Amazon is expanding an existing program that gamifies warehouse work to encourage its fulfillment center employees to improve their efficiency and compete against others for digital rewards like virtual pets, according to a new report from The Information. The program is called FC Games, and it includes as many as six arcade-style mini-games that can be played only by completing warehouse tasks in the workplace.
This productivity-boosting strategy can make the workday a little less tedious for Amazon’s employees, which in turn encourages them to work harder for longer. So far, the program seems to have been a success, because Amazon is rolling it out to 20 additional states as part of a “major expansion.”
Participation can lead to additional rewards for workers. By playing the games, employees can earn a digital currency that can be used for virtual goods. Some workers have even leveraged their success in the games into tangible real-world benefits, such as SwagBucks, which can be used at the company store to snag clothing and other goodies.
Amazon says playing the games is not mandatory. The program is and will remain completely optional, and employees can even play “anonymously” if they’d prefer the choice is theirs, the company claims.
The games in question aren’t “particularly good,” one worker says, but they do offer a break from the monotony of longer shifts, and the element of competition can be entertaining to some.
Amazon is in the years-long process of automating many elements of warehouse work using robotics. The ultimate goal is ostensibly to eliminate the most repetitive and dangerous jobs. Yet, the result of this hybrid workplace in the interim is that humans are being forced into more specialized, often rote roles that involve less movement and more repetition with an increasing focus on metrics that gauge work performance like one measures the effectiveness of a robot.
In many cases, robots fetch items and bring them to humans to sort, and Amazon has not shied away from its ambitions to automate large swaths of its warehouse work in the future. Yet, Amazon warehouses with automation have been shown to actually have higher injury rates than those that rely entirely on humans.
