In my long and varied employment history there are precisely three things that have ever provided me any sort of motivation:

1) money
2) a sense of personal obligation towards customers or co-workers
3) concern for the quality of the work

Reward or morale programs of the sort being discussed have always struck me as irrelevant at best, risible at worst. When I worked for Bartlett we had an employee safety program where employees at each office earned points for accident free months that could be exchanged (eventually) for various prizes (tv’s, ipods, etc). My thoughts on the program, then and now, are that if the prospect of a hospital stay isn’t enough to make you don your protective equipment, but a free flatscreen is, then your intelligence level is best characterized by terminology you might not want left in your comments.

I’ve been in office situations where other sorts of programs were implemented, and I’ve always been annoyed when they were introduced and brought up again later. Other than subsequent mentions by management I never once thought about them.

I’ve found the best way for a manager to keep me motivated is to make sure that I’m doing work that I find interesting and valuable. This is never possible all the time in any job, but a good manager can do a lot to make sure that employees are at least getting to do some work on things that they care about, which makes the dull parts of the job easier to be enthusiastic about. When your working life is a tedious slog for 40 hours a week there’s no morale program that can improve that, and when you find your work interesting and rewarding you don’t need to earn points (or whatever) to stay motivated.

It’s an idea with significant merit. Working at an employee recognition company, one of the things we look at is factors affecting employee morale. Interestingly, studies show that purely financial incentives are among the least effective.

As I see it, the biggest barrier to your ideas are employee buy-in. On xBox live for example, some people care about accumulating points and will spend hours doing mundane or esoteric tasks to accumulate them. Others simply don’t care. With a staff of 5, if you fail to get buy-in from 3 or 4 of those employees, then the competitive nature of trying to garner ‘points’ looses it’s appeal, and you’re back to where you started. Additionally, it can be a bit daunting for new hires to catch up with someone who has been gaining points for a year or two.

I’d suggest a mixed approach that rewards benchmark scores as well as the current leader. I’d avoid gift cards or cash incentives, and focus on recognition. Not being familiar with your workplace, I don’t know what incentives you can offer, but things like casual dress for the current leader, a day of comp time for hitting certain score benchmarks, or being able to host the coveted office mascot in your cubicle make excellent incentives that not only reward achievement, but do so in a way that your co-workers can’t help but notice.

An additional recommendation would be that anything which can get points be universally available. Tasks which some team members can get but others cannot can be divisive. If three people can each get 20 points for programming tasks, make sure that there is a comparable 20 point task for the administrative assistant. I would also create a mix of team tasks which can be gained only once by the first team member to complete the task (Document and fix a specific bug), as well as universal tasks awarded to each person who completes the task as they do so (Identify, document, and fix your first bug). Note that in some cases, one task might accrue more than one benchmark. People who watch their points will look for these ‘exploits’ and feel rewarded when they happen.

I have really liked the xBox system of making all achievements public. I can browse the achievements of my friends (co-workers) and also peruse what options I have open to me at any given time to accumulate more points. I would suggest something similar in terms of posting options for the point system you are proposing. Any new opportunities could be quietly slipped into the list to encourage people to check it regularly, rather than announcing them outright at meetings and such.

To promote enthusiasm for the project, you might want to launch it with some sort of group incentive. Once everyone in the office hits 5,000 points for example, you have an early release Friday, or extended lunch with pizza brought in or something. This encourages people to track each others scores (breeding a bit of competition) as well as encourage those lagging behind to participate.

Getting everyone on board with the program is a key factor. You know your team better than anyone else hopefully, so specific incentives should be tailored, but my suggestion would be that they be visible to co-workers. Everyone wants to be recognized by their peers.

In my mind rewards programmers like are the ability to lead projects. Maybe those are rewards given out as one builds hit points so to speak.