Gamify Employee Collaboration - A Critical Review of Gamification Elements in Social Software

Abstract: Social software solutions in enterprises such as IBM Connections are said to have the potential to support communication and collaboration among employees. However, companies are faced to manage the adoption of such collaborative tools and therefore need to raise the employees' acceptance and motivation. To solve these problems, developers started to implement Gamification elements in social software tools, which aim to increase users' motivation. In this paper, we critically examine the status quo of the current market of leading social software solutions and seek to find out which Gamification approaches are implementated in these collaborative tools. Our findings show, that most of the major social collaboration solutions do not offer Gamification features by default, but leave the integration to a various number of third party plug-in vendors. Furthermore we identify a trend in which Gamification solutions majorly focus on rewarding quantitative improvement of work activities, neglecting qualitative performance. Subsequently, current solutions do not match recent findings in research and ignore risks that can lower the employees' motivation and work performance in the long run.