Hack:
Get your gaming pads, camera, camcorder, and 'out-of-office' activities, we are going to work.
An evolving work culture which incorporates the elements of social networking, game-based activities and the passion associated with sporting activities. Employees are the masters of the game. Productivity the resultant effect. Passion, fun and satisfaction, the agents of change.
The Current Scenario - Present Day organizations:
- Top level management make strategic decisions required to drive the affairs of their businesses. At the heart of these decisions are their people - employees at all levels. There is the desire to evoke in them the thrill, passion and fun equivalent to or near the thrill, passion and contentment games and allied interest brings. However, organizations are yet to see employees exhibiting the characteristics that come with having fun and playing games.
- Job descriptions are not tailored to suit employee preferences and strengths. A good number of employees would rather perform activities which are less routine, require innovation, and are interesting. The situation? Job descriptions are routine, boring, uninteresting and matched against people with temperaments, interests and strengths negatively skewed. Like a cross word puzzle or a maze or a game of brick wrongly fit. A pack of cards falling apart and the centre so loose, the employees are losing their minds.
- Employees are smart, great thinkers with multiple interests in the kind of work they want to engage in and they want flexibility with regards to how they accomplish their task. But the organizations of today offer little or no mechanism for employees to achieve this.
- The criteria for performance determination are not interactive (they are stiff), are essentially out of the reach of employees, and does not consider the interest of employees. Employees have become robotic targets which need to either be shaped or eliminated
- Organizations are not finding the best way to use the concepts of social networking sites to bring the passion, fun and feeling associated with these networks to make work interesting.
- Recruitments are not based on the intersection of interest and skill sets hence organizations continually recruit individuals who eventually become discontent and possibly confused. This creates a cycle that produces a loop-sided organization where passion and fun are non-existent.
- The magnitude of untapped and wasted intellectual resources in organizations today is indeed enormous. These resources that can make the difference in work place effectiveness are continuously wasted because only very few people in organizations get to share their stories and fit the hierarchical position to advise. Such situation allows valuable intelligence from uncommon sources to go unnoticed and unutilized.
- Control in organizations are contentious issues today. The management-employee decision mix is a mirage and the facts actually shout management-management mix.
- Trust, loyalty, friendship, companionship are attributes we use when we refer to our communities, games we love, favorite sport stars, and even our pets, but fellow colleagues. Yet, the intrinsic longing between employees is to be part of a community of people with similar interest and passion to achieve goals.
- Attention and significance are tools of motivation both within and outside organizations. Individuals want to get noticed for different reasons; in so much as it makes those that matter in their life happy and comfortable with them. Others need these motivations to spur them up to achieve more.
The pad controlled work:
In games, there is always a final goal to achieve, the boss or aliens to eliminate, or the destination to arrive at. However, getting to this goal is always in stages, with points and rewards gotten along the way. These points can always be used to purchase or trade off for some other thing as determined by the gamer. There are set of rules and procedures already outlined which control the boundaries of flexibility the gamer can stretch to. Sometimes there is the possibility of getting more option when certain stage is reached under specified criteria.
Jobs should be broken down into small units of activities which can be effectively and efficiently accomplished by individual or groups. These individual units must in turn become aggregates which define and meet set standards and goals. Points should then be allocated to this individual units. These points must contribute to an employee’s overall performance to each of this unit. These units of activities are posted on company-wide network, allowing employees to go through the activities posted and select the activities they want to undertake. Each of these activities will contain the metrics that will be used to determine the minimum required success, the deadline for the activities to be accomplish, if the activity is part of a collaboration to accomplish a bigger task, the persons who are handling different activity in that collaboration, resources available for the activity, the person to whom reports and results concerning the activity will be directed to, different dates to report progress to avoid red flag on the activity, non-exhaustive list of possible addendum to get extra points, e.t.c.
The decision to have a flexible or regimented work schedule, conform to a dress code or conduct themselves in a particular manner rests with the employee and is subtly influenced by the activity chosen and the team the employee has chosen to work with. In certain situation (as the case may require), activities may be listed with baseline conditions with respect to timing, dressing, availability, e.t.c. that have been established to be effective in achieving that goal.
And just like games, points accrued overtime apart from contributing to performance rating and remuneration can be used to get more resources to perform some task. This may be needed if after an activity has been planned and resources allocated to it, the executor finds that the resources are not sufficient to complete the task. The individual simply requests for more resources with their points. Provision is made for refund of points once the job has been completed and legitimate report submitted.
Social Networking:
Create an internal in-house media division that interviews employees randomly about anything from hobbies to their current performance on their present activity to celebrating their accomplishments. The coverage is posted on internal company websites.
Video clips on the company wide internal website are not limited to those produced by the in-house media house. Employees are encouraged to produce different types of clips (ranging from comedy to fun time with colleagues and clients) and upload to the internal website.
In addition, employees are encouraged to comment and discuss about various clips. Every week one to three clips are selected as the tops and they are given audience in a common or general room. This room just like chatting rooms will allow other employees to comment, chat and vote on the clips. All this activities will have points associated to them in such way that when you upload a document and it is viewed, the number of hits you get on any material will contribute to points towards performance.
When commenting on a clips or upload of a fellow employee, a person will have the option of tagging the clips with stuffs like fan.
In addition to these, every employee possesses the access to upload documents or files on anything from ideas, experience from past or current assignments, movies or videos to articles that could be used by other employees. These materials are classified into categories that should allow them to be sourced and used when needed.
The number of times materials are accessed and used will be logged and will contribute towards another category of points for the content generator.
Further still, employees can be sorted to give advice and mentor people through whatever situation they are going through. The person who makes use of these service to accomplish any activity or finds the advice they received useful are required to document that and describe what category of advice they received and from whom. Points are allocated to the adviser for these. And their identities are entered into the directory of people who can be met for certain advice.
Supporters Base:
There will be allowance for people to identify and support projects, people, activities, and every other material that is produce by employees. There will be a general boards where people can indicate this, online forum where they can say one or two things, and the weekly community gathering. This can go as far as wearing logoed dresses to work on certain days to show support.
Recruitment exercise will contain sections where the interest of prospective candidates are asked to select activities they are or will be interested in from a list of activities carried out on a daily basis in the organization. Performing activities interest listing in order of five best and five worst ensures that only qualified and interested candidates are selected. This could also be used during interview sections.
- The situation that employees can decide their activities and engage in other things they love doing and bring them to work causes increased commitment as a result of increased trust.
- Everyone does what s(he) likes and enjoys doing while achieving organizational goals.
- Flexibility and personal control is very much at the heart of this process.
- There will be the eagerness to get around with fellow colleagues to discuss the latest happening thereby, creating the avenue for increased attachment to the work environment, just like being with friends having fun.
- More innovation, emotional and intellectual capital that will continuously produce higher levels of productivity and accomplishment for the organization and her primary cultivators – the employees.
- Have every personnel itemize the activities involved in performing their jobs.
- Perform a review of jobs in the organization and have them divided into units of activities that can be executed by an individual or a group of individuals.
- Develop the points metric system and the unit that will handle the management of the new practice.
- Management should create and upload ‘out-of-office’ videos, then, encourage employees to view them and engage them impromptu about the upload in an acquaintance-conversational manner.
- Encourage employees at every level to build their own templates and videos and be proud to associate them with their experiences, knowledge gained, and be realistic about levels they can still attain.
This is indeed a new look to making work look like games. On the activities scheme, what happens when more than enough people are interested in a set of activities?
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