Gamifying the Warehouse, With Katie Brown From Foot Locker and Dylan Tilford From Summit Advisory Team - Ep. 62

June 18, 2025 | 40:31

In This Episode

In this episode of Unboxing Logistics, host Lori Boyer kicks off Season 5 with a fun and insightful discussion about gamification in the supply chain. Joined by Katie Brown, Senior Director of Product Management at Foot Locker, and Dylan Telford, Omnichannel Practice Lead at Summit Advisory Team, they explore how introducing game-like elements into warehouse operations can drive motivation, improve productivity, and even make picking and packing a bit more fun.

Gamification is more than a leaderboard, it’s about meaningful motivation

Gamification isn’t just displaying performance stats. Real impact comes when the experience feels rewarding, includes clear goals, and provides a reason to play, whether that’s pay-for-performance, team recognition, or personal growth.

“Everybody who's attempting to get to that win in the end is successful in playing the game.” —Dylan Telford

Measurement is the foundation of any effective gamification strategy

Before introducing competition or incentives, teams need to define what success looks like and track it consistently. Without goals and metrics, gamification falls flat.

“You need to be able to measure. Otherwise you're playing a game with no goals.” —Dylan Telford

Simplicity, coaching, and iteration are key to long-term success

Gamification shouldn’t be complicated. Start small, involve the team, and keep improving based on real feedback. And don’t forget: it’s just as important to lift up lower performers as it is to celebrate top ones.

“Sometimes bringing up the bottom is almost more impactful than raising the top of the bar.” —Katie Brown

Transcript

Lori Boyer 00:00

Welcome back to Unboxing Logistics, everybody. I have missed you. It's been a few weeks, season four wrapped up, and we are on to season five already. So hard to even imagine that that's happened. I'm your host, Lori Boyer, and to kick off season five, we had to do something fun. We had to make it amazing. Of course.

So I have brought on two super fun guests to have a super fun topic. So without further ado, I wanna introduce you to Katie Brown from Footlocker and Dylan Telford from Summit Advisory. We are gonna be talking about gamification today. Dylan, can you introduce yourself and then Katie we'll hear from you?

Dylan Telford 00:49

Absolutely. Hi everybody. My name's Dylan Telford. I am the omnichannel practice Lead at Summit Advisory Team. Omnichannel always is a very ambiguous term and we like to laugh about that. It's kind of intentional. I cover post-purchase experiences, which includes customer service, CRM, retail technology.

Very centered around order management. So it's not exactly every single piece of omnichannel, but it is those touch points that really come in, that dive deeper into the later fulfillment routes into warehouses, and that are after all of the fun that gets all the inventory available for us to be able to make those sales.

Lori Boyer 01:27

Dylan Omnichannel just makes you sound cool. So. I wanna be an omnichannel something.

Dylan Telford 01:33

I'll take it.

Lori Boyer 01:33

So it, I love it. I love it. Katie, tell us about you.

Katie Brown 01:37

Hi everyone. I'm Katie Brown. And I'm a senior director of product management at Footlocker supporting the supply chain space. So similar to what Dylan discussed, my role kind of actually starts on the inventory side of things with inventory availability.

Through the order management cycle, indoor distribution centers, and logistics, and then also supports kind of the end-to-end post-purchase experience and customer service layer on top of that.

Lori Boyer 02:02

So super easy, basically.

Katie Brown 02:05

Yeah.

Lori Boyer 02:05

You know, inventory's easy, customer support's easy. HR, no, the exact opposite. I don't think you can put easy being with anything in supply chain.

There's a lot of complexity, so. I kind of hinted at it. I'm really excited. We are gonna be talking about gamification. You might not know this, our unboxing logistics fam, but I'm actually a big gamer. I like to play video games for fun. So I, this is gonna be more like gaming in the warehouse, but I'm really excited to hear about it.

So, before we do that, though. One thing that we are doing this season is I am just asking everyone to share somebody that they really admire in the industry. There are some incredible people in this industry and it has been so fun to hear a about them. So Katie, why aren't you kick us off? Who is somebody you admire and why?

Katie Brown 03:01

I love this question. I have had the opportunity to work under some phenomenal female leaders across the retail space and one of the ones that I have super appreciated is Sonia Singal, who was the CEO at Gap, Inc. When I worked there. I love the fact that Sonia's career started in the supply chain space, that she worked her way up into broader leadership and to watch her manage gap through COVID was a pretty incredible thing to be witness to. I always appreciated her ability to kind of see ahead of the next question. Having been able to present to her a couple of times and really put together, kind of the retail space end to end.

