The ZIZO Effect

Podcast Takeover: Can Work Be Fun? with Dan Smitley

• ZIZO Technologies Inc. • Season 2 • Episode 9

Share episode

Send us a text

Welcome to a Podcast Takeover Episode of The ZIZO Effect!
 
This week, Dan Smitley takes over as host, flipping the script and putting Jimmy Chebat in the guest seat. In this takeover, Dan doesn’t hold back—he challenges Jimmy with tough questions about gamification, workforce management, and creating more engaging work environments. 

Episode Overview:
 
With his expertise in workforce management, contact center operations, and strategic thinking, Dan leads a conversation that pushes boundaries and explores how gamification transforms the workplace. Jimmy opens up about ZIZO’s journey—how transparency, accountability, and gamification can turn repetitive tasks into opportunities for engagement and self-accountability. 

If you’ve ever wondered “Can work really be fun?”, Dan and Jimmy have the answers. 

From redefining gamification to questioning its applications in contact centers, Dan ensures no topic goes unchallenged, making this episode a must-listen for anyone looking to rethink workforce management. 


Timestamps: 

0:00 Podcast Takeover: Gamification and Workforce Performance 
15:08 How Employee Engagement Boosts Productivity 
20:21 Can Work Be Fun? Motivation in the Workplace 
25:38 How Gamification is Revolutionizing Workforce Management 
34:39 Essential Criteria for Successful Gamification 

Guest Information: 

Dan Smitley – Workforce management expert, public speaker, and thought leader. Connect with Dan on LinkedIn to learn more about his insights and work. 


Engage with Us:
 
Don’t forget to subscribe, like, and comment to join the conversation. Follow us on social media for updates: 


🎧 Tune in on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube for a dynamic discussion where tough questions lead to big insights. Get Ready - It's Game Time!  

Jimmy Chebat:

Welcome to another episode of The ZIZO Effect Podcast. Today we're shaking things up with a special episode that's a bit different from our usual format. We've handed over the hosting duties to none other than Dan Smitley and this time I'm in the hot seat as the guest. Dan's here to bring a fresh perspective and deep dive into the world of gamification and performance management, ZIZO style. So sit back, relax and enjoy the role reversal as Dan takes the reins. Let's go. It's game time. Welcome everybody, to another episode of The ZIZO Effect podcast. Today we have a special treat we have a guest, Dan Smitley. Dan, you've been around workforce management, the contact center space, for decades and today we're doing something very unique. But before we get into that, I'm going to give you an opportunity today to introduce yourself to our audience.

Dan Smitley:

Yeah, absolutely Happy to be here. Thanks for the opportunity. For those that don't know me, dan Smitley, as Jimmy said, I've been in the contact center space for decades, starting on the phone at a dial-up internet company, so worked my way through the ranks, taught a lot of different roles inside of workforce management that's typically my sweet spot, but I've got strong opinions on a lot of different topics. I share a lot of those topics on LinkedIn, so you can always find me there. I love doing different pieces of humor, memes and GIFs around the contact center. So if you're ever needing a kind of a lighthearted approach to the contact center seriousness, come follow me. But again, happy to be here. Thanks for this opportunity and looking forward to the conversation.

Jimmy Chebat:

Absolutely, and, dan, thank you for coming. Dan, just for the context, you and I met at a conference down in Orlando at the ICMI Expo, and we had just a great conversation and I loved how you challenged this concept and the idea of gamification, as you had put it, and I constantly, always preach about, which is it's a very broad stroke, right, and gamification could be as simple as a leaderboard, could be as sophisticated as what we think we're doing here at ZIZO. You and I talked about you coming on this podcast but doing something unique and different, which is a podcast takeover. So I'm going to actually hand the reins over to you and I'm going to give you an opportunity to have that conversation. This is your podcast, ZIZO Effect. I'm the guest and you are the host, so I'm going to let you take it away today.

Dan Smitley:

I mean not to scare you at all, but I was trying to do some deep cuts. I was scrolling on your LinkedIn from six years ago trying to find information on you, so we'll start there. Six years ago you were talking about blockchain. You were talking about. People should be laughing at blockchain and Bitcoin. I'm assuming you invested in your filthy rich at this point. Is that true? Are you independently wealthy because of a six year investment?

