The Dark Side of Karma & Unicorns—Why Gamifying Projects Doesn’t Work
There are lots of quick and dirty tips floating around on how to implement gamification to 10x your team’s productivity.
You won’t find any of those here.
As project managers, we know there’s more to leading a team than squeezing out every last ounce of output. For gamification to actually work, we need to rethink one of its biggest assumptions: that productivity is the ultimate metric for success.
So I talked to a neuroscientist, a licensed clinical psychologist, and a developer about what gamification can look like when we strip away the pressure to perform like machines.
But first…
A Quick & Dirty History of Workplace Gamification
Gamification—using game-like elements such as points, badges, leaderboards, and challenges to boost engagement—caught fire in corporate circles back in the early 2010s.
But its roots go back even further.
Charles Coonradt’s book, The Game of Work, first highlighted how incorporating fun and games could combat declining employee engagement. Coonradt noticed productivity dipping in the recreation and sports equipment industry and proposed that game mechanics could boost satisfaction, motivation, and performance. His insights laid the groundwork for modern gamification.
Then came Nick Pelling, who coined the term “gamification” in 2002. And in 2005, gamification evolved into a structured, modern platform thanks to Rajat Paharia, who founded Bunchball—the first cloud-based gamification platform. Bunchball integrated leaderboards, badges, points, and missions directly into workplaces, transforming how companies approached employee engagement and motivation.
However, it wasn’t until the second half of 2010 that the term “gamification” really took off, becoming widely adopted by businesses around the globe. Many companies, including Deloitte and KFC, have used leaderboards, points, challenges, and badges to make work "more fun and rewarding" through progress tracking and recognition for completing goals.
Gamification is so baked into today’s workplaces that you might not even realize how often you’re running into it. Most project management tools, for example, have some sort of built-in gamification element:
- Asana is known for playful celebrations—think flying unicorns and bursts of confetti when tasks get checked off.
- ClickUp lets teams earn customizable points for task completions and hitting milestones.
- Todoist offers "Karma points," nudging you towards daily productivity streaks.
Why Gamification Doesn't Actually Work
If gamification is so common in the workplace, it must work, right? Well, it depends on what you're after.
Sure, it can spike short-term engagement and give productivity a temporary lift. But if the motivation behind gamification stays surface-level, it fizzles out quickly. The novelty wears off, and eventually people get bored chasing digital gold stars, especially when deeper issues like workplace culture or real job satisfaction remain unaddressed.
The typical approach to gamification is all about short-term wins—like hitting quarterly sales quotas, wrapping up projects ahead of schedule, or pushing monthly productivity numbers higher.
But if tasks and productivity are endlessly gamified without consideration for why there’s a need for gamification in the first place—higher employee engagement, increased productivity, and enhanced motivation—it's just treating symptoms, not the cause.
“We need to understand that work isn’t always inherently motivating. And that’s okay,” says Megha Sharda, a neuroscientist who works at the intersection of art and science. “When you attribute success to these kinds of symbolic things, the absence of them becomes dark and harmful.”
As clinical psychologist Aritra Chatterjee puts it, gamification can often put the focus on the “worker as a machine.”
Aritra adds, “What this does is that it creates an external locus of control. The rewards themselves become the driving force instead of me finding true meaning in my work.”
To put it simply: We can't assume that introducing game-like elements to our projects will make them exciting and motivating in and of themselves. We need to be thinking more about team and company culture.
Consider these workplace trends:
- According to Gallup, only 15% of employees are actively engaged in the workplace.
- Mercer's 2024 Global Talent Trends report, based on a massive survey of over 12,000 people worldwide, shows that over 80% of employees are at risk of burnout.
- Employee mental wellbeing took a hit in 2022, with 48% reporting a decline and a further 28% stating being “miserable” at work. Plus, 60% of employees feel emotionally checked out at work.
No amount of virtual donuts, karma, and unicorns, can solve for poor mental health. You cannot successfully motivate a burned out team with gamification.
What Does Ethical Gamification Look Like?
So, we're on the same page here. If you're trying to motivate your project team, gamification can’t just be about sprinkling shiny badges onto tasks and hoping your team magically hits deadlines. But there are still ways to get gamification right and make it work for you and your team.
It's about shifting your focus: instead of grinding purely for productivity, your goal should be to build a culture where your team feels genuinely supported, engaged, and motivated to collaborate—even when your projects hit inevitable bumps along the road.
But how can we think about gamification in a more ethical way? What can gamification focus on if not productivity and hitting targets?
Boosting Employee Wellbeing
As a project manager, your job is to make sure you deliver successful project outcomes. You can't do that when your team is burned out. Workers who are burned out from their work are three times more likely to be actively searching for another job and are significantly less likely to go above and beyond what is expected of them at work.
This is why Megha and Aritra both emphasize the idea that gamification doesn’t always have to reward work—it can reward rest, too.
Take Headspace, a mental health app that offers mindfulness and meditation sessions. The app gamifies the wellness experience by tracking the user's "run streak," or the amount of days in a row they engage with the app. When integrated into the workplace, Headspace users report feeling 32% less stressed—and gain the equivalent of three more productive days—after just 30 days of use.