So, she's definitely somebody that I look up to.

Lori Boyer 03:47

Oh, I love that. And so happy always as a female in the logistics space to learn more about some of these amazing women in supply chain. So Dylan, what about you? I know it's probably me, right, Dylan, but if it ha, if it couldn't be me. Who would it be?

Dylan Telford 04:02

Yup, we had to take you off the list. That would've gone too easy.

Lori Boyer 04:05

Oh, okay.

Dylan Telford 04:06

So I actually took a step back as I started thinking about this and wanted to go a bit broader. And so who I'm talking about is from retail. But they're actually more from store end of retail. And it's a gentleman I worked with when I was a district manager at Guitar Center and his name's Rick Wallace and Rick really got me into people.

And when I say that, and I think that's very important for the conversation today. How to manage people in a way that makes them want to follow you. To really be people centric, to really be driving where the value is. And we always used to say a good leader is somebody that you would follow down a dark alley.

A great leader is somebody that you wouldn't even question that it's an alley. You're just going wherever that they're going. And he's one of those people, and he's all about just taking care of the people first, having hard conversations, but having 'em in a way that's productive. I learned so much from him about making people want to actually do the work that everybody needs them to do to make the business successful.

And I can't be thankful enough for somebody like that being in my life and, and really guiding. He's just a magical person.

Lori Boyer 05:14

That is amazing. Shout out to Rick and all of the other leaders out there who are amazing. Honestly, they are gems. I think all of us have had plenty of leaders that. Maybe we wouldn't even follow down a dark alley because, you know, they were subpar.

So those leaders who are inspirational, I mean, that's just amazing. So love it. Shout out to Rick. Shout out to Sonya. So excited. I'm gonna have to look you up and connect with you. Okay. Let's jump into our topic. We're gonna be talking about gamifying supply chains today. Let's take supply chain and make it a little bit more fun.

I'm gonna throw this to Dylan to start. So, Dylan. Let's go over basics. What is gamification? What does it mean and how would it look, like in, in our, you know, supply chain industry?

Dylan Telford 06:06

Sure. I, and it's a great question because there's a perception and then there's the reality of what gamification actually is.

The perception being, gamification is simply showing people competitive performance stats. And kind of letting them, you know, to their own devices, discover where they wanna be on that list. The problem with that thought process is it's, it's single threaded, and it's not incentivized in any way.

It's incentivizing pretty much only, the, those that are highly competitive and we'll get into what that means, some a little bit later as well. But, when you're really doing gamification, you think about when you actually sit down and you play a game, right? You have a desire to be playing that game.

There's something that is hooking you in there, whether it's an incentive, the fun, the fund, and I guess the fund could be an incentive itself, but there's some. You know, a, a positive feeling or interaction you're trying to get after. You're trying to get those chemicals going that you know everybody loves having.

And that is a position if you're doing a game well where you're really getting people energized and they have a very positive outcome coming from it. There needs to be a win at the end of a game too, right? And games that don't end, even Monopoly ends, right? You play Monopoly, it might go multiple days, it might get really intense.

Lori Boyer 07:27

Does it end because you threw the board? 'Cause that's what happened when my brother played.

Dylan Telford 07:32

Well, that's some of the fun sometimes too. You always have the people that, and again, this is probably a topic for later. We always have the people that sneak dollars outta the bank and all sorts of fun stuff.

And I guess, and that makes it reality in the end. But, there's an end to that game. There's a winner. There's people who are not winners, and we're not gonna call them losers for the, for the base of this conversation because. Everybody who's attempting to get to that win in the end is successful in playing the game. And they should really acknowledge that they're successful in playing the game.

There's a positive that you put an effort forward in there. You don't have to win every game.

Lori Boyer 08:08

Yeah, I love that.

Dylan Telford 08:10

You can level up every time that you play those games. So you really have to have a reason for people to get in there. You have to have something that persists it, makes it enjoyable, and really again, gets those good chemicals, positive chemicals going, and then you have to be able to end and show results coming out of that.

When we put that into business context, there's a lot of layers that you have to uncover to truly gamify something and get all of those behaviors that you're looking for and repeated coming after it.

