Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 movie Modern Times’ Standing on an Endless Machinery Assembly Line and comedienne Lucille Ball’s hilarious 1952 chocolates wrapping highlight the dreariness of monotonous work. Many people worldwide continue to work on tedious tasks that dull the brain.
Now, a study by engineers at West Virginia University proves that people’s completion of monotonous assembly tasks improves when doing those tasks involves playing a game.
Gamification has been a growing topic of interest in recent years across many fields, especially marketing, healthcare, and education. More recently, researchers in manufacturing and production have begun exploring the potential applications of gamification in manufacturing to improve the psychological well-being of workers and overall productivity.
However, empirical research to support gamification for manufacturing remained scarce.
A new study published in the journal Robotics and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing, titled “The effects of gamification for manufacturing on workers and production in industrial assembly,” examined the “gamification” of manufacturing tasks to improve workers’ well-being and productivity.
Findings find that factory assembly line workers are more productive when repeating motions
The team’s findings suggest that workers on factory assembly lines will be more productive, engaged, and motivated—but also more stressed—if repetitive activities like fitting parts together are incentivized through competition or rewards.
Teaching assistant Prof. Makenzie Dolly at the university’s College of Engineering and Mineral Resources said gamification has become part of many people’s daily lives.
In wellness, it 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 and colleagues designed an experiment that simulated the monotony of a typical production assembly task using a toy Lego set.
Study participants were randomly assigned to a “gamified” or “control” group. Both groups had to assemble the same Lego model of a telehandler — an agricultural vehicle known as a “reach forklift” or “cherry picker.”
Participants in both the gamified and control groups were required to assemble the telehandler model 15 times over five occasions. However, those in the gamified group had their productivity measured and rewarded via game-like elements such as progress bars and badges.
Turning the work into a game significantly boosted the gamified group’s productivity by the time those participants got to their 15th build of the Lego kit.
The researchers speculated the jump in completion times for the final attempt “may have been caused by participants’ last-ditch efforts to obtain a new personal record badge,” Dolly said. “We believe participants wanted to end the study on a high note by showcasing their best efforts.”
But, to her surprise, gamification also amped up participants’ stress. “We expected gamification would lessen participants’ perceived workloads,” she said.
“Instead, it increased the frustration, effort, time pressure, and mental and physical demands they said they experienced. Participants in the gamified group performed better than those in the non-gamified group, but they believed they did worse.”
According to Dolly, that’s not as bad as it sounds. The “psychological load” that gamification places on workers encourages them to be more mentally active and engaged in the task. She said that extra pressure drives better performance as long as stress levels aren’t extreme or unnecessary.
“There has to be some risk or motivation keeping people engaged during repetitive assembly tasks. When tasks are too monotonous, mistakes happen, and workers tune out or silently quit.
If we introduce the risk of losing a game into those tasks, then they feel a sense of urgency that drives productivity and quality.”
Participants who said they tended to be “self-competitive,” driven to beat their own records, felt the pressure of time most acutely. Those who identified as impatient tended to get most frustrated during the builds and to feel most burdened by the physical demands of the task.
“The fact that we saw physical demand and frustration levels rise as patience levels decreased means that anyone designing a gamification application needs to consider the level of tolerance a user will have for more difficult scenarios,” Dolly said.
“Step one should be knowing the workers’ personalities and levels of patience with hard tasks. Every individual has his or her own threshold for what level of challenge and stress is helpful, and pushing employees past that point can lead to high turnover and sick leave.
Regarding gamification, workers must be in that sweet spot between boredom and overwhelm.”