Jimmy Chebat:

I got to tell you I wish. I wish I'm as much as I backed it. I'm also a skeptic and but also I love investing in myself. I'm very cautious as an investor. I put some in, but I didn't get as filthy rich as most people who did heavily invest and then also take out. And I'm sure people have seen the recent news bitcoin is shot way up, so I'm always late to the game. So if kudos to those who have invested and if listen to my advice I didn't listen to my own, but uh, I do think that you know there is no ceiling on that technology and the future has a lot of great things for that technology as well.

Dan Smitley:

I think the challenge with the technology in general is that it's so hard to fully understand. It's not one of those things of where, like it's like a toaster, but slightly different, like there's no reference point other than currency for the internet, and I think that's that's part of the challenge of this conversation and getting people to talk about Bitcoin, talking about blockchain it's it's so complicated, which I think is part of the challenge of gamification. Right, like this, this concept of what it is. Well, it's, it's like Candy Crush, but not really. But it's also kind of like candy crush, but not really. But it's also kind of like performance management, but not really. So like maybe we, we set some, some ground rules or some foundation. When you're talking about gamification, what do you mean? Give me one sentence, two sentence definition. Don't give me this huge paragraph. But like, what is gamification?

Jimmy Chebat:

definition. Don't give me this huge paragraph, but, like what is gamification, I always use the simplest definition, which is the application of game mechanics to non-game tasks.

Dan Smitley:

That simple, so you could gamify. Parenting.

Jimmy Chebat:

Sure, absolutely, and it's actually currently being done. There's an app that I use, green light, which is, if you're not familiar with it, it's essentially a way to. It's a, it's a debit card for kids that you can transfer uh money to so they have some sort of payment method when they're out on their own. I started using it with my kids when they were eight, nine years old, but you can gamify it because they can do chores and as they do their chores and complete their chores, they're incentivized by allowances. So, yes, parenting can be gamified as well.

Dan Smitley:

That's too bad. I was leading you there because I was hoping you were saying it wasn't an op I mean, it wasn't out there and that maybe you and I could have this million dollar idea. This is something I've been thinking about forever ago. Like I could get points as a parent for, like, feeding my kids every day. Sure, it's a responsibility I have, but maybe I can get some kind of recognition that I can't get from, but sounds like maybe it's already happening.

Jimmy Chebat:

They make mugs. Number one dad.

Dan Smitley:

I don't know if you've gotten one of those yet, but that is, that is one way you can be rewarded for being a great father. Way to bring up a sore subject 17 years in as a dad, still no number one dad mug like uh, maybe this year's the year, maybe this christmas it will happen, but yeah, sore subject. I appreciate bringing that up, jimmy, thanks, that's awesome. So gamification, game mechanics to non-game tasks, and we could go 100 different directions with that right, parenting could be an option, your community yard work uh, it could be a hundred different reasons, like 100 different ways, but you went the direction of contact center. Why, why? Gamification?

Jimmy Chebat:

for contact centers. I didn't set out to build a gamification platform for contact centers. I actually designed a platform because I owned and operated a contact center, and when I first designed the original iteration of ZIZO, it wasn't called ZIZO, it was called the E-Whiteboard, and that could be dating right, I'm dating myself. That's when E whatever insert word was the thing, because it was the new revolutionary internet of things.

Jimmy Chebat:

I was really going for more of an accountability platform. I was trying to build a platform to hold my staff accountable, and the way I wanted to do that was we would measure just through a single metric, which, for us, it was a collections contact center and our primary goal was to recover defaulted debt, and so we had a goal of dollars collected and that was really the KPI that we measured to, and I realized that it was a trailing indicator. I didn't know until the end of the month whether a person met their requirements and whether they're doing their jobs, and like number of phone calls made, you know number of right party contact, things like deals closed, revenues generated, you know cleared money. So those helped me identify earlier in the month whether or not people were doing enough to reach their monthly goal. And so that's where this all started was more about building a platform where I can hold people accountable to metrics outside of just that daily or that monthly goal.