Lori Boyer 08:38

Yeah. Katie, do you have anything to add to that? Or, or just why do you think. So I, I've read some, some studies that say gamification is great in this space, and I'm curious why you think that is, why do you think it works?

And also, if you just had any other comments to add to what gamification means to you.

Katie Brown 08:54

It's usually hard to follow a Dylan answer to a question. But, I think when we talk about the supply chain industry, there's a, a couple reasons why it works very well. Number one, the options are endless for employees, right?

Like I think about living in the Columbus area. The number of distribution centers and spaces where people can, you know, look for work is massive. And so being able to set aside or kind of have that differentiator for why to come work for you versus anybody else on the market, I think, you know, gamification is a huge way to attract that workforce.

I also think it's a very measurable industry, and so, being able to have metrics and data behind something like this when you're gamifying helps build the credibility. It helps build the trust. It, it kind of locks people into the, you know, whatever you're doing to gamify the process. And so for me, those are kind of two major reasons why it works in this space is you've got a lot of competition to differentiate yourself in. And then also you got a lot of data to back up the work behind the, the gamification.

Lori Boyer 10:09

I love that because in the, in this industry as well, we struggle with labor, right? It, it can be a difficult industry to retain and, and keep your labor and hire originally. So I love that you pointed out that differentiation of, of being something that makes you stand out, that the job's a little bit more fun.

Anything else you had Dylan on, why you think it works here?

Dylan Telford 10:31

Not without piling on, I mean, in the end, get the advantages of the carriers and everything else you're gonna be in geographic area. A lot of other warehouses and and that becomes a competitive market just for people. And so I think the differentiation is a huge call out within there.

Lori Boyer 10:48

Yeah, I was, I wonder about rote work as well. Like sometimes in a warehouse specifically, you can get a lot of rote work and, and maybe that ties into making it a little bit more fun. You know, when I have my kids and I try to make cleaning up their room a little bit more fun that could be another element I would think.

Okay. So I wanna hear from both of you. Where have you seen gamification? Katie, we can start with you, but where have you seen it? Have you experienced it yourself in your own, you know, work history? How have you seen it done in work?

Katie Brown 11:21

Yeah, absolutely. Fun fact, my very first job coming out of college was writing engineered labor standards for Gap as they were standing up their incentive pay program.

So from the start, that was, you know, something that was kind of near and dear to my heart. They have, from my perspective, a very well built out program around incentivizing people in the warehouse to be more productive and paying them based on that productivity.

And so that pay-for-performance model, when Dylan mentioned. How do you have a win or what are people looking for at the end of the tunnel to win the game? It was a really around incentivizing performance with a pay structure that enabled employees to kind of earn up to their potential and really, you know, drive their own destiny. And that's something that I loved about that program is, beyond the competition with other people, because that's not always something that everybody is super driven by. It's the competition with yourself and being able to kind of own your own destiny there, and I thought that was something that made their program really successful. Is that they, you know, it was kind of me, me against me in terms of competing to get to that next level and really own and earn my salary.

Lori Boyer 12:46

Oh, I love that. So it wasn't an example then where you would see yourself in comparison to your coworkers. You would see just yourself comparing to yourself, or how did that work?

Katie Brown 12:56

At the end of each month, they did have kind of a board that showed top performing departments and top performing individuals.

So there certainly was that aspect of, you know, being in the top five, across the distribution center and being able to see your name up on the board. But I think what made them successful and really turning it into something that benefited the organization as well as the individual is the, like, you know, the pay-for-performance component of it, really driving productivity in the warehouse as well.

Lori Boyer 13:27

Oh, so Dylan, how do you know? So let's take, let's say that we took Katie's program at at the Gap and, and. How do we know it was successful? Maybe people are doing it and they're having fun, but how do we know it actually like kind of had an ROI or paid off for the company? I think it's a company we kind of wanna know about if it was successful.

Dylan Telford 13:47

Sure. I mean there's something to be said about the, I, I believe Katie it was the first distribution center you rolled it out to, being the top performing distribution center in the network. So there's definitely something to be said there. But you can't, you can't play in this game very well in the warehouses without having a great labor standards program set up.

So you need to be able to measure. Otherwise you're playing a game with no goals, right? You're kicking, throwing whatever you're doing with balls all over the place, but there's no net. There's no, no, no goal to capture anything in. So you definitely have to have targets needs to be important for people to see where that target is too.

