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David Zinger, MEd, is founder and host of the global 6,300-member Employee Engagement Network. He is a popular speaker and educator on employee engagement and engaging management. He wrote two books on work, and uses a 10-block pyramid of employee engagement to help managers learn practical and tactical approaches to engagement. Visit David online at www.davidzinger.com.

David Zinger

May 2014 - TD Magazine

How gaming techniques can help boost employee engagement and productivity.

Game On: A Primer on Gamification for Managers

Engaged Management: Irreverence

The Energy of Engaged Management

Employee Engagement Imports

Engaging Management: Complexity and Perseverance

Engaging Management: Put an End to Employee Engagement (Lesson 1)

What is the last game you played? Did it have anything to do with work? Do you perceive games merely as a diversion from work? What about performance appraisals at work? Are they working for you and your organization? Are you fully engaged with your current approach to performance management? How did one company in India subtract 28,000 hours of work from the old performance management system?A recent Modern Survey study found that only 10 percent of employees in the United States are fully engaged at work. Yet, they or their teenage son or daughter can spend all evening and the early hours of the morning fully engaged in an online game. Teresa Amabile from Harvard in a study involving 12,000 daily diaries of knowledge workers found that the greatest contributor of engagement and motivation for knowledge workers was progress and the single greatest source of that progress was collaboration. Progress and collaboration are inherent in most game design and are vital in effective performance management.Games are inherently engaging and a powerful tool to use in building more engagement within organizations. Gamification is the use of game elements in work scenarios in order to drive engagement and make work more interesting and productive.In the beginning, gamification was largely about implementing a points-based economy, coupled with leaderboards and badges in order to drive motivation or engagement. The new wave of gamification involves taking business problems and mapping them to game play and thereby improving trainability, and increasing effectiveness and results of core business-related actions and workflows.For example, one area of pervasive consternation for most organizations is the performance appraisal system. Edward E. Lawler III in a Forbes blog post on Performance Appraisals are Dead, Long Live Performance Management wrote:"Performance appraisals are one of the most frequently criticized talent management practices. The criticisms range from their being an enormous waste of time to their having a destructive impact on the relationship between managers and their subordinates. Criticizing performance appraisals has a long history. For decades, the literature on talent management has pointed out the flaws in most performance management systems and in some cases recommended completely abandoning them. The problem with abandoning them is that they are vital to effective talent management."In India, eMee, a company that develops comprehensive social gamification platforms enabling engagement for business, implemented a game based visualization approach for the 7000 employees of Persistent to combine social collaboration, performance management, learning and rewards and recognition.The system addressed the challenges in performance management. The system has been in operation at Persistent for three years and employee attrition has been reduced by over 350 basis points year on year. The company saved, by a conservative estimate, over 28,000 person hours in 2013 by eliminating the need for an arduous and time consuming end-of-year appraisal process.The continuous performance management system residing in a gamified system provides employees with a platform to showcase their skills, achievements, and contributions. Powered by big data analysis, the system recommends actions that can help employees earn appropriate recognition, while reminding them of actions due, and guiding employees towards target behaviors.Appraisals, which were an end of year function taking two to four weeks to complete, are now primarily conducted by looking at each employee’s game profile, their game position, and their activity in the game.Although many companies are still in their infancy in adopting internal social media, gamification will take the adoption of internal social media and raise engagement to new levels while being fused to key business results and metrics.How about you and your organization? Are you game?

Employee Engagement Gamification Trumps Tick Boxes for Performance Management

David Xue is an experienced facilitator focused on delivering TtT, management leadership, and sales skills courses. He is certified to deliver the ATD Training & Facilitation Certificate, ATD Master Trainer ®, ATD Instructional Design Certificate, and ATD Consulting Skills Certificate courses. Previously serving as the director of L&OD for Microsoft Greater China, Ingersoll Rand Asia Pacific, and Dell sales global training, responsible for teams in Greater China, Asia Pacific, and globally, David has a profound understanding of and practical experiences in management and talent development.

David has a strong teaching influence and excels at boosting learners’ enthusiasm with unique and highly effective visual presentations. Humorous and witty, he always combines education and entertainment while delivering practical content. As a full-time facilitator for the past 10 years, David has worked with companies from various industries including retail, energy, finance, telecommunications, automotive, manufacturing, and more.