Dan Smitley:

So that's interesting, right? So I hear you using the language of accountability, but it sounds like you're talking about performance management. It sounds like you're talking about driving behavior towards a particular hard data point. Accountability can be connected, and I'd love you to flesh that a little bit more, because I think for a lot of people there's performance management but we don't necessarily hold people accountable, because accountability in our minds is consequences, it's conflict. We don't want to necessarily have those. We'd prefer just to talk about I'm coaching and supporting you to a particular goal, not count. So how do you see these two things connected? How do you see accountability and performance management connected? Sure, all right.

Jimmy Chebat:

So let me take you back a little bit further. And and kind of the part of the origin story was I would always try to have accountability conversations or performance management conversations Like I need you to do more, you're not hitting your goal, and I would get a lot of this so finger pointing it's not me, it's them, I'm doing this and they're not doing that. And we had a model where you pick up any phone call. You didn't have to work just the accounts in your queue. Anybody can grab your account that you're accountable for and work that account. So you have excuses like hey, nobody's closing my deals and I'm closing everybody else's deals.

Jimmy Chebat:

And so once I started measuring those things and bringing them in and saying and they would give me those excuses and I would say actually I would turn my monitor towards them and said let's take a look at the data and see what the data says.

Jimmy Chebat:

And when I pointed out information that contradicted their excuse, their eyes would open wide. They're like you can see that. And so that's when people then started taking accountability, say, oh, I didn't realize, you can see that. And so that's when people then started taking accountability and saying, oh, I didn't realize, you can see that information and that's curious, can I have access to that? And that was one of those light bulb moments to me where I said, okay, I have this information, how do I provide this information to them in real time? And transparency was a critical turning point in the development of this application, where, when you give them access to that data in real time, that's where that management switches, where I'm no longer micromanaging them, they begin to micromanage themselves, and that when that culture of accountability started to kind of really take root, it's interesting, so I don't know the answer.

Dan Smitley:

I don't know where we're going to go with this, but do you think accountability is possible without transparency, without the ability for that frontline team member to know their metrics and their goals and to direct? Can you have accountability without that?

Jimmy Chebat:

No, not self-accountability. You can have the perceived or the intention of we're going to build a culture of accountability and we're going to do so by having these metrics, and then we're going to hold you accountable. The intent is there, but you're never going to be successful. So, yes, for true accountability, for self-accountability to occur, you have to have transparency, you have to give people information that is directly related to what your expectations are. So there is another level, or another layer to it, which is, hey, I'm giving you the metrics of where you are, but you also need to add that variable of but this is what I expect from you. So there's a set, the expectation, and then the data is going to tell them how they're doing relative to that expectation, and that's when people can be accountable. They can say, okay, I need three more of X in order to hit my expectation or my goal or my quota, and so I'm going to continue working hard, I'm going to continue putting the effort in to reach that goal, because that's what's been set for me.

Jimmy Chebat:

Now there's another layer beyond that, which we'll talk about when we maybe get into the gamification aspect Objectivity, what is the right goal for each individual? And then that's another conversation, but hopefully that. But to answer your question, no, you cannot have accountability, true accountability, without access to information. Which is that transparency or communication? They're both related.

Dan Smitley:

So let's keep driving down on this right, an accountability piece. That accountability piece kind of turned a little bit or significantly whenever you started thinking about transparency and access to information. But for me, the question I keep coming to is is why, why are these things? What is it that we're trying to build? So let's hone in on that. Self accountability necessary I mean only possible with transparency. What is that? Why is that so important? What is it that it's building? So talk to me a little bit more about kind of the environment, the culture, the value, like self accountability is connected to something that we're trying to build. What is it we're trying to build here?

Jimmy Chebat:

what I'm trying to build is a feedback loop right and people, when they're given a task, a job right, it's really good for them to understand what is their expectation, what is their job and you know how do you measure success for that job. So setting targets I think it's a big part of that, Giving them that feedback loop right. Most I'm going to go maybe not worst case scenario, but most traditional routes is monthly review right. Some of the worst case could be hey, you're getting an annual review. We're not giving you any feedback until after you've been here for a year, which doesn't work if they even last a year.

Jimmy Chebat:

Most people require that information. They want to know whether am I doing good, and if I am doing good, can I get some recognition for that, and if I'm doing bad, can I get some coaching or some assistance or just help guide me to do good. People want to do good, they want to grow professionally, they want to learn, and so by giving them that feedback, it helps them evolve. So I think part of it is is that feedback Right, and so creating that feedback loop and doing it as close to real time, I feel, is where it becomes super effective, Not once a month, or even once a week. Give it to in real time.