You want to know where the race ends. And I think the measurement piece on that monthly basis is great too because you give enough time for recovery. You give enough time for adjustment, self adjustment. You give enough time for coaching, you give enough time for all of the pieces that come together to change the performance in the case that you're seeing less than desirable performance for yourself or potentially for somebody on your team.

We have to remember, again, and Katie touched on this a little bit, I mean, it's a very physical job working in distribution. And when you're trying to incentivize people in, that are doing physical work, it's natural to want to do the most comfortable, I don't wanna say least 'cause it's not always the least, but the most comfortable level of work, within what you're getting paid.

So that when you're doing a physical job, you're not going home and your day's ruined because you're just physically worn out completely, right? You wanna go home and have a life when you get home, and some people make such a big separation in that you gotta make it fun to be at work. You gotta go through all these different pieces. But having those targets is important to be able to get that win.

To be able to measure the success of this. In the end, you're gonna have to take some time. I think as well. You're gonna have to iterate on your program. You're gonna have to see where the measurements are are growing, but where they shrink.

Sometimes we do things that have unintended consequences such as we end up, you know, as an extreme example, you can end up boosting your productivity with picking so much that you're not replenishing fast enough. Right. And it's not any individual's fault for that. It's just the program was set up to have a gap if you're not really covering that and having appropriate targets for it.

So you wanna think about the total ecosystem. What is the win for the total ecosystem? What is the win for the individual teams contributing to that ecosystem? The impacts they can have on each other and the individuals themself then. And once you have that, it's just like any good organization that's goal oriented, that's really starting from the top down, creating goals that cascade into goals down to individuals and those goals accomplish what the company goals are in the end.

Same thing here. Setting up those standards is what's going to be the ability to measure and then giving it time as well. So if you're giving a financial component, you wanna be able to be budgeted for that so that you can give it time so that you can actually quantify the results and you're not just going based off of what you know one period looked like and saying yay or nay with, with little data to back you up.

Katie Brown 17:00

I was gonna say, I think Dylan's point around coaching is super important here too. When we think about gamification, we usually think about like. Who's winning and who's the top performing individual. We don't think about the fact that the same program gives us the opportunity to find those folks that are struggling and to coach them. And sometimes bringing up the bottom is almost more impactful than raising the top of the bar.

Dylan Telford 17:25

Yeah, great point.

Lori Boyer 17:26

I love that. And so, Katie, gimme an example in the warehouse just so I can like wrap my mind around it. So let's say you were implementing a gamification. What might that look like? Like. Try to speed up your picking process or, or I guess, give me some examples of how you would use it.

Katie Brown 17:44

A lot of it is tied to speed of an activity. So it's your units per hour, your cartons per hour processing. I think it's important though, in a lot of spaces to make sure that you're tying in some component of quality or safety in that as well, though. A lot of times when we only incentivize productivity, we lose some of the other aspects of what's important across the supply chain industry too.

And so it's a combination of, you know, making sure that from a picking perspective, if we take that example, I'm reaching a certain units-per-hour from a picking perspective or exceeding that. But at the same time, the units that I pick are within 95% accuracy of what I was supposed to pick or something like that.

So being able to connect those two pieces.

Lori Boyer 18:35

Oh, I love that. I can make my bed in like half the time, but it probably isn't gonna look very good. So.

Dylan Telford 18:41

Yeah, we always use likes to say it's not efficient, just doing it faster. It still has to have quality to it as well.

Lori Boyer 18:48

I love that. So any that seems like a common mistake, we may think like, oh, we'll just do it faster.

So are there any other common sort of mistakes people make when they're implementing a program like this?

Katie Brown 18:59

I've seen a couple things from my perspective. Number one is making sure that you have buy-in across all levels of leadership. A lot of times this is something that folks at the top can sit and say, Hey, this is a great idea.

We're gonna do this. But if you don't have. The right level of buy-in, I would say, all the way down to the supervisor level, that can be really impactful because they're the folks that are out on the floor every day communicating with the employees, answering questions, helping coach them. And so I think making sure that you have buy-in across all levels of the organization is really important.

And then the other thing I think is trying to over complicate it too quickly. You know, I've seen companies try to go in and put in all kinds of rules about. In department versus out of department performance and layering on a bunch of different metrics, and if it's not something that you can easily explain, it's probably not gonna be successful, especially with the workforce in this space.

