Fun Innovations Friday: Game On: How Gamification Transforms Mundane Assembly Tasks Into Motivating Challenges

Do you think if work was like a game, you would try harder or that it would pass the time faster? 

My first job was as a cashier at a grocery store, and before I moved up the ladder, being at the register for around 8 hours a day got old and my brain races a mile a minute. So, to cure myself of boredom, I would create a game out of bagging groceries. 

In our grocery store, at least around 15 years ago, you were supposed to ensure the plastic bags were always topped off whenever possible so you didn't run out. My brain, however, wanted to try and use all the bags before topping off with a new stack. Doesn't sound like much of a game or even that interesting as I type this, but focusing on anything other than the monotony was a win. Additionally, at that time, we didn't have scanners, so we typed prices in by hand on the register. And it was a lot of fun seeing how many products' prices you could remember and then how fast you could ring someone out. 

Now, I didn't get any prizes for this other than solidifying I was a good employee and lowering my chances of not getting yelled at by customers who were in a rush. But, it brings a topic into conversation about making a game out of tasks, whether at home or at your job (which I am well versed in). At home, I constantly set a timer to get a task done in a specific amount of time if I really don't want to do it—just to see if I can.

A recent study from West Virginia University (WVU) engineers has demonstrated this exact thing and they found that when monotonous assembly tasks were framed as playing a game, completion rate improved.

Published in the Robotics and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing journal, the researchers examined the “gamification” of manufacturing tasks to see if it would improve workers' well-being and/or productivity. What they found suggests that workers on an assembly line would be more productive, engaged, and motivated if they were incentivized through competition or a reward system.

Makenzie Dolly, a researcher of the study, said gamification has become part of many people’s daily lives. In wellness, gamification shows up in the form of fitness-tracking challenges. In marketing, popular forms of gamification include shopping rewards programs for food, coffee, or clothing.

Dolly, a Statler College doctoral student at the time of the study, with the help of Ashish Nimbarte, professor and chair of the Department of Industrial and Management Systems Engineering, and Thorsten Wuest, associate professor, created an experiment that simulated a typical assembly task using a toy Lego set.

Randomly assigned to a “gamified” group or a “control” group, participants were tasked with assembling the same Lego model of a telehandler—an agricultural vehicle also known as a reach forklift or cherry picker. The telehandler holds a special place for Dolly as she worked for JGL, a leading telehandler manufacturer, for her WVU senior project.