David Xue

At the beginning of the past two years, I’ve written a post on important points I think you should know. In 2021 I mentioned the importance of context, emotion, and learning to learn. In 2022 I discussed some of the newer cognitive science models of cognition—including distributed, social, and embodied cognition—as well as the role of mental models. This year, I’d like to focus on a trend that we should extinguish: the belief that we are formal, logical, reasoning beings.The cognitive revolution transcended the view of behavioral psychology; we couldn’t talk about what went on in the brain. While many valuable insights were generated by that scientific paradigm, including the role of performance objectives, the move to thinking we could isolate necessary components provided further advances. Results that have stood the test of time—the recognition of sensory, working, and long-term memory as well as core cognitive processes like attention, elaboration, and retrieval—were identified.We tend to adopt existing models as frameworks for thinking about the brain, and the cognitive revolution was no exception. For example, consider the computer as a general-purpose information processing system. It made sense to adopt that model to reflect our abilities to process information and complete a variety of tasks. Thus, the dominant framework for thinking about thinking was to view our brains as formal, logical, reasoning machines.Such models, with some assumptions like mapping the world into formal representations, accomplished impressive tasks. Systems built upon that model could break down problems into components and solve them. They could even learn. Artificial intelligence (AI) advanced as a result. So-called “expert systems” were built upon interviews with the best practitioners. Sadly, these models failed in practical situations, leading to an AI winter. This was a disconcerting time, when behavior naturally observed in humans did not reflect these symbolic systems.The Postcognitive RevolutionOne of the most impressive capabilities of our thinking is the ability to organize the world into flexible frameworks. What David Rumelhart called schemas, Marvin Minsky called frames, and Roger Schank called scripts all reflect our ability to infer knowledge about the world. Thus, we had representations such as wheels that scaled up to vehicles but differently for automobiles versus bicycles. Symbolic logic struggles with this, however. Attempts were made to adapt, such as Lofti Zadeh’s Fuzzy Logic and Douglas Hofstedter’s Slipnets, but suffered in practice.An alternative framework emerged that could be characterized as “subsymbolic,” operating below the symbolic level. John Holland, Keith Holyoak, Richard Nisbett, and Paul Thagard created a genetic algorithm approach in Induction, which borrowed mutation from biology, but wasn’t aligned with neuroscience. Rumelhart, along with Jay McClelland, proposed connectionist models instead in their two-volume set Parallel Distributed Processing with a neuroscientific inspiration. These models were found to exhibit rational behavior similar to humans. They represented the same types of behaviors, including errors, that were empirically obtained from psychology research.These neural net models created not only a psychological revolution, capturing elements of cognition, but also a renewed basis for artificial intelligence, underpinning much of today’s work in machine learning.A Cognitive LegacyOne small legacy of the formal, logical, reasoning model of cognition, however, seems to linger. It appears that many of our practices in learning and development (and business in general), still seem to be based on this idea. This is a potential problem.If we’re formal logical beings, there are several things we should be able to assume. For one, if we give people new information, they’ll appropriately adjust their behavior. Moreover, the person with the greatest access to information should be the one to make a decision, and that decision will be the best one possible. We see this manifest in several ways.For one, our training frequently resembles the presentation of new information with an expectation of behavior change. Too often, we see bullet points of information extracted from (and even presented by) experts. After this, there’s an expectation that we’ll do something differently. Similarly with annual or quarterly reviews. People need feedback at the appropriate time and support for change. We don’t just change when we wish to; it takes time and practice.We also see decisions made by individuals without consultation. Folks will decree a new approach because it’s been determined by the person at the appropriate decision point. Yet the evidence suggests that we get better outcomes when we bring more people into the decision-making process, such as in Keith Sawyer’s Group Genius. When we follow practices that help us suitably explore a problem individually, and then collectively brainstorm solutions, test, and adapt, the outcomes are better.A Problematic LegacySadly, there is also evidence that this approach to work isn’t working. We see it in the outcomes of learning investments, and when we evaluate organizational success as an outcome of our approaches, we see that more informed ones work better.In the 2012 Harvard Business School working paper The Great Training Robbery, Michael Beer, Magnus Finnstrom, and Derek Schrader cite metanalyses that suggest only 10 percent of training investment has an impact. There may be multiple causes for this, but it does suggest that we’re wasting money with our approaches. The Serious eLearning Manifesto suggests that much of traditional learning is based on information presentation, so it’s safe to say that we’re not doing as well as we could.Similarly, efforts like Laura Overton’s Toward Maturity and Lauri Bassi’s Human Capital Capability Scorecard suggest that organizations do better when they’re better aligned with how people think, work, and learn. Organizational performance reliably improves with better employee approaches.Overall, the continued use of ineffective practices undermines our organizational success. We need to effectively achieve our organizational goals, which includes ensuring we can optimally execute what we know we need to do and continually innovate when we have to invent or adapt.Moving ForwardWhat should you do differently?Truly understand how your brain actually operates. Know the basics of the human information processing loop and extensions for learning and performance.Avoid the myths that continue to hinder our industry.Conduct deep needs analyses to find important performance gaps and their root causes. There are many causes of problems besides a lack of knowledge or skills. Stop thinking that if you give people knowledge, behavior will change.Leverage external resources. Decision making is best done collectively and iteratively. To do otherwise is to minimize your potential.Move from legacy practices to evidence-based practices. There are vested interests that continue to exist based on perpetuating approaches that aren’t effective. Many products that are quite lucrative—profiling instruments and development programs —aren’t effective.Start measuring impact. This doesn’t mean what people prefer (there’s no correlation with what people think of a program and its impact). Instead, assess the actual change in the organization. You can’t collect this yourself; you must partner with the business units that require change.Align programs to demonstrable gaps, and then measure until they’ve improved.Ultimately, L&D should be the folks that are responsible for not only optimal execution but also continual innovation. When you’re innovating (problem solving, designing, or researching), you don’t know the answer when you start, so inherently it is learning. It’s informal learning, and no one knows the answer (yet)! Still, it’s an opportunity for L&D to attain a more valuable role in the organization.To make this strategic move and start bringing evidence-based practices from formal to informal learning, take ownership of these practices within your teams. Make it safe to fail; share stories of what you tried; and learn together. Create and understand a learning microculture before taking it to the rest of the organization.Last, identify the organizational legacies that are holding you, and your organizations, back. Then, find alternatives, and implement them. When you’re free of your unexamined past, you can move forward to an evidence-based future that means better outcomes. That’s a trend I’d like to see and encourage you to undertake.

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