You know, that simple acronym. Keep it simple, right? I think

Lori Boyer 20:04

Yes, yes, I was thinking of that.

Katie Brown 20:04

It's super important. The more you complicate things, I think the more you put yourself at risk for being successful.

Dylan Telford 20:11

One thing that I want to add to what Katie was just saying is not just buy in from all levels of leadership, but from the team themself to actually play the game.

It's, we've all have. Played games that we weren't interested in. I'll give you my examp-- I, I have no interest in playing tennis, and when I play tennis, you can't get me to play in a meaningful way because I have no interest in playing tennis. I might participate because that's what we're doing right now.

But if anybody's seen the movie Bachelor Party with Tom Cruise or not Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks. And he's playing tennis, and he's trying to hit the ball as far and as hard as he can and not really playing the game. He's hitting it over the fence. That's me. And it's not fun for anybody else because there's no way to actually play back and forth with on the tennis court because the ball just goes into oblivion if it comes anywhere near me.

That's the same kind of behaviors you might get from people or just like. They might be do less performance if you're forcing them into a game that they're not interested in. So you need to be sure that they understand and are bought into the game itself. Right.

Lori Boyer 21:15

How, how do you guys go about the buy-in process?

So I know it's a little bit of change management and whatnot, but do you, either of you have tips for, let's say you are, you know, let's say one of our listeners out there thinks, okay, Katie and Dylan are geniuses, I'm gonna implement something. How do they start with the buy-in?

Dylan Telford 21:32

Carry on with this and hand over to, to Katie for it.

But you hit it the nail on the head when you said it's change management pieces. It really is. It's, it's back to core of what change management is. We don't want people to feel like things are happening to them. It's you want people to be part of the journey that they're taking. Your acceptance is much higher.

I think about the results pyramid, the experience is at the bottom. The belief comes out of the experiences that you have, that feeds into the behaviors and then the end results that you want, that moves up to the top. That experience at the bottom of being part of the conversation, A, is good for the employee because they could feel like their voice was heard, that there's this thing. Somebody's gonna ask me to do more work, and I'm coming again into a physically demanding job.

What would make me feel good about doing that and and what would make my day feel like it went by faster, potentially if I was participating in some way within this. It's also great on the other side, too, because now you have feedback from the actual people, and sometimes I think in the supply chain space, we lose track of getting to the end user's feedback.

Which is indexed very highly in places like e-commerce. You know, they'll survey customers for, for days and days and days to make a decision on something that they're gonna change on an eCommerce site and the experience. But then sometimes we're just like, here's a new program for people to, to operate within and have fun.

And they're like, the what? You know, and it's--

Lori Boyer 22:54

And they roll their eyes and they're like, what the heck is this? Yeah.

Dylan Telford 22:59

So if you're gonna roll it out, ask, you know, solicit information, make them feel like they're part of it and make them part of it. In the end. The people that come years later. Still need to be able to have a voice.

You still need to have a point. Maybe it's at the end of the game every time the game ends, every month, maybe you say, okay, soliciting feedback. What worked, what didn't work? When we think about agile processes and going through your retrospective and continually changing to be more eff effective in what you're doing, you gotta ask the people who are doing the work again.

Lori Boyer 23:28

I, I think, I always think of buy-in as, you know, I'm a leader myself. I have my own team. I think of like, oh, I should get them involved before. And I think my mind was like, oh, I should keep asking for buy-in as time goes by. Really smart. Probably everybody else out there was like, yeah, hello Lori.

But completely makes sense. Katie, any other tips for buy-in here?

Katie Brown 23:50

Yeah, I mean I love Dylan's comment about getting feedback early on and understanding what incentivizes your workforce. I think about that like meme or GIF of, you know, thanks for all of your feedback and what you actually want. Here's a pizza party, right?

Like. We wanna make sure that the incentive actually ties to the workforce and what is going to make them work harder. So understanding that upfront. And then the other thing thing that I would say, it kind of ties into Dylan's, you know, agile feedback processes. Be iterative. You don't have to roll it out across your entire organization in one big bang. Right?

Pick a specific department. Pick a specific team, and start to get that feedback in small chunks so that as you roll it out, you've got more experience that you can lean on.

