Mr. Duggan founded Badgeville, whose software turns work tasks into badges and a leader board in an effort to add elements of games to work. His new company blends that game-playing sensibility with hard-core metrics.

Using BetterWorks software, workers set goals, like “Sign 10 new customers by May,” and enter them into an internal system that can be viewed by other employees — it looks almost identical to the dashboard function used by Fitbit fitness trackers. Co-workers can give each other encouragement (“cheers”) or shaming (“nudges”). A worker’s profile shows a digital tree that grows with accomplishments and shrivels with poor productivity.

Image A tree made with a 3-D printer was presented to employees after one year of working at BetterWorks in Palo Alto, Calif. Credit... Jason Henry for The New York Times

The impulse to find ways to make people work harder is hardly new. Henry Ford used teams of investigators to keep tabs on his workers to determine things like which ones drank too much. Factories and other blue-collar employers have a longstanding tradition of cajoling their people to compete with one another so that, through a combination peer pressure and ambition, they do more work.

Karen Levy, a fellow at the Data and Society Research Institute, a research firm in New York, recently completed a three-year study on performance tracking in a decidedly old-line business: trucking. Over the last two decades, the industry has used GPS and other technologies to measure how fast drivers are going and how suddenly they brake, with the goal of getting goods delivered quickly but not so quickly that drivers waste gas.

To make drivers more efficient, companies post scoreboards in the break rooms or mail bonus checks to spouses so that they get competitive pressure from home as well as work.

One of the main ways people become more productive on the job is by using their supposed downtime to do even more work. Many drivers did things like loading, unloading and inspecting their trucks during federally required breaks, Ms. Levy said.