The Apps with love office has a lot of different game options, such as table tennis, flipper or table football. Short games during the working day are important as distractions and relaxation phases. The employees should be encouraged to stand up for a while and clear the heads. These brief distractions and the social contact they encourage improve the work quality and the health of the employees.
This ritual is triggered twice a week by a random bot. A melody plays, a message appears in the chat and reminds everyone to get up and play a game. But the various options for play in the office don’t mean yet that the employees really go for it. Most of the time, they’re deep in their work and, when on occasion you do feel like it, it can be hard to get the others motivated to have a bit of fun with you. That’s why we automated the whole thing and developed a higher power that prompts us to play. And it works quite well – we now play regularly.
Apps with love has made it its goal to create fair salaries and transparent wage criteria. This has been implemented through the development of our own salary system. The salary for every employee is thus based on precisely determined and verifiable criteria, such as training completed, specialist experience in the relevant field, company loyalty and responsibility. We consciously decided against an individual evaluation of performance as a salary factor. This was because the performance is often seen subjectively and is anyway almost always a team effort.
In order to encourage company loyalty but also to reward outstanding commitment, an achievement system was invented. To this end, special tangible medals were developed and printed using a 3D printer. There are medals for company loyalty and also for outstanding commitment in project work.
3 years with the company = bronze medal
5 years with the company = silver medal
7 years with the company = gold medal
“Stag” = white
“Master” = yellow
“Hero” = blue
“Guru” = red
Being awarded a loyalty medal entitles the recipient to express a wish which is then fulfilled if possible; for the commitment medal, the awardee receives a small cash prize. The awards are ceremoniously presented to the employees during team meetings. Whether the medal is worn or not, is left up to the recipient.
To make sure everything runs smoothly in the office, there are little jobs that come up on a weekly basis. For example, the plants have to be watered, the wastepaper taken out, the coffee machine cleaned, the latest tweets made from the company account or the next team meeting chaired. These jobs were originally undertaken voluntarily by the employees but, as time went on, it got harder to always share out all of the tasks. So, for this reason, cards were made on the basis of input from a culture board; these cards meant that the tasks could be distributed at random.
Following the first successful draw, our own complete set of cards was developed with all existing tasks and sufficient “blanks” for the remaining employees. The cards were seen as being a simpler measure than a reward plan. Plus, they give the whole enterprise an element of suspense. The card draw is a little thrill every time and is a lot of fun for everyone. Since we started doing this, the jobs themselves aren’t seen as something negative but rather as part of the game and are (mostly) carried out reliably by everyone. The completion of the jobs is then checked the following week before the cards are drawn again.
Gamification measures can be used to change the corporate culture.
A study conducted as part of a Master’s degree examined our gaming culture and was able to demonstrate clearly that the measures have an effect. A connection could also be made between the measures and the corporate culture. Ultimately, a correlation was also proven between the corporate culture and the willingness of the employees to commit themselves to their work.
