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Why New Employees Need to be Gamified, or Else

What’s happening in the workplace to young employees? They seem to operate by a different set of values, showing little interest in company events.

Yet, they willingly give time and energy to off-the-job pursuits. How can executives create an environment in which they direct some of that discretionary effort towards their work?

“The company’s culture was good enough for me, why isn’t it good enough for them?” If your organization’s leaders are asking this question about engagement, consider the presumption: young employees need not receive any special privileges. After all, the argument goes, “I had less than they do and I made do with what I had!”

At first glance, this seems to be a fair statement.

Yet, the result of such thinking is disengagement. Whereas, in past generations, a paycheck was enough to guarantee a certain level of staff engagement, those days are over. Today, the young, post-COVID employee isn’t interested in merely trading time for money. (The only exceptions might be those who stand to earn a windfall which allows them to retire early, and those who are desperate.)

This state of affairs is hardly a sustainable recipe for fostering a new generation of leaders. In fact, if the status quo is maintained, it’s likely to repel the most creative talent, which is neither greedy nor desperate. If this rings true for your company, it might be time to call for a transformation. Here are some guidelines to use.

1. Young Employees Expect High Engagement

Consider that most of their lives before joining your organization were highly gamified. As achievers of better-than-average grades in school, they accepted the default structure and became winners. They filled their spare time with apps specifically engineered to grab their attention for long periods.

The resulting heightened states became the norm. Constant, high-quality feedback followed intense efforts, helping them make clear, undeniable, prize-winning progress. Whether it was CSEC/CAPE, Schools’ Challenge, Facebook or World of Warcraft (an online game), they benefited from great gamification.

Now, consider all of these to be powerful competitors to your company’s best attempts to engage staff. They are formidable: not even our Parliamentarians can resist Instagram or email during speeches at Gordon House.

And if your employees are spending their spare time starting new companies, or hustling side-gigs for extra income, consider that to be more of the same. Some of their interest in becoming entrepreneurs is to compensate for a lack of engagement in a disappointing job.

2. Your Company is Allowing Bad Games

If your leaders aren’t using game mechanics to deliberately engage staff, they do them a disservice. Some may go start new companies, but most will remain in your employment, falling into games which are harmful.

One of my summer jobs as a teenager with a government agency revealed a game of “Cat and Mouse”. Employees waited until the manager left the office to bring out cards, dominoes, and radios. When the appointed lookout spotted her return to the parking lot, shouts of “She ah come!” sent staff scurrying to remove the evidence, and resume the pretense of work being done.

According to one conspirator, “Sometimes she tries to trick us by not pulling up in her usual spot!”

Unfortunately, most Jamaican companies are infected with a cabal of the most disengaged. They make fun of new employees who work too hard (at best) and may even ostracize those who persist in making them look bad with high performance.

Eventually, the average new hire surrenders, dropping their standards (and expectations) just to fit in. This game of “Do as Little As Possible” can last an entire career, even though it may never be formally named.

The point is that these negative games (and innumerable others just like them) are at play in all companies. The only question is one of popularity. Call it a version of “The Devil Makes Work for Idle Hands” if you will.

3. Transforming a Dysfunctional Culture

What’s a way to prevent a culture of nasty games? Get leaders to explicitly create better ones. By so doing, you can scoop up new employees before they fall prey.

If your organization is already overrun by people playing destructive games, start by teaching your managers the principles of gamification. Then, use these same principles to give them a great first-hand experience as they apply them to their departments.

Continue by setting up programmes which place young, new employees in high engagement activities from the moment they join. Don’t let them lapse into the boredom which invites mischief. Just help them experience the reality of positive games which ultimately give them more of what they want in life.

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How to Gamify Employee Engagement

For most companies, staff engagement is just like a religious belief: Someone either has it or doesn’t. This separation between those who are blessed or cursed is familiar to any church-goer, but does it have a place in corporate Jamaica? There may a better way starting with a key assumption.

Many managers assume that high performance is an innate characteristic. “Is so dem stay!” is a retort that ends arguments. In their mind, it’s due to  personality, culture, upbringing, ethnicity, or some other intangible factor which can’t be changed. They pass a final judgement that throws an employee, with all his potential, into a box…which is then locked from the outside.

Following this logic, the only resolution is to hire engaged staff-members from the start. However, that not only takes a long time, it hardly  lasts. Why? The vast majority of new hires are honestly engaged for their first three to six months after which they slip into the same disaffection that afflicts their colleagues. After a while, they are as ordinary as everyone else.

A more fruitful approach throws out the old concept of engagement as a belief, replacing it with a higher standard. Let’s narrow it down to a collection of observable behaviors which can be captured on a video camera, thereby passing what I call “The Video Tape Test.”

Using this standard we can focus on the precise habits, practices and actions people take when they are engaged, or not. However, we must be careful – my work in the region shows that engaged behaviors vary widely between companies, and sometimes even between working groups. There are no cookie-cutter, universal answers.

This challenge means that you, as a manager, need to do some legwork in order to help your staff succeed. Follow these steps.

Step 1 – Group your employees’ jobs

Examine the positions which report to you and group them by the behaviors demonstrated to be engaged. In some rare cases, you may find that someone’s formal job description may be too narrowly defined. For example, their role in building positive relationships around them using engaged behaviours may be diminished. In these cases, redraft the job description to be more realistic and holistic.

Step 2 – Distinguish Low Engagement

Set aside hostile behaviors which are clearly antagonistic or simply a demonstration of “Bad Mind.” Then, define the level of low performance which is just enough to prevent someone from being fired but not enough for them to contribute more than a minimum. Start to detail the behaviors of this person.

What practices does she engage in each day? Which ones is she unlikely to initiate?

Break down complex behaviors into small, practical atoms which are easy to observe. For example. “Being a standoff” is not a detailed behavior. However, “skipping the Christmas Party”, “refusing lunch meetings” and “leaving at 4:30 on the dot every afternoon” might be.

Step 3 – Clarify High Engagement

Perform a similar tear-down of high engagement.

Step 4 – Identify interim behaviors

Between the two extremes, distinguish additional levels an employee would climb on her way to high engagement. Think of it as a ladder. Then, turn these steps into an assessment for people to apply for themselves.

Step 5 – Teach Employees to Self-Assess

As staff-members evaluate themselves, show them the benefit of conservative grading which allows for room to improve.  Serious employees will be glad for the opportunity to improve, now that they have a clear yard-stick and direction.

Step 6 – Offer Coaching

Ask employees to take the initiative to improve performance. Most should be able to put together long-term improvement plans, but they will need your help to craft a strategy which isn‘t too aggressive – these skills always appear easier to implement than they are.

In fact, employees require a great deal of support to achieve their goals. You may not be the one to provide it, but you should help assemble a framework that makes it easy to make stepwise improvements.

If you suspect that this sounds a bit like self-gamification, you are correct. As the manager, you are actually providing a clear-cut game people can play to become more engaged, one step at a time.

In summary, it provides a huge win for both parties. Employees’ attention will be diverted towards the task of giving themselves the gift of focused energy – a life engaged in purposeful activity even at their workplace. 

The problem your company faces is that employees who are bored and disengaged are comparing their work-life with other parts of their lives. The only way for it to measure up is for you, the manager, to play your part in helping them adopt a game they can win.

http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/business/20181216/francis-wade-how-gamify-employee-engagement