Dan Smitley:

Why we're hearing the what them in real time, why we're hearing the what's in the house, but what's the why here?

Jimmy Chebat:

I had a guest on my podcast, Richard Gold, who's the president of M&T Bank, and he truly not only was a student but a teacher of organizational behavioral management, and he helped define what people need in order to behave.

Jimmy Chebat:

So there's that positive reinforcement right, and positive reinforcement is how you get to reinforce good behavior. If you want somebody to give you 100 calls, now that's what we call effort, right, it doesn't matter about skill or quality, it's just effort, and sometimes I just need to push the effort button. Now I don't know where, if I'm not getting any feedback and information on where I stand, I may give up too early, I may go above and beyond, I don't know. So if I'm, if you have some sort of graph or charters that says, hey, you're 50% towards your goal, okay, I know what else I have to do for the rest of the day. I guess it's to help people stay engaged is part of it in their work, but also help them meet the criteria or the goal of their jobs and their tasks, and those should be fair. Like you can't tell somebody go do a thousand phone calls, it's impossible.

Dan Smitley:

My team that's always reported into me hate it. I do it to them all the time. There's wise underneath, wise right. So why do we care about people staying engaged right? The contact centers, I think all too often is in an environment of churning burn. Whether we own it or not, it is drive to the bottom line as fast as possible. It is. We make pennies on the dollar and you have to do this at high scale, high volume. Not that it feels like I'm setting you up too easily, like that's not important, but you're pointing towards people staying engaged and is important. People having positive reinforcement is important. Having feedback loops are important and I think my question to you is simply why are those things important? So?

Jimmy Chebat:

your point of hey, as a business model, businesses only succeed if they're able to be profitable. Right, if you're losing money every month, then you're just not going to be able to keep these people employed. So everybody loses. And so we actually start. When we're onboarding a new customer, we start with their business objectives what are your financial goals as a business? And then we work our way backwards to identify the KPIs and then we tell them okay, we're going to help you hit these goals, these are your goals. But I'm going to focus on your people and what you said earlier, which is, hey, people aren't important, it's the numbers that are most critical I agree with both.

Jimmy Chebat:

I think that if we focus on the people and we tell them, hey, when you say, why is engagement important? Because it's a very mundane, redundant, repetitive job that even in we'll go back a generation or two where that seemed to be like hey, this is a desk job. I don't have to work at McDonald's, I don't have to go dig trenches or be a garbage person or whatever the case is. I can sit at a desk and it's a professional job. Maybe considered even white collar at the time. It still leads to burnout. It's still a difficult and boring job. Now take the new generation.

Jimmy Chebat:

We have very short attention spans as a society due to technologies and everything else that you and I have discussed, but you have to keep them engaged, and so Richard Gold shared this idea of there's negative reinforcement, which is I need 100 phone calls from you or else you're out of a job. So you created that negative reinforcement and somebody may give you 100, but there's a ceiling. So the curve it goes up and then it flattens at 100. If you say, hey, if you give me 100 phone calls, I will give you this reward, you remove that ceiling. But the curve is kind of like this right, it's oh great, I get a reward for hitting 100.

Jimmy Chebat:

And what we're going for is natural reinforcement. And what natural reinforcement does is it distracts you so much from the actual task that you're so immersed in this gamified experience where again we'll get into that later but you're competing, you're earning rewards, you're getting recognition and you have all of these different micro opportunities to be recognized and rewarded that you're no longer focused on the tediousness of the task, you're now focused on the gaming itself, and that level of engagement removes all barriers in terms of potential for peak performance. So that is the why engagement is important is because you remove any limitations in terms of their capabilities and you create an environment in a culture that is so fun that nobody's focused on how excuse my language shitty the job is.

Dan Smitley:

It's interesting. So I saw on your website you guys lean into work should be fun. You just referenced work can be and maybe this statement is, should be fun. That's hard as a senior business leader to say. Sure, I care about my people because I know if they're engaged they're going to perform better. I know I'm going to get more calls out of them, better conversion, better customer experience. That customer experience might net me additional profit in driving my EBIT up. But fun, why do you feel like work should be fun? That's a big one.

