Amazon Is Making a Game of Warehouse Work

Amazon relies on its staff of warehouse workers to fulfill orders quickly and efficiently. In fact, the online retail giant's success is rooted in the fast shipment and distribution of goods. Notwithstanding, Amazon has a tactic to encourage warehouse workers to boost their productivity: making a game out of it.

Turning order fulfillment into a competition

Back in 2017, one Amazon warehouse started encouraging workers to participate in games designed to improve their efficiency.

The goal was to improve worker productivity by pitting employees against one another and allowing them to compete for digital rewards. Some workers agree that making a game of things can help alleviate boredom -- something that tends to crop up in warehouse environments. On the flip side, workers who are less enthused say Amazon's games could prompt employees to work too quickly for their own good, resulting in injury and a more dangerous working environment.

Inside several of Amazon’s cavernous warehouses, hundreds of employees spend hours a day playing video games. Some compete by racing virtual dragons or sports cars around a track, while others collaborate to build castles piece by piece.

But they aren’t whiling away the time by playing Fortnite and Minecraft. Rather, they’re racing to fill customer orders, their progress reflected in a video game format that is part of a program by the e-commerce giant to help reduce the tedium of its physically demanding jobs. If it helps improve the efficiency of work like plucking items from or stowing products on shelves for 10 hours a day or more, all the better.

The video games are optional for the thousands of “pickers” and “stowers” across a handful of the company’s warehouses.

Developed by Amazon, the games are displayed on small screens at employees’ workstations. As Kiva robots wheel giant shelves up to each workstation, lights or screens indicate which item the worker needs to put into a bin. The games can register the completion of the task, which is tracked by scanning devices, and can pit individuals, teams or entire floors in a race to pick or stow Lego sets, cellphone cases or dish soap, for instance. Game-playing employees are rewarded with points, virtual badges and other goodies throughout a shift.

Think Tetris, but with real boxes.

Amazon’s experiment is part of a broader industry push to "gamify” low-skill warehouse work, particularly as historically low unemployment has driven up wages and attrition. Gamification generally refers to software programs that simulate video games by offering rewards, badges or bragging rights among colleagues.

Uber and Lyft have mastered gamification in an effort to keep drivers on the road longer, generally by dangling cash rewards for completing seemingly arbitrary goals, such as 60 rides in a week or 20 more miles. The companies keep drivers engaged with meters or other gauges that are tantalizingly close to a new objective.

Target has used games to encourage cashiers to scan products more quickly, and Delta Air Lines used them to help train reservation agents, tasks that may otherwise seem rote, said Gabe Zichermann, who has consulted with companies on gamification and written three books on the topic.

Other firms award workers badges for achieving fitness goals that, over time, may reduce the employer’s health-care costs.

“This is most successful when the games are replacing tasks that are otherwise boring,” Zichermann said. “Anything to reduce the drudgery, even the smallest amount, is going to give a bump to workers’ happiness.'"

But, he said, gamification can be used to mask higher productivity goals, because the games’ algorithms are typically kept secret. In customer service jobs, for instance, gold stars awarded for resolving 20 customer concerns may over time require 22 or 25. “When [employers] want to generate more output, they can ratchet those levers,” he said. “It’s like boiling a frog. It may be imperceptible to the user.”

The thinking goes that if it feels like a game, it will feel less like work.

But the rush to gamify comes with risks, said Jane McGonigal, a video game designer who has studied workplace gamification. “Competition is only enjoyable for a short time,” she said. “As soon as workers start underperforming against their colleagues, it becomes less fun and can actually be counterproductive.”

The games are a response to worker complaints that Amazon’s push for more automation has made laborers feel like cogs in a bigger machine, as they increasingly work alongside robots.

By fostering workplace competition through games, Amazon is also slyly pushing workers to raise the stakes among themselves to pack more boxes bound for customer homes.

The company said it doesn’t monitor game results or penalize workers for not participating. However, warehouse workers are tracked carefully for speed, efficiency and other factors, and those who underperform can be fired or reassigned. If the games are helping to push workers to be more productive, it could make those who eschew them appear to be straggling.

To be clear, Amazon has said employee performance will not be measured by how well its workers do at its games. But still, implementing those competitions will no doubt put the pressure on. Furthermore, it's unclear as to what benefit workers will get by participating in the games. Amazon has said that winners will earn digital currency that can be used for virtual goods. But that doesn't translate to higher pay, better benefits, or the perks that might really motivate warehouse workers to step up their game.