Internal Game Mechanics. Eating our own dog food.

At DoubleDutch Headquarters, we are competitive. We have big ping pong tournaments. We fight to win dart games. If you lose, you get to buy an overpriced (but delicious) cup of Ritual Roasters Coffee.

Game mechanics move beyond the break room, and are integrated into our workflow. We developed a tool, based on our event and sales products, to be used internally with our small team. It’s mobile project management technology that encourages friendly competition and transparency.

It works like this: When we wrap-up a new project, no matter how large or small, we “hive” (that’s our term for a work-related “check-in”) this project in our app with a few taps of the phone. Each “hive” awards the employee a certain amount of points. These points, when accumulated over time, allow you to climb to the top of the point leaderboard, where you can see some pretty impressive employees.

The leaderboard has break-downs by day, week, and year which helps new employees get motivated, even if they are behind the veterans by 1,000 points. Because we have elevated the leaderboard in our app, we can see after every check-in who is where in the ranking.

I’m currently right behind Pankaj, fighting for 2nd place. I (Jen) overcame him last week, and gloated a bit too much. He came back with a vengeance. Never kick a sleeping dog, I guess.

When you get into different point brackets on the leaderboard, you are entered to win different prizes, determined by the game mechanics manager (in this case, our CEO. Hey, we all wear many hats). They aren’t always directly tied to monetary value — it could be 3 work-from-home days, or control over next week’s Safeway office order.

Hive check-ins and points also help unlock badges, which are more permanent “stamps of approval” in different categories. We have virtual badges to motivate sales (like the “Kustomer King” badge) and others to motivate Project Management, Marketing, Customer Success, Quality Assurance, and Engineering types.

Just this afternoon, Lawrence (DoubleDutch CEO) cried out, “Woah! I unlocked a new badge!” It’s the little things like this that can brighten your day at the office.

We eat our own dog food. If we tell our clients to use game mechanics in their apps, we want to be able to truly speak from experience. We’ve found that game mechanics encourage employee engagement and activity — and it has only just begun. Once you can clearly define what motivates people, it becomes easier to make compelling game mechanics. So, it’s a learning process.

There’s a lot more in the works for DoubleDutch employees starting in March. Always trying to keep our team on our toes! Stay tuned…