Achievements have been a popular tool for gamification in various contexts, from social media platforms to educational institutions. It's also known to be a great recognition method for open source community contributors, of which GitLab has many. Recently, we introduced a new feature that allows organizations to award achievements to their GitLab users. This feature has the potential to increase engagement and productivity within technical organizations. Let us show you how.
Achievements are a way to reward users for their activity on GitLab. As a namespace maintainer or owner, you can create custom achievements for specific contributions, which you can award to or revoke from users based on your criteria. For GitLab specifically, there were already many forms of recognition available for our community, such as leaderboards for our hackathons, swag that is sent out as a token of gratitude, etc. However, there was no single place to get an overview of these achievements. This led to a broader investigation into how we could empower not just the GitLab contributor community, but also our large user base, both on SaaS and self-hosted.
So far, we've awarded achievements to all our GitLab Core Team members and also to the winners of our most recent hackathon. Congratulations to all winners and our core members. You deserve these awards! We have a lot more ideas to award our wider community for their achievements, so stay tuned if you are an active contributor to GitLab.
Benefits of achievements
By using achievements in your organization you can start to create a culture of continuous learning and skill development. The options are limitless, from rewarding users for touching a new piece of the codebase to rewarding users that have proven to be exceptionally collaborative. Receiving an achievement can be a powerful motivator for an employee. It shows that their work is valued and recognized by their peers and supervisors. Awarding your users for obtaining a skill could lead to a more skilled workforce, which benefits both the employee and the organization.
If rolled out well, it can create a flywheel effect in your organization, leading to a competitive advantage in the market due to increased innovation and a faster cycle time.
Don't believe us on our merit, start to implement achievements to reward your contributors.
How to start to use achievements
Achievements are generally available for all tiers, both SaaS and self-hosted. See the achievements documentation to learn how to create, delete, award, and revoke achievements.
If you are an organization using GitLab, consider implementing achievements within GitLab to start rewarding behavior that drives your organization's goals.
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