I’m Jay, co-founder & CEO of Shram: a gamified work management tool. Ask me anything!

@aditya_mohanty Thank you! :) We have failed at many and fortunately, succeeded at getting few things right about this space: 1. We started with the idea that work management tools should not look and feel like excel sheets. But, that's not the reason behind employee disengagement at all 2. We revamped the traditional app experience to only realise that a drastic change makes it more difficult to adopt a new tool like Shram. The minimal the deviation from the existing way, the better! 3. Since there are numerous alternatives in this space, even the base expectations users had from the MVP were high. Integrations, advanced features, more flexibility, etc cannot be compromised. Users will always compare you with the best in the world they can access 4. Friction during onboarding led us to believe that we are not solving a problem. But after speaking to more people, we realised that we had not considered user personas involved deeply 5. Workplace gamification if done thoughtfully, just works. Our users love it and it has truly brought joy to their teams 6. Serving user pain-points such as AI passively suggesting ideal task assignees or real-time performance evaluation reports may outweigh complex features that are just nice-to-haves 7. UI matters more than users assume. Anything that makes them feel special is highly rewarded while anything that makes feel dumb faces criticism Sorry for the long list. There are more but the ones above have been critical to our current approach with which we will be relaunching Shram in the next few weeks. :)

@gaurav_agarwal24 1. Most team members hate coming back to a platform to log in work. So if we could improve that then gamification might be helping 2. This process is also quite tedious so if people are having fun and we could record it as feedback over a survey then that could be another win 3. Shram doesn’t have a leaderboard to discourage unhealthy competition. So if we are able to nudge friendly competition and team work, that’s another effective measure that gamification is working. :) I think a temporary progress bar that give teammates a sense of progress and then resets periodically would be most useful. That way everyone gets an opportunity to be seen as performing the best amongst their peers.

@serverlord , I would like to believe that we are building that newer version. Let me explain that better. In the book Drive, the author explains two types of motivations: 1. Motivation 2.0 that is extrinsic: driven by carrots and sticks; the kind we employed during the industrial era. If you did well you got a prize and if you didn’t, you got punishment. 2. Motivation 3.0 that is intrinsic: driven intrinsically: the kind Google instills instilled in its employees. Here you do work because you enjoy doing it. Existing employee engagement platforms offer employees coupons or gift cards for logging in work, which is like training rats. So the next version of gamification should ideally be intrinsic and we are building Shram only on that foundation. There are no coupons or gift cards here, just pure social capital amongst your peers at work. :)

@karna_nanda Let’s look at the three industries at play in team productivity: 1. Project mgmt tools help you document your daily work and how it moves the needle for long-term goals. Unfortunately, daily work data is summarised into a report and submitted to the manager during appraisals. So this step becomes optional. 2. Performance mgmt tools help you understand how well your teammates are doing so as the gauge if you should appraise them (or fire them). For this, tedious evaluations are done periodically that both managers and employees hate. 3. Employee engagement incentivises teammates to use the above tools because they are otherwise very boring and tedious. Here, employees are given coupons and gift cards as motivation to use the above tools These are seen as three independent industries. So as an organisation, you would be expected to buy and use three separate tools! But for us at Shram, they are intertwined. How? 1. Daily work data if collected more responsibly, contains rich information about how well you are doing it. 2. So a lot about each teammates performance can be gauged in real-time by how well they are doing daily tasks. This eliminates overwhelming performance evaluations that are conducted periodically 3. Engagement should ideally be a later stop work management such that everyone finds the experience of using such a tool delightful, instead of motivating teammates with gifts or coupons. For small businesses, all of this distills down to accountability. So we make logging in daily work rewarding and meaningful so that such work data can point toward each teammate’s accountability in real time. :)

@grayson_carter1 Thank you! :) Yes! If gamification isn’t done meaningfully then users simply will ignore it. For that reason all gamification in Shram is based on actual work done. 1. There is a weekly progress bar each teammate must try and make green by gaining XP. This bar resets to 0 at the end of each week so that competition is avoided and instead everyone has the opportunity to be the best this time 2. You gain XP when the approver of your task marks it as complete and rates your task out of 5. The XP gained is a function of the task rating and its duration. We are soon introducing difficulty as well. 3. The more tasks you do the more XP you gain. Most importantly, quality of work is also accounted for because of ratings provided by the approval process. So the better you perform the more XP you gain These are simple yet effective ways with which, Shram has been able to make gamification meaningful instead of being a distraction. :)

@anthony_wright2 Thank you! :) Here are a few ways with which Shram makes work management engaging: 1. There is a weekly progress bar each teammate must try and make green by gaining XP. This bar resets to 0 at the end of each week so that competition is avoided and instead everyone has the opportunity to be the best this time 2. You gain XP when the approver of your task marks it as complete and rates your task out of 5. The XP gained is a function of the task rating and its duration. We are soon introducing difficulty as well. 3. The more tasks you do the more XP you gain. Most importantly, quality of work is also accounted for because of ratings provided by the approval process. So the better you perform the more XP you gain 4. We have streaks based on your history of logging in daily. The more consistently you visit Shram the more your streak would be. This is an alternative to an attendance calendar that makes people feel they are being monitored We plan on making the experience even more engaging with time but thankfully, these features have been working well for our users. :)

@kalpesh_bhalekar1 That's an interesting one! We want to eventually eliminate logging of all work. For that we need to get multiple long shots right. For example: 1. Aggregation of work across all channels 2. Using LLMs to gauge what's done and how well 3. Making this work seamlessly, which seems daunting today! At present, we want users to log in the work they wish to be recognised for. You may get 10 tasks approved for 1 hour of work resp or just 1 task with 10 hours of work logged in. Your checklists in each task may elaborate on what was done so that reports over-time reflect contributions made accurately. :)

@balaji_bk If you have tried conventional tools but could not stick with them, Shram could be a game-changer for you! It boosts team engagement with: 1. Instant delight, due to workplace gamification, and 2. Long-term meaning, thanks to our ability to link daily work with performance. Unlike other tools, Shram is designed to collect rich information not only about what was done but also what type it was and how well it was done. This allows Shram to gauge your performance real-time based on granular work you do daily. With time, this could replace the dreadful evaluations that managers and HR reps engage in and recognise each one of your team member's effort without bias. :)

@navreen_d06 Thank you! :) We believe that regardless of the core-function you serve at work, be is sales, marketing, operations or engineering, the foundation is based on tasks, which are universal building blocks of productivity. At present, professionals from varied functions note down their tasks in their diaries, to-do apps or more sophisticated work management tools like Asana, ClickUp etc. So we are simply enabling the ability to keep your tasks together on one platform like these alternatives, but with a pleasant caveat! On Shram, your daily contributions over-time reflect your performance and may be part of your periodic evaluation. So unlike other tools where daily work has little to no impact, on Shram, each contribution you make is recognised and might help with an appraisal as well. :)