the city of Nanisivik, Nunavut was almost 500 mi north of the Arctic Circle which meant long and dark, sunless winter. It was hard for Dessureault and his co-workers to stay motivated.
This experience defined Dessureault’s career, he said in his TEDxTucson talk on Saturday, Sept. 21, where he talked about gamification of blue-collar work. Dessureault worked in the mine to pay for college and decided to serve a blue collar-job community often neglected by IT-corporations. While teaching in the Mining and Geological Engineering department at the University of Arizona, he founded MISOM Technologies, which developed a mobile app and IoT technologies for mining. In 2017, MISOM Technologies was acquired by MST Global, a company that develops technologies to improve safety and productivity in mining.
Dessureault defined two key problems that needed to be addressed: the absence of communication between workers (mining is a team enterprise but workers were isolated) and the inability of the workers to track their progress. As an inspiration for the solution solved two types of games: a strategy Civilization that encouraged the gamer with the system of gratifications for every milestone achieved and online-shooters that allow team cooperation and communication.
The next step was to define what kind of behavior the managers need to encourage in their workers. For example, every company wants its workers to improve productivity over time but wants them to do this through mastery and not unsafe practices. Mining operations are risky, so accident prevention is another important factor for performance evaluation. As a result of that research Dessureault and his clients have chosen the metrics that encourage the exchange of safety information between the workers, the compliance with safety requirements, including speed limits in the tunnels. The points were introduced to measure the results of every department, and the highest points were given for altruistic team behavior.
Most of this information was already collected by different trackers and counters in the mine, but neither management nor workers were using it as it was just a massive set of raw unstructured data, Dessureault said. He saw it as an opportunity and used those metrics to distill important data, translate it into points and create a digital tool, product, “a game” for blue-collar workers.
