Goals and Games: Designing Your Employees' Goals Like Game Designers Design Video Games

This Element is an excerpt from Changing the Game: How Video Games Are Transforming the Future of Business (ISBN: 9780132357814) by David Edery and Ethan Mollick. Available in print and digital formats.

Apply the lessons of game design to supercharge employee productivity, performance, creativity, and satisfaction!

We’ve all experienced moments when we’ve felt extremely focused and productive, and time flew by. That experience, first named “flow” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, has been linked to increased performance and improved learning and problem solving. Several factors that promote flow also underlie good game design and can be applied to designing employee goals.