Engagement is the fifth and final external Attribute in the SCALE acronym. In Chapter 3 of Exponential Organizations you can read more about this and I suggest taking a look at the open source tool developed by the ExO Ecosystem.
Engagement is a way of enabling collaborative human behaviour – social behaviour – to come into play. Through engagement collaborative individuals can do what large organisations once did. It is a vital tool and comes fairly naturally when individuals resonate with an organisations MTP. Having a powerful MTP is vital for having an engaged community. Other ways that an organisation can engage is through:
- Ranking transparency
- Self-efficiency (sense of control, agency and impact)
- Peer pressure (social comparison)
- Eliciting positive emotions to drive long-term behavioural change
- Instant feedback (short feedback cycles)
- Clear, authentic rules, goals and rewards
- Virtual currencies or points
Whilst these engagement tools are for the external ecosystem they can be used for internal employee engagement.
Gamification
This is a technique that can be used to increase engagement. Gamification is the process of adding a gaming element to your interaction with your community. It is vitally important that this is well implemented and thought through.
Leverage the following game techniques:
- Dynamics: Motivate behaviour through scenarios, rules and progression
- Mechanics: Help achieve goals through teams, competitions, rewards and feedback
- Components: Track progress through quests, points, levels, badges and collections
Incentive Competitions
These are competitions that move people from the crowd into the community. Incentive competitions leverage the community to come up with breakthrough ideas to solve challenges within an organisation. Competitions of this nature have been used for centuries although it was the Ansari X Prize that elevated incentive prizes into the exponential realm. An incentive prize needs create a clear, measurable and objective goal and offers a cash purse for the team that is able to reach the objective. If you want to run an incentive competition you can do this yourself or leverage a platform such as HeroX. Check out the video course that Peter Diamandis put together on designing a successful incentive competition.
Engaging the community and crowd is not a simple task but with a great MTP and the implementation of the tools discussed in this blog it is most definitely possible.
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