Lori Boyer 24:38

I love the idea of going with a certain team because I was thinking like, oh, I feel like I'd roll something out and there's gonna be one or two team members who are like, eh, this is stupid. And then you're like, Ugh. But you could even pick teams who are more enthusiastic to kind of get it going and rolling it out and then other people see they're enjoying it and having fun and, and that can help with that buy-in. Maybe as we trickle down a little bit.

Okay. I have some questions. I actually sent out sort of a little questionnaire of any questions that some of the people in my network may have had around gamification and, and how it would actually work. So I'm gonna throw those at you guys and then we'll come back and make sure we haven't missed anything else.

Okay. So my first question was said, we've got a small team, like, just like 10 people. Is gamification even worth trying at a small scale, or is it always work better if you've got a big operation?

Dylan Telford 25:30

Anything that you can do to be more effective is worth the time. So if you feel like you can, you know, work with your small team to come up with a way to gamify their work that they're aligned to, that will be more perfective and or, or effective, and you are going to measure manually, right? Go through all the, the little bit of pain up front to be able to feel that and to iterate and go through. There's nothing wrong with trying it and stopping. There's something wrong with sitting there and being like, at our size with lacking X, Y, Z, this is just not practical right now. But that allows you then to say, I'm gonna set a different goal.

I do wanna get more effective, but I need to find a way to do it that is potentially outside of the direct people. Right now, maybe that's through, you know, small bites of augmentation. You know, automation ends up being expensive down the road. If you're that small of a team, I, I'm. Likely that there's not a lot of automation, but are there things within the rest of the supply chain that could potentially make that process in the warehouse easier?

Are there things that you can physically change around that you can end up making some bites that justify the growth to grow the team to then start, you know, putting something in, but you don't know until you try.

Lori Boyer 26:50

Okay. I love the truth bomb there. I wrote it down. There's nothing wrong with trying and stopping.

That is so important in so many areas of just us in work in general. Because, a lot of times we don't wanna track for like, oh, what if this is a big fail? And, and that shouldn't matter. So Katie, I'm gonna ask you my next question. How do you make sure gamification doesn't encourage workers to just cut corners?

We're a little worried about accuracy, safety. We kind of addressed that earlier, but what would you say about that?

Katie Brown 27:24

Super critical to have some sort of component there, but make sure it's something that you feel comfortable measuring. You can stand behind. Because one of the things with gamification is when you give folks an incentive, they're gonna care more and they're gonna ask questions, right? And so making sure that you have the data to back up the incentive, the, the incentives and, you know, the, the process behind things, super important.

Lori Boyer 27:52

Oh, I love that. Dylan I had a question that kind of I was thinking of as well. You mentioned it earlier a little bit with like, some people are competitive.

So they said we already have a little bit of tension between our top performers and the rest of the team. Is there a chance that this is gonna, you know, blow up in our faces? I had a nephew who was so competitive, he'd do anything just to win. But then when he was six and he would win, he'd go around saying, I beat you.

I beat you, I beat you. And my sister would say, oh, so how, how do we manage kind of that potential for tension?

Dylan Telford 28:30

You gotta cut the isolation from there. If you are only pointing out on an individual level who's successful, the only competition they have is everybody else. And I know there's an oxymoron there saying only everybody else, but you, you gotta be able to measure all, all these things that you typically would with employees that you have on the team.

You might have an employee that is even more extreme than that and they are your top performer, but they're toxic to the environment. Right? There might not be any incentive that's gonna help with that, but with everybody you wanna work through and you want to coach to get them into the right place, bringing them together and forcing the impacts of others onto other people as part of the game, right?

We work together, we win together. Having the team as part of it, you start requiring people to think differently. Now, some of those people are going to make the decision that that's not the way that they want to think. And that they wanna act, and you can make your own decisions on how you wanna move forward with that.

But, one of the incentives that I've always thought about within these programs is how, how does this add to my growth? If you look at people who are very competitive in the workplace, a lot of them are also very ambitious on growing their career. So if you're able to sit and say, Hey, every time that you win against this, just like an award you would get issued at the company or anything like this, it's something that is looked at as you're considered, as you move forward with the company. That may be a good incentive to say when you also pair it with, 'cause you don't just want to take people who perform well and take them out of the, the performance pool and have them unable to get others to perform well.

