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Toby Beresford, founder of Rise, a consultancy specialising in workforce “success tracking”, says that cash rewards are counterproductive because they turn gamification into work and employees just focus on what they have to do to earn the prize to the exclusion of everything else. He also stresses that such strategies work best when they are voluntary and designed for the benefit not of the boss but of the employees, letting them track their own performance.

Magazine interview regarding the use of gamification in the events industry. Quotes Toby Beresford of Rise.board.

International Confex 2013 in London. The focus was on the event’s social media presence – and the idea to reinforce it using simple gamification concepts.
Specialising in exactly such applications, the UK company Rise created a leader board, Confex’ attendees were featured on the Twitter board in real-time ranked according to tweets. They could move up by using a combination of event hashtags instead of just tweeting #confex2013, and even re-tweets of influential Twitter users resulted in better rankings. Was there a prize? None at all. Nevertheless – or perhaps precisely for that reason? – the outcome was 5,000 tweets from 1,400 attendees and an Event Tech Award for “Best Use of Social Media”.

“Once you offer a prize you run into problems,” says Rise CEO Toby Beresford. “Gamification works best if it reinforces the intrinsic value of an activity.” In other words: The game itself has to be fun. If you have to be “bribed” into taking part, something must be wrong with the underlying concept. For this reason, says Beresford, there is no case that is universally applicable. “We have seen successes,” says Beresford, “but they are based on many different aspects.” The individual target audience is of crucial importance – good gamification concepts are personalised, “there is no one size fits all”.