While there are plenty of solutions out there to support employee mental health, few of them lean into gamification. If you have the internal resources (or even just access to a tool like Lovable AI), it might be worth building something tailored to your team’s specific needs.
For example, you could design a “Mental Health Points” system where employees earn rewards for engaging in activities that support their mental well-being. This could include things like:
- Logging off at the end of the workday without checking emails.
- Taking part in a mindfulness or meditation session.
- Taking a mental health day or using PTO.
- Attending a company-sponsored therapy or counseling session.
Employees can redeem their points for rewards that directly contribute to their mental health, such as extra time off, access to wellness apps, or gift cards for self-care products.
By gamifying mental health—not just work tasks—you’re actually supporting long-term productivity. More importantly, you’re sending a clear message to your team: you see them as whole people, not just cogs in the machine.
Promoting a Positive Culture
Work can feel isolating—especially in hybrid or remote environments. So rather than gamifying individual achievements, it can be more effective to focus on team collaboration that builds a stronger feeling of connectedness to the workplace.
But it's not just about rewarding team work. It's also about cultivating a culture of gratitude and appreciation. Too often, we can fall into the trap of focusing on what’s missing—the goals that weren’t met, the projects that failed, the targets that were missed. Ethical gamification flips that narrative. It shifts the focus from what’s wrong to what’s right.
Take HeyTaco!, for example—an app that lets team members recognize each other for lending a hand, contributing to shared wins, or simply lifting team morale. It includes a leaderboard highlighting those who’ve received the most kudos, but it also rewards giving recognition—so the more tacos you hand out, the more rewards you unlock.
By gamifying recognition, tools like this help foster a culture of appreciation on project teams and beyond.
Building Team Spirit
Ethical gamification can also cultivate a sense of camaraderie and shared purpose among teams.
So instead of just rewarding individual achievements, you can gamify collaboration and teamwork. The more your team members feel like they’re part of something bigger, the more invested they’ll be.
For example, you could create team-based challenges where success isn’t about individual performance, but about collective effort. A team collaboration challenge could reward teams for helping each other with tough projects or contributing to group goals. Or it could even be a team challenge focused on mental health or self-improvement.
Solutions like Nectar allow you to create custom challenges to align your team and gamify the collaboration experience. They support challenges from employee wellness initiatives, to continued learning courses, and even monthly book challenges. And built-in rewards help to enhance the gamified experience and keep team members excited to collaborate together.
How to Implement an Ethical Gamification Strategy
These are all great ideas in theory, but if you actually want to implement gamification that can help you reach these goals, what are the first steps?
Listen First, Implement Later
Before you roll out any kind of gamification system, start by listening. Run a quick team survey to figure out what really motivates them. You can ask:
- What makes you feel most motivated at work?
- What makes you feel connected to your work?
- What do you need to thrive in the workplace?
Their answers should help you decide what you will center with your gamification approach. Whether it’s creativity, collaboration, or well-being, choose what truly matters to your team.
Dr. Sharda also says it can be helpful to get input from people across the company—not just your team. The more diverse the voices you include, the more helpful the results will be.
Make It Private
Publicly ranking employees on a leaderboard probably won't have the impact you're looking for. Take the example of Disney—they tried to increase productivity by displaying a large television screen that ranked employees based on their speed in completing tasks. This obviously went poorly, leading to unsustainable work practices.
Aritra says that we use some form of gamification for ourselves already: “We make lists, we check them off for ourselves, and other people are not judging us for it.”
So make any gamification (at least anything productivity-based), private. An individualized dashboard where employees can track their own progress might actually be more motivating (and less stressful) for your team.
For instance, consider a “Progress Tracker” where employees earn points or badges for completing certain tasks or reaching specific milestones. This could be for anything—from professional development like attending a training session or completing a project.
They can track their own improvements over time, but there’s no external pressure from competing against others. This encourages personal development without creating a sense of anxiety or rivalry. And eliminates the “they did it better than us” competition.
Separate it from Evaluation
One last reminder—it's not enough to decouple gamification from productivity. It also shouldn't be tied to a direct evaluation or performance reviews.
Gamification can quickly lose its positive impact if it’s tied too closely to formal performance evaluations or job reviews. The goal is to foster intrinsic motivation—encouraging employees to engage because they care about personal growth, well-being, or contributing to the team, not because they’re worried about hitting specific targets for a review.
Gamify for People, Not Productivity
So, before you roll out any gamification initiative, ask yourself: am I just adding digital sugar to make the medicine go down? Or am I creating something that actually nourishes my team?
Ethical gamification recognizes that we're not machines that need to be optimized for output. We're complex beings who crave connection, meaning, and rest. The unicorns and donuts aren't the problem—it's what we've been trying to use them for.
The project managers and teams that thrive in the coming decade won't be the ones with the most aggressive productivity metrics. They'll be the ones that understand a fundamental truth: when you design for humans first, productivity becomes a happy by-product.