When you pair it with, how well did you influence your team to grow their performance as well? That's an ideal candidate that's able to influence the performance of the team and maintain their performance to grow into a supervisor or a manager or any other role that they're gonna want to go into in the future.

So you have to create that environment though for people to work within. Again, once you have the feedback from them on what's gonna work for them, at least to start with, as you start to iterate, you bring the team together and you say, this is a team win. We will call out individuals because we all want you to see where the, you know, top performance is, because that's where you potentially could be. But it's also about where everybody else, Katie's point on the bottom rising up. The bottom rising up is it is a huge value. It makes people feel better about the job that they're doing.

It's not just about what the company's getting. You can leave at the end of that day and be like, I actually got better at what I do. Overall, I feel more comfortable in my role. I've, I've got all these other intangible kind of values that come out of this. You're not gonna get that. If you are constantly having, again, if you bought a software that has performance metrics you can put up on a screen, it's not gamification. That is, if anything, incentivizing people to work as individuals.

Lori Boyer 31:22

I love that. I just, I gotta say I love that so much. It made me think, 'cause I mentioned at the beginning, I love gaming, and I have this kind of group of friends about once a week we get online, we game. But we've learned over the years of doing it, we just play co-op games where we're on a team together trying to win, because it does become a little bit testy and people's feelings get hurt when it is lining up.

Katie, I kind of, something Dylan was saying there at the end, he mentioned like the software, so one of my questions was, is there an easy way to test it without getting a bunch of new systems or software or tools or anything like that, do you have recommendations for that?

Katie Brown 32:00

So things that'll probably surprise folks is that at Gap, and hopefully they don't get mad at me for saying this, but they did their whole incentive program built on an access database.

So you talk about whether you need, you know, any technology to be able to support something like this, an organization of that size, and with that number of employees. Was able to do it all in very simple tooling. So when you think about it, you know, don't feel like you need to go over the top super expensive tools to be able to support this.

There are ways to be able to, you know, get the data and support your programs without having to have crazy technology.

Dylan Telford 32:40

Yeah, and, and I, I'll add into that the the smaller teams, right, that might not have a robust labor management technology available to them, and they may be doing things a bit more manual.

As I said earlier, as long as you can measure, as long as the metrics are there, the targets there, you can measure. You can measure manually if you got a small enough team, if you got 10 people in a very small workspace that are fulfilling orders all day and they're doing every job, right, they're taking it from, from soup to nuts, or maybe there's only two departments of things that work through.

If you're manually measuring in there, you can still gamify, you might say. Hey, I'm going to start this doing it once a week over a four to six week period, and I'm going to go to the team and I'm gonna say, Hey, I'm trying to come up with a gamified way to incentivize the team so that we can be as productive as possible, because we all wanna see the company grow. To do that to begin with and make at least impact, but something so valuable to you, I will say, we need to hit this many units in a day. And we will do this once a week so that we can, we can keep our thoughts together. We're not just buried in games every day that are ill-defined. And I'm gonna buy the entire place lunch based on, and my measurement of increase is based on that.

Then you've got a week of retrospective shift. Then you can do it again. You can do it again. Once you get to a point where you're like, I think I know this is a pattern I wanna follow, or it's not, if you decide to follow the pattern. Don't become the meme, change it from lunch and go into an actual incentive program potentially at that point. But--

Katie Brown 34:09

Unless your team really wants lunch, right?

Dylan Telford 34:10

Unless your team, unless the team's like lunch is great.

Absolutely. But. You take that, those small bites, you move in that way, and you inform them from the beginning. This is all about total company growth. Not, not just this little piece of work that we're doing here, but I'm going to experiment with this, and I need your participation in the experiment to move forward.

And make it, it can be slow. No, you don't have to make decisions today and execute tomorrow. You need to create a strategy with all the data that you have available to make informed decisions. You take insights from others to drive those decisions a bit further. You take the insights internally so that you can be, you know, well organized and collaborated.

And then you build out the program, you grow from there. And then again, if you hit the end of your testing period, and it really didn't work out. And the consensus from the team is, it really didn't, we love getting lunch, but it really didn't work out. Maybe you buy them more lunch and then you say, okay, we're gonna go back to other things, go back to the drawing board. We'll, we'll come back when there's a new idea.

You know, don't lose money just to test something in the end. Make the investment upfront in, in the most responsible way.

Lori Boyer 35:19

Okay. I have one final question be just 'cause we're running low on time, but. Somebody said, I can imagine it would get a little stale after a while.

