About the project
Playfully motivate employees
Sustainability has also become an important issue for small and medium-sized enterprises as global warming continues. It is not only supply chains and business processes that play a role here - the behavior of a company's own employees in particular can have a major impact on its climate footprint.
The Greenify.work research project aims to investigate whether employees in small and medium-sized enterprises can be motivated to adopt sustainable behavior in the workplace through the use of game elements, so-called "gamification" - so that they reduce their electricity and water consumption, for example, or think more consciously about waste avoidance and transport routes. Previous studies in the area of private households suggest that game elements such as point systems, ranking lists, challenges, personalized tips and direct feedback demonstrably lead to lower energy and water consumption.
As part of the project, a gamified smartphone app based on scientific findings will be designed and tested in collaboration with small and medium-sized enterprises.

Game elements and their impact
Greenify.work works with different game mechanics to appeal to different types of users and motivate sustainable behavior





Schedule
Course of the research project
The Greenify.work app
The smartphone app for sustainability.
A separate app for each company
The Greenify.work app is designed so that each company receives its own app instance and employees can thus play with each other in a closed setting.
A companion in everyday work
The decision for a smartphone app was made based on the interviews with the employees. In this way, the topic of sustainability should accompany everyday work, but not distract from it.
Suitable for any team
The Greenify.work app works for large and small teams, so it can be used with 10 employees just as well as with 500.

Scientific publications on the research project
Publications in scientific (peer-reviewed) journals:
Krath, J., Schürmann, L. & von Korflesch, H. F. O. (2021). Revealing the theoretical basis of gamification: A systematic review and analysis of theory in research on gamification, serious games and game-based learning. Computers in Human Behavior (125), 106963. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2021.106963.
Publications in scientific (peer-reviewed) conference proceedings:
Krath, J., Morschheuser, B., von Korflesch, H.F.O., Hamari, J. (2023). How To Increase Sustainable Engagement In The Workplace Through Green IS: The Role Of Instructional And Motivational Design Features. 31st European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS 2023), 11.-16. Juni 2023 (forthcoming).
Krath, J., Morschheuser, B., von Korflesch, H.F.O. (2022). Designing Gamification for Sustainable Employee Behavior: Insights on Employee Motivations, Design Features and Gamification Elements.55th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), 4.-7. Januar 2022,1594-1603. http://hdl.handle.net/10125/79530.
Krath, J. (2021). Gamification for Sustainable Employee Behavior: Extended Abstract for the CHI PLAY 2021 Doctoral Consortium. In: Extended Abstracts of the 2021 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (CHI PLAY ’21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 411–414. https://doi.org/10.1145/3450337.3483523.
Krath, J., & von Korflesch, H. F. O. (2021). Player Types and Game Element Preferences: Investigating the Relationship with the Gamification User Types HEXAD Scale. In X. Fang (Ed.), HCI in Games: Experience Design and Game Mechanics. HCII 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 12789 (pp. 219–238). Springer Nature. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77277-2_18
Krath, J., & von Korflesch, H. F. O. (2021). Designing gamification and persuasive systems: a systematic literature review. 5th International GamiFIN Conference, 100–109. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2883/.