Jimmy Chebat:

Because it can be. I mean, if you had an option I mean without compromising performance, productivity, compliance, quality, all of those things and you had the option of hey, you're here to do a job and you can only do a job and you know when you're done doing a job, go home Versus hey, this is fun, it's engaging, there's contests, there's rewards, there's recognition. There's so many cool things about this. Do people get excited about coming in just to do that specific job? That's repetitive. Or would they get excited about coming into work because there's this new item in the rewards or this new competition that they're really in the lead and they want to hold that lead? Or there's this collaborative goal that they're working together and they really enjoy working together as a team. Which one do you think people will gravitate towards? They'll gravitate towards the fun, and this is something that is fairly ubiquitous with respect to everything. So when we talk about gamification and we had this conversation before everything is gamified right.

Jimmy Chebat:

Learning is probably one of the biggest areas where it has a pretty profound effect, because going to school is almost the same, as you know, going to work. Okay, it's not something students look forward to, or students look forward to learning. I'm going to open a textbook, I'm going to read, you know 20 pages, and then I'm going to take a test if I'm doing trivia and I'm competing against my peers, and you know, there's these ding, ding, ding, ding and stickers and badges and rewards and recognition and this competition where you're flexing, you're winning. That's more engaging. People retain that information more and they're more engaged in their work and that actually results in higher grades and retention of information. Duolingo is a great example of one that's effectively used gamification to really help people learn new languages, and so I guess that's my answer is why fun? Why not?

Dan Smitley:

Why not? That's a lot. I love that sentiment. I'm curious, you can always edit this out later. Sure Is work fun for you. Why?

Jimmy Chebat:

not yes, but I'm intrinsically motivated. Intrinsic is autonomy, mastery, progress. These are things that I'm embedded with. I work to live. I don't live to work, but I really, really enjoy what I do.

Jimmy Chebat:

Not everybody has that opportunity or has that privilege, especially in early stages of your career. Most of these contact center jobs are not normally career type jobs. Right, they're career type positions. People come in, they're frontline workers and then there's opportunities for them to grow within the organization, to do more things, whether it's in management, whether it's in a different department. It's usually a feeder for different areas if they're going to stay with the organization. It's very unlikely and rare that people make a career out of contact center jobs. So it's hard to be intrinsically motivated. Now we do have strategies to help blend that intrinsic and extrinsic. So we're using extrinsic motivators, like recognition and rewards in games, to get them engaged in their jobs. But we can blend the two.

Jimmy Chebat:

When you're creating badging systems, that is progress towards a much larger goal. That is mastery right. Much larger goal, that is mastery right. When you're showing them hey, you're starting off as a rookie but you've been promoted and promoted to a pro and all pro and superstar and legend status and you've hit these streaks. You know that now taps into the intrinsic. Again long-winded answer to your question am I motivated by the extrinsic? Sure, I love it. I mean I have a 200 day streak or 170 day streak on one of my games and I only go back to that game and it's a brain exercise game. It's solving their crossword puzzle for the day and I make sure I do it every day because I don't want to break my streak. I mean that's engaging. Would I do it otherwise? I may forget it, I may not be as motivated to do it, but it's a game mechanic that keeps me engaged.

Dan Smitley:

Absolutely, and I love where you're hitting on this external and internal motivation right I think you hit on it perfectly of this feedback loop helps build mastery. I also see gamification and let me know if you disagree or is it slightly different for y'all but I see gamification also as an ability to grant a little bit of autonomy, that by creating transparency around the metrics, I'm not dependent upon my coach to come to me to tell me this information and then I follow the specific instructions that they've given me and they're coaching me. It's a positive thing. But this transparency of metrics, this ability to see where I'm at, gives me autonomy, again important to that intrinsic motivation, so that way I can drive towards that next piece. So I see gamification playing in that environment too.

Jimmy Chebat:

It's 100% correct and it was an inadvertent result of my original platform, which is called the whiteboard, where I seen people begin to micromanage themselves. They became addicted to the data and they were addicted to seeing how they were doing against their peers, how they were doing against their expectations, how they were doing against our expectations. We slowly began building game mechanics into that platform because we would do contests and we would use the data from the platform to run these contests, so that drove them even further into the data to see how they were doing in terms of statuses and these competitions. But no, 100% correct. I think autonomy is definitely a byproduct, but what if one of our intentions in terms of a management tool? So we want to revolutionize workforce management. It's a very strong and ambitious statement to make, but I feel that society is ready for that. You have to that.