So let's say that you rolled it out, you were doing the lunches, you maybe, you know, what do you do to kind of keep the excitement going? You mentioned iterating earlier, Dylan. Let's start with you, Dylan, and then we'll end here with Katie. What, what are things to keep it going long term, that, that keep it fresh?

Dylan Telford 35:46

Yeah, I, I'm gonna bury the horse as far into the ground as you can with the iterating piece on this. Let's just talk about the word stale, right? We're making a comparison to food going stale, right? Like you take a piece of bread, you leave it out, and you do nothing with it. What happens? It gets stale.

Right? It gets moldy eventually too. That's a bad thing.

Lori Boyer 36:09

Yeah, gross.

Dylan Telford 36:09

Like you, you can't just sit there and allow stale bread and moldy bread to be the comparison for what your business is. If you have a program, it needs to change with the times. It needs to change with the people. You need the feedback.

You need to iterate. You might not make massive material changes. You might not say, okay, here's how we're measuring now, and it just. Moves out there. But, you know, macroeconomic headwinds may limit the ability to hit hard numbers that you, you have. So maybe you move to a percentage based improvement.

You may have some areas that were not thought about originally. All of your departments are covered. All of them are being incentivized. But again, something was a catalyst to open the door for some other challenge that's presented itself that's impacting everybody. And now you wanna say, do we reorganize the teams?

That's maybe too big. Do we put into the incentive a way to mitigate this challenge? Maybe let's talk with everybody about it and let's move through it. If you're not iterating, it will get stale. And that differentiation you got amongst the 30 warehouses around you to get people to start working with you is now antiquated and nobody cares.

Lori Boyer 37:18

Yeah. I love how you said it doesn't have to be big. You know, most companies, if, people probably don't even notice, but every few years, most of the biggest companies out there switch their logo up a little bit. And it's exact same thing you were talking about, Dylan. It gets stale, right. And it's not like a big giant change, but small changes to keep things going and, and moving and updated and fresh.

So, makes sense. Katie, anything from you on tips to keep it fun and exciting?

Katie Brown 37:46

Yeah, I mean, Dylan absolutely crushed that one, but I would just add, you know, look at what people are doing. Around you as you're iterating, right? Look at the, the other companies that are in your area that they have programs.

Look at, you know, when you hire employees, if they have feedback around why they choose you, and they maybe went somewhere else, use, I would say like the industry as an opportunity to find those little pieces of information. That you could, you know, slightly tweak and, and transfer program with.

Lori Boyer 38:19

I love that.

That's exactly right. I also love from you, Katie, just really good advice on figuring out what incentivizes your people. We did a big quiz on a team I was on once and it was really surprising how some people were really motivated by money. Some people were really motivated by recognition. Some people were really motivated by, you know, something like a lunch or a a, those types of things.

And so I love Katie that you've had that focus on the individual and seeing what motivates people. So we're totally out of time. I feel like we could have like 10 more hours talking about gamification and then we could have tried a game, but we have no time.

So if people wanna connect with you, how can they connect with you? Are you on LinkedIn? If they have questions or if they just wanna learn from you? Katie, we'll start with you and then Dylan, let us know where we connect with you.

Katie Brown 39:11

Absolutely would love to connect on LinkedIn whether it be to chat about the gamification or anything else in the supply chain space.

Lori Boye 39:18

Dylan, what about you?

Dylan Telford 39:20

LinkedIn is a absolute great way to get ahold of me. You can also see if I am attending any conferences that come up. So I'd be there with bells on to many of them. And if not me, somebody else from Summit Advisory Team, I will likely be there, especially if it's supply chain oriented, and you can always catch in other perspectives as well.

We talked about trying to get the perspective of many, and we are two, so we are two of many, and those other many have a lot of other ideas. So find us and, and ask away. And if you really are dead, set on me again LinkedIn.

And there's a group within LinkedIn that I'm part of as well. It's called the Order Management Gurus, OMG. You can always join that group too. There's a lot of great order management feedback that comes through there.

Lori Boyer 40:05

Love it. Love it. Okay. Community out there, family. Let's make peak season 2025 a little bit more fun, and I'd love to hear what you're doing to add gamification into your processes.

So thanks again, Katie and Dylan. It was so awesome having you here, and we'll see you all next time.