EY Gamification audio version  |  10 mins  |  Listen now

Holder explains: ‘After two years, we wanted to check how it was landing so we got some data back. While we had really good awareness and commitment numbers – 79 per cent global awareness and 80 per cent commitment – underneath this was a lot of extra data which talked about people, and how they were finding it difficult to connect their day job with the global strategy and these highfalutin ideals.

‘They were asking how they personally contributed to our global ambition targets. But they also didn’t really understand how we were delivering against those ambition targets, such as achieving Net Zero by 2025 and impacting one billion lives by 2030 through our corporate responsibility programme EY Ripples.’’

Holder realised that EY had gone as far as it could to embed the global strategy through broadcast internal communications and line managers, and that a new approach was needed. A series of focus groups with employees around the world agreed. When asked what would help them to make a personal connection to NextWave, they responded: not more communications.

They wanted a different approach. They wanted something team-based, that was fun and digital. And, if it was digital, something that could be played anywhere. ‘The purpose of the focus groups was pretty simple,’ explains Holder. ‘There’s no point in a team of tech marketing talent sitting down and creating something. The data and co-creation absolutely drive adoption.’

A further round of brainstorming by Holder and agency Ogilvy introduced him to gaming psychology – gamification.

‘Basically, how can you create something that is fun and inclusive? And if you’re doing it on a team level, how do you get everybody to participate at the same time?’ he asks. ‘I learned an awful lot, such as how to differentiate in point scoring and win streaks to be able to differentiate between the tens of thousands of teams that would be playing this across EY.’

The game was also co-created with colleagues. ‘We tested all the questions. We tested the animations, the concepts, the videos – we did some incredibly funky videos which were humorous, and which we’d never done in EY before. We tested the team discussion at the end,’ says Holder. ‘We co-created it with our people and then tested and designed it every step of the way with them.’

But while co-creation was essential, so too was the support of EY’s board and regional leaders. The game involved significant investment, which needed their backing. ‘We spent a lot of time taking our global executive through the game, ensuring their support and advocacy, so that they would push it out through our areas and regions,’ he adds. ‘It is then really up to our regional managing partners to ensure that the countries beneath them are deploying and adopting it.’

Players start the game by entering an immersible environment, only accessible via the browser on their EY laptops. (This also serves to capture data.) They enter The NextWave Elevator – the idea being that it elevates everybody’s connection. It's a lift with a personality and a sense of humour: she's called Lovella and hails from Peru.

At the back of the lift is a massive window, with backdrops from around the world. ‘The idea came from Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator,’ says Holder. ‘You enter it. You have a click around with some hotspots, a bit of fun, pressing buttons. But it does certain things.’

For a start, the elevator can either go up or sideways. If it goes up, it opens into a cinema room where visitors can sit down and watch a two-and-a-half-minute video featuring EY’s most senior leaders, which has been filmed like a movie.

There are four interactive quiz levels based on each of EY’s strategic pillars, with eight questions apiece. Answer a question correctly, and a piece of an animated puzzle will cover the question. Answer each question correctly, and there’s a reward.

It’s a team voting mechanism. Each question has four possible answers. If most members of the team click on the same answer, the platform accepts that. But if there is a tied vote, then the team’s facilitator – usually a line manager – has the casting vote. If a team answers a series of questions correctly, they achieve a winning streak which amplifies their ultimate score.

Each quiz level is different. Reach Global Technology and the elevator comes to a juddering halt with sirens and flashing lights. Holder explains: ‘The story is that hackers are trying to take it down, so you must play the game to crack the code to beat them. There’s also a Harry Potter style theme world and a manufacturing background, where you end up building a heart in the background.’

On the Harry Potteresque level, players climb a bookcase within a library environment. ‘It’s based on People Engagement and attracting exceptional and diverse talent. Each question that you get right, a book flies off the shelves with the name of the [relevant] HR programme. So, whether that’s our EY Badge, which is our phenomenally successful ‘get a badge in data’ programme, involving 250 badges, or leadership, mobility… a lot of people join EY and are interested in international assignments.’

The 90-minute challenge concludes with a 20-minute facilitated conversation. ‘Two simple questions appear on the screen. Each game can be played by teams of up to 15 people in a virtual way to really have a conversation round what their team is already doing to deliver against our NextWave ambition,’ adds Holder.

The questions they tackled at each quiz level were based on key messages, so they will have been learning along the way. ‘That all feeds into the conversation,’ he adds. ‘And the second question is: what more can we do?’

Colleagues were incentivised to compete. There were monthly draws for those who participated with prizes including $1,000 pay outs. There was also a global competition, which involved flying an entire team to one of EY’s events, such as World Entrepreneur of the Year in Monaco. 'We also had a Yammer competition, whereby if you share a picture of you doing the challenge or of your team during the challenge, you get entered for a monthly draw of $1,000. That’s been great. We’ve had hundreds of posts,’ he adds.

Everybody who completed the game completes a survey, which asks whether they found it to be a fun and engaging way to learn; whether they have learned more about, or feel more connected to, NextWave in terms of their day job; and, whether they will do something differently now. ‘These are scored out of five, and at the moment they are approximately 4.4, 4.3 and 4.2, so we’re above 80 per cent in all our key metrics,’ says Holder.

EY enacted a phased deployment of the game. 'We were really targeting more junior ranks and joiners,’ he adds. ‘Our financial year runs from July to June, and in 2022 we had 100,000 new people through the doors, who found this to be a neat way to connect to our strategy early on in their EY journey. The feedback has been staggering; it is probably the most supported internal campaign that I’ve ever seen.’

The ambition was for half the 365,000 strong workplace to ultimately participate, and by May 2023, more than 10,000 teams had completed the NextWave Elevator, with the Polish-based Internal Transformation Services team winning the ultimate prize – and choosing a trip to London. The game was translated into 12 languages, including Japanese, Korean, French, and Spanish. ‘The game was templated and designed to fit onto a laptop. Some languages fit beautifully into the template, others are slightly more verbose – not in their language, obviously, but from an English perspective it looks long,’ adds Holder.

The feedback was consistent across the regions in which the game was rolled out, but due to the co-creation aspect, Holder did not actually anticipate any major surprises. ‘I didn’t expect the scores to dip below four, but even if they dipped by ten per cent in one country, say, that’s one out of 150. But [we got] great feedback from the larger population sites, such as the UK, America, and Canada.’

The game, which took six months to build, has a modular design which will allow other campaigns to be pushed through the platform in the future. EY has now abandoned its proposed split into two operations – auditing and consulting - but the plan had always been to talk about NewWave up to the point of separation, because the overarching strategy was unlikely to change. ‘The principles of client centricity, technology, global integration, learning and exceptional client service will remain,’ explains Holder.

‘It’s very important that people understand, and they do it through the game, how we’ve grown, how we’re continuing to grow, what are the central themes we need to take forward, and how does their day job connect to those.’

If there was one piece of advice that Holder would impart to other organisations considering a similar project, it is this: always ask your people what they want. They might not want this. ‘Don’t do something because it’s exciting,’ he adds. ‘This was a tough project. I sometimes wish that our people hadn’t said that they wanted something fun, innovative, team-based, and digital. I wish they had said Just send us a newsletter because that would have been a whole lot easier.’