Yearly Review
I just went through my yearly review at the zoo. And while I cannot say that the process was, in any way, worse than any other review I’ve had to take part in, I really felt like it was all a waste of time.
This is not to say that yearly reviews are a bad idea, or that we should do away with them, but I feel as though there has to be a better way to do them. I feel like this is an area where gamification can really make an impact.
Let’s pick apart what a typical (from my experience) yearly review looks like. There is a form, with questions and maybe some Likert-style rating scale, where your supervisor tries to crystallize you as a worker, usually in 100 words or less. Occasionally there is a long form, which involves an essay, also written by your supervisor (or in one memorable case, by me, because my supervisor was too busy), all about your strengths and weaknesses and working style. And then, finally, there is a section where you and your supervisor come up with some goals for the year.
The problem here is that this is not any sort of immediate feedback – it is all based on the recollections of an entire year – and the goals end up sprawling and strange because they are “yearly” goals. My experience has been that the goals are usually vague and unrelated to my actual day to day work, and that the actual review is usually couched with “sorry, but we need to do this because HR is breathing down my neck”. And sometimes there seems to be no real benefit to anyone, especially with many companies no longer giving out raises.
It seems like this is something that games are uniquely qualified to handle. Firstly, they provide immediate feedback. I saw a really nice example of this at LEEF this year – a bank had essentially created a leveling system for their employees. It was performance based, and it allowed the employees to see how they were doing throughout the year. This allowed them to make improvements as they went, and they were motivated to do so in order to earn more points and level up faster.
Secondly, games often have a structure of nested goals, which can allow achievement of large and long-term goals by creating smaller attainable goals along the way. To put this more concretely, games give us a series of small quests that build our confidence and competence and eventually lead us to the boss level, which we are able to handle entirely because of all the questing we did along the way. The current review strategy just tells us that our goal is to beat the boss, rather than sending us down a manageable path of skill-building to do so.
I know that I’m not saying anything all that new. This idea is actually somewhat central to a conference I am hoping to attend this fall – where they are actually encouraging you to invite your HR lead. I definitely think, however, that it is something that needs to be pursued, as the first waves of digital natives enter the workforce, and begin to demand more from their work experience.
Both Feet
At a conference last year, I sat in on a session on serious games. During the session we talked about a game which cast the player in an EMT sort of role during some sort of crisis. The game had been distributed widely, and while it was initially intended to help recruit and train people for certain crisis related professions, it was being played by people who just wanted to play a game.
In the end, they told us a story about a 17 year old, who, on seeing a bus accident happen, evacuated the bus, and performed triage for the passengers while they waited for the authorities to arrive. When asked about it, he said he had learned to do all of those things while playing this particular game.
Clearly, if you are reading this blog, you know I firmly believe that games can teach, and I believe that they are not a waste of time if they are the right games. What makes a game the “right” game for learning is really illustrated by the above anecdote – games let us try things and inhabit roles which are not accessible to us on a daily basis, without the potential for things to go horribly wrong. Or, at least, if they do go horribly wrong, you can try again – and hopefully not make the same mistake twice.
To use an example, I’ve recently picked up Link’s Awakening for the 3DS. Now, I would not consider this a real learning game, because I doubt I will finish my experience off with skills which I can extend into the real world, but I will be really good at playing Zelda games. In order to get there, though, I will fail a lot. Take, for example, the “nightmare” at the end of the first dungeon – it took me somewhere on the order of 30 tries to defeat this boss (more if you count the number of times I fell off the screen but didn’t die). And I would have likely continued to try another 30 times if I had needed to.
So why would I spend so much time and energy doing something which was clearly very hard for me? The idea (which many have written about), that the goal of defeating the boss is achievable. That the hard work and multiple failures will eventually pay off. And that the failures, in the end, are ok, because no one actually got hurt. So that if I am ever in a situation in real life that requires that particular strategy of shield use and pit avoidance, I will be able to jump in with both feet, because I already know what I am doing.
Game Cognito 