Jimmy Chebat:

The world has changed so dramatically over the past five years, with, you know, work from home becoming normalized, new generation coming into the workforce. That is quite unique. That's the first generation born into technology, but also, you know, rising wages and the gig economy. There are so many other options that people can go and work at and people are decisive. They're a lot more decisive today than they were in the past.

Jimmy Chebat:

In the past, if we were going to make a decision about our jobs or our positions, we didn't quit until we started finding another job or until we found another job.

Jimmy Chebat:

People are quitting immediately. We've seen instances where they go through training, they get on the floor day one, they go to lunch and they say this just isn't for me and they don't come back. I mean, that's how decisive it is and you know the companies. They're paying for that training, you know, and that onboarding and all of the tools that are necessary that they have to pay for to get those people onboarded, and then they get no benefit from it. So I think it's important that you know. I want to go back to that question about is the business more important than fun? Our objective is the more we do the things for the individuals, the more. The longer they stay, the better they perform, the happier they are, the more engaged they are, and it actually meets the goals of the business. So which is again, high performance, high quality, larger retention rates and a culture that they're proud of, and keeping ways to attract new employees.

Dan Smitley:

Love it, love it. You hit on something that, when I saw it, I was like wait, what do we mean with this? And you literally just said the phrase. So my background call centers, my background workforce management. And what I mean by workforce management, it's forecasting, scheduling right people, right place, right time. You just talked about revolutionizing workforce management. Square this up for me, because I saw that on your LinkedIn as your tagline. You just referenced it, wanting to revolutionize workforce management, and this is gamification. Well, this is something different than what I think of when I think of workforce management. So what do you mean when you say revolutionizing workforce management?

Jimmy Chebat:

So managers, if they're responsible for managing a team, they have a set of tools that they need to use. Scheduling is one, so it's some sort of attendance software. Performance management is another. So they have to tap into their systems of record, pull reports, analyze that data, put those kind of, somehow reconcile them against what their, their requirement is as a manager of that team and identify who is doing what and then determine what sort of activities or events that need to occur for each individual. Do I need to coach that person? Do I need to recognize that person? Do I need to reward that person? So there's a lot of thinking that is happening at the management level. There's also a lot of administrative responsibilities in order to come to those conclusions and to arrive at a decision. And so when I talk about revolutionizing workforce management, is we bring in a tool that does all of that for you, Automated, and your job now, and what we're hoping will happen, is to leverage that tool and to focus on the human element right, so there's no longer a need to do the administrative tasks. You don't have to go into the systems, you don't have to pull reports, you don't have to analyze that data. We do all of that we also object.

Jimmy Chebat:

Fairness and inclusivity is a big part of this, of our platform and what we design. So when we set expectations, you know you can't expect everybody to perform at the same level, regardless of how much experience they had, how long they've been with you and how much you pay them. There's a lot of subjectivity that happens and we want to remove all of that. When I originally designed it, I didn't trust my managers. I didn't think that they were smart enough to do the things that I wanted them to do. I apologize if that offends, but in reality, most of them weren't formally trained in management, so they would just make things up in their head Like I feel like this person deserves the best leads and because I think he's the best collector, so I trust this person more or maybe it's a relationship. I like this person, so I'm going to treat him differently. I'm going to give him the best schedules and the best you know compensation package. But what I did is I said no, we're going to give them the best schedules and the best compensation package, but what I did is I said no, we're going to treat everybody the same, but I understand that not everybody is the same. So we're going to set the expectations based on an algorithm, and that algorithm provides everybody the same opportunities to grow with the organization and to be treated equally and fairly, and you can build policies around it.

