How to Gamify Slack Collaboration in Watershed [UPDATE]

At Watershed, we begin every day by reflecting on recent work and updating Slack with the most important task we need to accomplish that day. The “Most Important Thing” (as we call it) isn’t necessarily the most urgent, easiest, or most fun task—but it's what’s most important to achieving our long-term goals.

Employees publish their daily commitments in a company-wide Slack channel. By doing this, we help ourselves in a few ways:

Accountability. When we publicly commit to do something, we are more likely to get it done.
Visibility. We're often not working in the same office space (or even the same country).
Collaboration. Knowing what others need to accomplish often uncovers ways we can help each other along the way.

The Challenge

When we first started using Slack software to share our most important things, every employee reliably posted their daily updates.

After a few weeks, though, we noticed a gradual drop-off in the number of people who consistently shared their updates.

Our Solution

To increase adoption and get back to sharing daily updates, we linked Slack with Watershed with two goals in mind:

Track who updates their statuses, and
Reward people who update their daily statuses.

Tracking Learners with Slack and Watershed

With Watershed and Slack’s integration, information about daily updates is passed from Slack to Watershed via a simple PHP connector app we created.

When a user updates his or her status with a specific keyword (in our case, the message needs to start with “Daily:”), the connector generates an xAPI statement and sends it to Watershed.

We use an internal Watershed account to track the Slack updates in addition to things such as client app usage and survey results.

For the Slack integration, we display a leaderboard for who has updated his or her status the most during the last 30 days:

Please note how low our CEO Mike Rustici is on the leaderboard. Time to pick up the Slack, Mike!

We use a line card to track status updates over time.

Rewarding Your Learners

We use Watershed to gamify our status updates. After employees update their statuses and xAPI statements are sent to Watershed, Watershed sends the number of unique days each person has updated his or her status in the last month to the PHP script.

From there, the script calculates a percentage and sends that number back to Slack.

It’s become really exciting and rewarding when your status reaches 100 percent. We often compete to have streaks of 100 percent, and it’s become second nature for most of us to update the status channel as soon as we get to work.