Gamification

 What sport do you like to watch? The answer could be anything from football to soccer, to, uh, baseball, tennis, squash, racketball, handball, whatever sport ball you like to watch, or even if it doesn't include a ball, uh, uh, you know, uh, survival contests or all of these different things or examples of competition and, you know, competition.

Is a good thing. It is absolutely wonderful to, in a competitive nature, compare your skills to the skills of other people. How that breaks down in an apartment maintenance front is gaming. I've heard it called gamification to where what you do is begin tracking items of importance that you perform and then compare your progress, your uh, skills with other people.

This is a method that can be used to spur each and every one of us to better performance. In the end, better performance on our properties translates to a better budget. Acumen translates to lower expenses, and not only that, it translates to, uh, uh, career progress. At one property I was at, we used to hold contests for caulking.

We had bathtubs that at this particular property where the, uh, caulking would go bad, and you know, the caulking that I'm talking about, it's the one that essentially you require a, uh, diamond drill bit or to hammer and chisel in order to cut out and remove the old caulking. Once we get that out. We would, uh, time how long it took to actually apply and install nicely, the new caulking.

We would actually take and keep a running scoreboard in the shop of the fastest person that could install the caulking properly. I was actually pretty good. I got to where I could install caulking in 32 seconds, which was great until somebody beat me. They got me at 28 seconds. Now, on one hand, I could get mad and angry at the fact that he beat me.

He broke my record. I could even blame it on the fact that he was shorter than I was. You know, he didn't have to fight gravity as much. He was skinnier. He didn't even have hair, so he was more aerodynamic. Uh. But at the end of the day, that completely defeats the point of gamification. Friendly competition when done correctly, spurs me to get even better at 32 seconds.

I was good, but you know what? He was better. I took him aside and found out the trick that he was using. He cut the tip of the caulking cartridge differently than what I was doing, which allowed him to go even faster than my fast time. In other words, by having friendly competition on site, I found out a better way of doing something that we all had to do.

Even though I never ever got as fast as he did, his record lasted for as long as I was at that particular property. I still got better even though I didn't beat it. This is why competition when treated in this manner is a net benefit to our entire property. Keep in mind that at no point in time did our competition get.

Personal. We had fun. We had a great time, uh, uh, talking to each other and challenging each other in various tasks. I mean, think about it. We could do it in anything. Replacing a garbage disposal, uh, brazing in a compressor, we could do that as long as it's done safely and the end result is the entire property and the entire team gets better as a result.

One final note. Competition is not a value competition. I am not a worse person because somebody beat my time. It's not a personal thing. It's a challenge on how I can increase my skills. That's the true benefit of competition.