Jimmy Chebat:

So I mean, without diving too deep into the algorithm, when I talk about revolutionizing is building a system that does all the computating, the thinking and then provides actionable insights. It's going to tell you Dan is struggling in this metric. You need to go and coach that individual. Jimmy is really excelling in these areas. We're going to celebrate him and you need to go and just give him a quick pat on the back and maybe put Dan and Jimmy together and create a mentor-protege contest where you give them a collaborative goal. They will work together and we will recognize both of them for succeeding. And what usually happens is the mentor will help transfer knowledge to that protege and help that person grow, which also again makes Dane's job more enjoyable because he's actually able to succeed and he's seen progress towards mastery. So that's the revolutionary thing. You do need to have some progressive thinking because you're going to get out of your comfort zone and you're going to have to trust data and that the algorithm is fair and inclusive.

Dan Smitley:

And this is honestly why, when we spoke at ICMI, I think I connected so well with what you were thinking about, right? I've heard a lot of organizations talk about a human-centered AI experience. They're all talking about keeping the human in the loop, and I think what I'm hearing from you and how you all are thinking about your platform and how you want to design it's taking the grunt work out of the management of people and then equipping people to connect with people. I think so often it's we're taking the grunt work out of it so that way, people can be isolated, so that people can just run by themselves, so that people can just do their own thing.

Dan Smitley:

And what it looks like to me from the outside not being a customer of yours it looks like you guys are trying to enable and equip, taking the grunt work out of something so that people still connect with people. That we're not being a customer of yours, right, it looks like you guys are trying to enable and equip, taking the grunt work out of something so that people still connect with people. That we're still focusing on that, and for me, that felt really unique and really interesting, so I appreciate where you guys are going and how you're thinking about this, two questions for you. One who shouldn't buy your product? Who are not your customers? When is it just not a good fit for them to work with you?

Jimmy Chebat:

That's actually an easy one, because we have three criteria that we require from our customers before we can actually work with them. And so there's a lot. Number one criteria is repeatable tasks. Right, if you're doing things, different things, each and every day, it's really hard for us to gamify, because what we're doing is we're solving daily, weekly, monthly goals, you know, and those are forever right, or throughout, at least, your time in that position. So, number one repeatable tasks. Contact centers are a great fit because they're on the phones all the time. Whether their task is support, customer service, collections, sales, they're usually doing the same things each and every day.

Jimmy Chebat:

Number two, second criteria, is a large workforce doing the same tasks. If you have a team of three and we have a leaderboard of three and you're in the top three, all tasks. If you have a team of three and we have a leaderboard of three and you're in the top three all the time, you have the competition with three people. It doesn't make sense. So for us, it's having at least 20 people in your department. We've done it with a little bit less.

Jimmy Chebat:

The organization might be larger, but each department is. They meet the same criteria. Where it's repeatable tasks, everybody's doing the same task and it's a large workforce. And then the third is you have to have systems that we can integrate with. So in order for us to provide that close to real-time feedback loop, we don't want any manual data entry. We've seen in the past where if it's manual, there's high probability of data corruption and human error, and so once you lose trust in the data, then it really becomes ineffective. So those are the three criteria Repeatable tasks, large workforce doing the same task, and system that we can tie into that's measuring the KPIs for that performance management.

Dan Smitley:

Pretty simple, pretty easy. I love the straightforward answer and, for me, what I'm curious about your gamification platform. How are you gamifying your own environment? Are you guys eating your own dog food Like? What is the company culture like? And do you guys have gamification inside?

Jimmy Chebat:

of your own environment. It's a great question and something that we talked about. So, as a software development company, we don't meet those criteria outside of the development team and I've talked to, I'd say, at least 20 other leaders in the development space for what KPIs do you use? For what KPIs do you use? And there's design points, there's code lines. There's nobody has an answer, so we don't even know what the KPIs are.

Jimmy Chebat:

Ultimately, I did get an answer, coincidentally yesterday, that said look, because we're an agency and we work for other people, our number one metric is are our customers happy? Sure, that's what we measure, how we measure success. But he told me the same thing Everybody struggles to try to find metrics to measure development. So, no, we don't do it in terms of do we have a platform for our users. We just don't meet all of those criteria. But we do a lot of recognition. We have scorecards for every position, even though there might not be leaderboards. We have goals. We are communicating with them regularly in terms of what their goals are and where they are relative to those goals, and then we recognize them when they're meeting or exceeding those goals.

