Briefly and honestly: first feedback on gamification at CleverStaff

In July, CleverStaff gave some customers an access to a beta version of gamification. In the guide, you can learn more on how it works now. And, in turn, we conducted a survey to get initial feedback, and today we can analyze the first responses.

More than 20 recruiters and team leaders from 6 leading IT companies participated in the survey. The questionnaire consisted of several questions. The first one was about their impressions of the gamification during testing. The vast majority of the respondents answered that it was “positive” and “interesting”.

For example, Kateryna from iLogos Game Studios said that “it brings variety into the routine, and I personally really like the topic of Greek myths. The namesake was supported by Kateryna from QATestLab stressing that it is “bright, intriguing and relieves stress at work”. Alina from iLogos responded that gamification is very interesting, motivates to work more with the system. Well, that is nice to hear, girls!

There are also respondents (isolated, but there are some) who could not formulate an impression – due to the fact that they did not have time to dive deeper into gamification to evaluate it. There are also those who expressed surprise and as “okay, no wow effect, but it’s definitely an advantage”. Well, we will accept that too ☺

Let’s move ahead. As to whether they liked the visualization of the gamification, the opinions are as follows 👇

Here everything is more or less clear: on the whole, they liked the visualization. There is no outright negative feedback at all (which is nice!), but we still have some work to do. And we will definitely do it.

After that, it is logical to ask what they liked the most. And we asked them ☺ immodestly.

We see that people most like to get rewards, reach new levels and earn prizes in competitions with the team. So it turns out that recruiters are a desperately gambling people ☺

Next, we asked if it was easy for the users to understand how gamification works. If not, what exactly was unclear and what difficulties (if any) they encountered. We got a laconic “easy enough” from 17 respondents. Others are still “in the process” or at some point lacked more detailed information in the description of the tasks. We will check this as well.

Probably one of the most debated issues was the impartiality and objectivity of the digitization of achievements. The results were better than we expected. More than half nodded in the affirmative – and that’s considering that the survey participants had only been in gamification “mode” for 2-3 weeks.

And then we asked recruiters how in their opinion gamification might affect motivation and engagement in the work itself. One respondent said that it would not, because those who are motivated to work will work without gamification.

Another one said that gamification will have a very positive effect on junior, but as for senior – it completely depends on the type of personality, some will help and some will not; for middles – it’s fifty-fifty. “Yes, it will have a positive effect on motivation”, answered 15 recruiters vs. “No, it will not have any effect” from 2 of their colleagues.

There were also responses with a different focus. So, according to Kateryna of QATestLab, the impact of gamification on employee motivation depends on what style is adopted by the team. “We, for example, have minimized competition in the team, so the rating can even demotivate to some extent (I cannot assert, because I have not yet collected feedback from colleagues). But for teams with a different style, pace and processes, where a competitive spirit and KPI are accepted – it is certainly an additional motivation and a nice stimulus 🙂 In our case – it is a bright addition to the daily part of the work, emotional and beautiful!” – emphasizes Kateryna.

Kateryna is supported by her colleague Liliia. She is convinced that gamification creates a certain excitement, you can compare your results with your colleagues and thus motivate yourself to do more. Alina from iLogos notes that “there will be more desire to add new candidates and to collaborate with CleverStaff. Needless to say, we agree with that ☺.

And, finally, we asked the survey participants to formulate their wishes for improvement of gamification system, namely – what to add, remove or change. 12 respondents are quite happy with everything, they are not planning to give any advice. 2 of them gave an advice to finalize the design in a more minimalistic way. Another one gave an advice about improving the final rankings and assigning each of the team’s recruiters personal statuses for a certain period. Also, 2 respondents expressed concern that gamification will overload the system and affect the information processing. We can answer right away – it will not!

In turn, one of the team leaders philosophically wrote: “I think everything is going well. I see that my team is actively collecting pebbles, raising their level. So everything is cool ☺”. We really hope so, and we will be picky about every feedback, comment, or suggestion.

Today, recruiting with additional, fascinating accompaniment is available to all users of the system.