{"id":2127,"date":"2015-08-18T14:55:20","date_gmt":"2015-08-18T12:55:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/?p=2127"},"modified":"2015-08-18T14:55:20","modified_gmt":"2015-08-18T12:55:20","slug":"amazon-terrors-of-the-gamified-workplace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/2015\/08\/18\/amazon-terrors-of-the-gamified-workplace\/","title":{"rendered":"Amazon: Terrors of the Gamified Workplace"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>You probably\u00a0heard about the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2015\/08\/16\/technology\/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html\">New York Times expos\u00e9 on work practices at Amazon<\/a>, where a constant chatter of metrics monitor employees. Yes, this is gamification in practice.<\/p>\n<p>Many horror stories about a complete\u00a0disrespect for the life part of the work\/life equation.<\/p>\n<p>But there\u00a0also is a simple design problem inside:\u00a0<em>The\u00a0Anytime Feedback Tool<\/em>\u00a0apparently allows employees to comment on the\u00a0performance of colleagues without their own identities being revealed to the target of the comment.\u00a0Combine this with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/microsoft-was-destroyed-by-its-stack-review-process-according-to-new-vanity-fair-expose-2012-7?IR=T\">stack ranking<\/a>, where every group has to rate somone in the group\u00a0as lowest performing, with potential for being let go.<\/p>\n<p>As I discuss in\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/artoffailure\/\">The Art of Failure<\/a>, we have to ask ourselves what the ideal strategy of an employee is in this situation? The simple answer is that it is likely much easier to\u00a0back stab a colleague with the Anytime Feedback Tool, thus dropping them in the ranking, than it is to genuinely improve your own performance. It\u00a0is plain game design: is there a degenerate strategy? Yes, there is. It <em>will<\/em> be used. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/?p=369\">Water will find a crack<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>*<\/p>\n<p>On top of that, Jeff Bezos&#8217; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2015\/08\/18\/technology\/amazon-bezos-workplace-management-practices.html\">rebuttal<\/a>\u00a0is that this\u00a0\u201cdoesn\u2019t describe the Amazon I know or the caring Amazonians I work with every day.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>This more or less proves the article right: When\u00a0managers or CEOs\u00a0say\u00a0that they don&#8217;t recognize the negative experience of\u00a0the employees it means either that:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>a) the company is organized such that the CEO will never hear about the negative experiences of the employees, or<\/li>\n<li>b) the CEO is unwilling to hear about them.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Most likely both, with a) being the results of b)<\/p>\n<p>The danger of metrics, and gamification, is that it insulates you from what is going on because you only receive the data you have chosen to receive. There is no substitute for listening\u00a0to people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You probably\u00a0heard about the New York Times expos\u00e9 on work practices at Amazon, where a constant chatter of metrics monitor employees. Yes, this is gamification in practice. Many horror stories about a complete\u00a0disrespect for the life part of the work\/life equation. But there\u00a0also is a simple design problem inside:\u00a0The\u00a0Anytime Feedback Tool\u00a0apparently allows employees to comment &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/2015\/08\/18\/amazon-terrors-of-the-gamified-workplace\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Amazon: Terrors of the Gamified Workplace&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art-of-failure","category-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2127"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2127\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}