What HubSpot’s Marketing Grader Teaches us About Employee Feedback

“I’ve discovered the best business model” someone told me yesterday. “You have people signup so you can send them a report telling them where they messed up. After they get the report that tells them what they are doing wrong, you sell them a service to fix it”.

“Imagine!” he went on to say, “You could get really rich by indicating the faults all humans have and then suggesting how to fix them”.

Thankfully, there is no such service to pinpoint humanity’s flaws, complete with suggestions on how to fix them. I suspect such a service it may be too judgmental – after all, what makes us human is the things we aren’t that good at.

The service my friend was referring to is Hubspot’s Marketing Grader.

Since Gameffective relies on its website for marketing, I submitted my email address into the Marketing Grader. I then got “graded”.

It then struck me that Hubspot’s marketing grader isn’t just a lesson about a great business tactic (tell people what they do wrong and offer them the tool to fix it). It’s a lesson about how to provide feedback to employees – and also includes valuable lessons for enterprise gamification. Here’s how:

Grades are clear and numerical

As you can see in the picture, our site got an 83. This number is neutral. It doesn’t say what grades other people’s sites get and it doesn’t set up a comparison with them. It’s positive and fact based. Good game design in enterprise gamification should use the same principles when telling employees how they are doing compared to themselves, their targets and their peers.

Focus on personal mastery and not on competition

The marketing grader compares the site to a clear set of goals. Not to others, not to a leaderboard. Many employees crave a sense of mastery and completion. Using competition centric game mechanics and feedback (“Joe is better than you”) creates frustration and discouragement. Using neutral measures promotes a positive dialogue and can even form habits and new, positive, behaviors.

How grades are measured is clearly set; expectations are clearly set, too

Each grade in the marketing grade is explained. This shows how expectations can be set – by employers, managers and game rule administrators in an enterprise gamification project. Setting the rules clearly also sets expectations and justifies “grades”.

There is always an opportunity to learn

Good gamification always ties into training and learning. Drilling through the marketing grader gives you the learning opportunity to improve your site. Tying learning into gamification of CRM or customer support works similarly.

Feedback is ongoing

You can always make improvements and check how you’re performing on the marketing grader. Employees, in any gamification environment, should have the same ability to clearly see the rules and to see how they are doing. This ongoing feedback helps adjust behavior and prevents misunderstanding and frustration.