Dan Smitley:

I think that counts right, like I think it counts where the top of the conversation. I think that counts right, like I think it counts where the top of the conversation. You said it's game mechanics for non-game tasks. Even if you're not able to use your own platform in your environment, you're doing that with the feedback, with the recognition, with the goal setting, with I'm assuming some sort of clear, transparent way of understanding where everyone's at and how everyone's doing. So I thought that might be the case, but I just wanted to make sure. The final piece is simply how can people find out more? I know that they're here, they're in your podcast, they probably already know, but I don't want to assume anything. Maybe this is someone from my audience has come over and is how can they find out more and reach out to you?

Jimmy Chebat:

PlayZIZO. com is our website and they can go there find out more information. Of course there's some links here in the podcast to some of our other social media profiles, but connect with us on our socials or find us on our website and more than happy to give people a demo. But yeah, we appreciate it. We hopefully will reach your audience. I know that we have our own audience. That may or may not be as curious as you are, but we love these sort of questions and it's going to take some time to really educate people on the intricacies of what we're trying to accomplish here. But these sort of questions we don't deflect, we don't push away. We will answer them and you know we're beyond a platform. We're not just a gamification platform. This is not turnkey. You are getting us, you're getting our team, you're getting our expertise. We will help you transition your culture from your traditional methods to more of a modern method to help engage your staff.

Dan Smitley:

Love it. This is what I heard. As a final thought recap, this is what I heard you guys accidentally built a gamification platform. You're moving in another direction and realized actually there's something here around making work fun. You leaned into needing something for accountability and realized that self-accountability is a whole lot more effective than that. To be able to get that self-accountability, you lean towards transparency, real-time data and then realized I get more out of people. Work is better, life is more fun when work is fun, and so you leaned into trying to do that. But all wrapped inside of this bubble of objectivity, of fairness, of saying people matter, how we interact with those people matter. So we want to achieve accountability, we want self-accountability, but more than anything, we want to make things easy so that people can connect with people and drive positive outcome. That's what I think I heard. I could have said it better. Appreciate the conversation, man.

Jimmy Chebat:

This has been good. Thank you, dan, and I think we could do hours more of this. I think there's so many layers, so we'll definitely have you back on this podcast, whether it's in this format or not, or even take these conversations offline. But no, I really appreciate you coming on this podcast, having this conversation really challenging me, really pushing the boundaries, and these are the conversations I love. So thank you for coming on. We do have one more part aspect of this podcast, which is our game. Right, we're a gamification podcast, so we always play a game. It's trivia. Dan, I think you're probably gonna be, uh, one of my biggest competitors here. You're sharp, you seem to know your stuff, so no jill my wife.

Dan Smitley:

My wife was the trivia person. She's the trivia puzzle person. I'm typically like 10 minutes behind her. I was like, oh, I get it now. So, no, you're gonna destroy me, but let's do this anyway, it'll be fun, let's do it what famous wall is visible from space?

Jill Fecher:

China, that's a tie what percentage of the human body is made up of?

Dan Smitley:

water 75 percent. I'm gonna say 80 percent.

Jimmy Chebat:

What is the capital of China? I'm going to say 80%. What is the capital of China? Beijing. Who is the lead singer of the band Queen? Freddie Mercury, Damn it. I knew that yeah. What colors mix to make green? Yellow, red and blue, oh yeah. What year did Christopher Columbus first reach the Americas? 1492. What is the largest desert in the world?

Dan Smitley:

The Sahara. What is the capital of Brazil? Rio de Janeiro. I can't think of any Brazilian cities right now. Who painted the Mona Lisa?

Jimmy Chebat:

Michelangelo, we are not around. Is it one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? I did know that. I knew it was one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Dan Smitley:

I know, I know that's what I was going through. Also, I was like there's one of those, the purple isn't it. And I just saw the painting over the summer Disappointing.

Jimmy Chebat:

Way too small and way too many small, not worth it. You know, what's impressive is the painting across the hall. I don't know if they still have it in the same hall, but it's massive. It's such a contradiction between the two. Well, that's a wrap for today's episode. A big thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in and an even bigger thank you to our guest host, Dan Smitley, for stepping in and taking over. It was a blast switching things up. Don't forget to follow us for more insights and conversations around gamification and performance management, and remember, as always, it's game time.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Andrew Reimers

Host
Head Shot

Jimmy Chebat

Host