Time's up

In the workplace, an individual's punctuality will not only affect how a person is viewed by colleagues, but will also reverberate on their productivity. Being late for a meeting can be disruptive to the working team, costing everyone time and causing the individual to miss valuable information. Little has been done to improve the punctuality of working teams; therefore, we were interested in studying the effectiveness of leaderboards, a common gamification technique, for improving punctuality of participants to regular work meetings. Leaderboards were comprised of data collected by monitoring the arrival times of the participants, which influenced their scores in the leaderboards. We found that leaderboards themselves did not promote punctuality in every participant, but gave rise to various gameful social comparisons, which were reported to be the cause of their punctuality improvements.