Levels, Not Titles: How Progress Systems Motivate Teams
It takes years and sometimes does not take place at all for a promotion to happen. It takes only weeks to get leveled up in well-designed progress systems. This is the main distinction that explains more about employee motivation than any performance review framework does.
Technology company Nomium, which develops application and platform systems for corporate use, has faced this problem again and again trying to create gamification systems for onboarding, training, and internal recognition purposes. A visible and frequent progression proves to work better than title progression in nearly every occasion.
Title Change is a Blunt Instrument
Job title changes rarely occur. They rely on budget cycles, company politics, and even more on performance. At the same time, a title does not tell anything about a person’s day-by-day improvement of job-related skills.
According to psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, who are the creators of self-determination theory at the University of Rochester, people get the greatest motivation from the process of developing their skills. The change of a job title does not help with that: it happens too infrequently to influence people’s actions and evaluates rank, not growth.
This is the reason why talented employees may feel like they stagnate despite their advancement on paper. The organizational structure changed, but not their perception of it.
Instead of Changing Title…
Levels, skill trees, badges, point achievements are used in all gamification systems created for corporations. Unlike the title change, these elements allow visualizing even the slightest improvements in skill set right away, not waiting for the year-end evaluation period to learn about one’s progress.
Duolingo is an example of how progress systems motivate users, and most people do not even realize it. The app shows users’ XP, streaks, and skill levels right after each lesson, and this is the main reason why people keep coming back to it daily.
Salesforce uses a similar system for professional training of its customers. The Trailhead platform ranks the learners by named tiers (Scout, Ranger, Mountaineer) according to the skills they have gained. Any learner can see where he or she is on this ladder and what requirements for the next tier there are.
Microsoft uses the same approach internally. Its longstanding “Ninja” certification tracks for IT professionals give different theme-specific badges to employees and partners who completed training modules. Badges themselves are mostly decorative, but the skills they represent are the ones people really chase.
Why It Works That Way
According to researcher Ran Kivetz and his colleagues from Columbia Business School, there exists the goal-gradient effect: people work harder as they perceive themselves approaching some target. Visualizing one’s progress taps directly into this mechanism.
It is not the reward in itself, but the progress towards it that changes people’s behavior. People get motivated not by the promise of future gain, but by the current sense of progress.
The same principle applies to motivating customers. The Starbucks Rewards program, which uses the same system of levels (from Green to Gold) for ranking its customers, motivates people not by the money they get from it, but by the visualization of their progress.
What Does Not Work?
None of this happens automatically, and the failure mode is well-known. According to psychologists Mark Lepper, David Greene, and Richard Nisbett, the overjustification effect is typical for the systems which give rewards for doing things people find meaningful: the external reward may quietly replace internal motivation.
Ranking people according to some criteria may inspire those who are higher on the leaderboard and discourage everyone else. If these criteria seem to be arbitrary to people, the results would be worse.
Poorly designed systems always tend to reward activity, not skill. If people realize it, such a system gets devalued right away.
What Sustains People Over Time
Motivational progress systems usually have several common features:
- The level must reflect real skill, not just activity. A level must mean something changed.
- Criteria must be transparent. Arbitrary criteria kill motivation very quickly.
- Participation must be voluntary. A point system makes people resentful, not motivated.
- The progress must lead to something real. A badge that will increase one’s responsibilities or recognition will be valuable; a badge that won’t – is decoration.
All of this does not require complicated software. A clear structured spreadsheet with realistic milestones can do better than an expensive platform if its design is based on these principles. Tooling does not matter, as much as what lies beneath.
Titles will remain in companies, as somebody must know who reports to whom. But as motivational tools, titles were never meant for this. What motivates people week-by-week is not the next title. It is the visibility of their progress in their skill set.