Gamification of the workplace

Social apps and games are today omnipresent and you can see people engaged in one or the other of these activities while traveling, waiting at airports or generally filling up their free time. Some facebook updates even show people climbing various levels or achieving new powers when they are supposed to be at work. :) The levels of engagement that gaming is able to generate got me thinking on how to harness the same levels of energy and engagement and apply it in work scenarios. I pondered on a few attributes which enables the gaming industry to keep people occupied for long hours on end. 

Read more on my linked in blog - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/gamification-workplace-fakhruddin-bandukwala about how the concepts of the gaming industry can be applied to the workplace.

Introducing these concepts into the workplace would of course have impacts on hierarchies and processes.

Is it possible to apply these principles to lead to a 'gamification' of the workplace leading to an enhanced sense of ownership and higher engagement levels? Would love to hear your feedback.

What does the customer do?

Outward looking organizations
Implementation of processes including completely internal facing process are ultimately to serve our customer. To achieve this end goal of serving end customers, the process has to in some way enhance efficiency or result in productivity, which would enable the organization to serve the customer better. Today the customer also expects a quicker turn around time on services. There is a pressure on prices and margins in almost every competitive industry, hence these efficiency and productivity gains are also expected to result in better pricing points for the customer. Faster, better, cheaper anyone?

Is this enough?
So, organizations have traditionally been 'outward looking' in setting themselves up in terms of people, process and system. However, is it sufficient to be termed outward looking? Should we not also be concerned about what kind of outside view are we tuned towards? The direction of this outward looking view or the fine-tuning of how well acquainted we are with our customers needs should be of prime interest.

What we are saying here is that while we did have an outside-in view in the organization's activities, we had been designing these processes, systems and structures thinking 'what do we want to do for our customer' rather than 'what does the customer want to do (period)'.

Not 'what the customer wants us to do'. Not 'what the customer wants to do with our products and services'. Not even 'what the cutomer wants to do on our e-biz site'. No No and yet again an emphatic No.

Just plain and simple 'what does the customer want to do (period)'.

In order to discover what the customer wants to do, we have to, of course, study - what does the customer do? It has to become our business to know the customer's business. And I am talking both B2B as well as B2C here.
As an airline I have to think, as a individual or corporate customer, when planning to go from point A to point B, what would be the expectation in terms of safety, comfort and convenience. What experiences would I value  most? This goes beyond the ease of ticketing and check-ins.
As an electronics retailer, I would need to think beyond how do I serve the individual and corporate customer better in terms of ordering, delivery, billing. I need to go into the territory of why the customer is buying what he is buying. What will she do with this device? Am I helping the customer make the right choice best suited for his needs?

Any examples or comments that spring to mind?

You Are The Traffic

There is a sign on a busy stretch of highway in Luton which says "You are not stuck in traffic. You are the traffic." Really makes one think. Many have been the times when we have been wistful about ideal scenarios and how we wish things were better around us. What we probably do not realise is how much we contribute to the problem itself.

If we are not engaged in working towards making things better, then definitely we are making things worse. If we do not provide the solution we are a part of the problem. My exhortation to you today is -

STOP WHINING! START WINNING!!

Look around you in your work environment and I am sure you will be able to make a list of 10 processes which hinder your work in some way or the other, making you inefficient or making you spend family time at work or making you put in heroic efforts. And as I have noted earlier in my trilogy on The Elusive Business Process, heroic efforts are a sure shot indication that things are being run in an ad hoc manner.

Here are a few tips on how to identify what is not working in your organisation -

1. Hours spent in escalation calls and on e-mail - If your employees are spending most of their time handling e-mail, it is a sure shot indication of processes which do not work. Any transaction which cannot be handled by the process, lands up in the inbox. The amount of time your team spends on e-mail will be directly proportional to the time you as a manager will spend on handling escalation calls and mails.

If you are encouraging completion of transactions on e-mail, you are contributing to the problem. A transaction handled on the e-mail, while resulting in temporary instant gratification, does not solve the problem permanently. Primarily the information and the solution remains confined to the few people involved in the mail. And reply-all does not solve the problem either.

2. Innovation in routine transactions - Innovation is good. But we do not want all our employees to start innovating in their daily routine chores. That is supposed to be run blind-folded and only taken up for process improvement or SLA impprovements. Routine can even be questioned as to whether it is indeed adding any value to the company. But once established as a required value-add task, it should not have to be perforce improvised upon to get anything done around here.

3. Personal interactions and rapport get things done - Another clear indication that process is not working. All good behaviours in themselves but as tools to get work done, it indicates your organisation will not survive the next round of exodus. This also leads to processes which get enforced for few people and get bypassed for few others who have a good rapport.

4. Lack of workflows and automation - Lack of software or existence of software which does not have workflows is another factor leading to things that do not work. Basically this leads to a breakdown of information flow across functions that are supposed to deliver the goods or the as a whole to the customer. Either it does not work fast enough or it does not send the right information to the right functions at the right time. The key requirements to make the organisation work as one unit are integration, communication and empowerment.

5. Process for the sake of process - If anybody ever tells you that you need to do particular steps because a) managements says so b) SOX says so c) we have always done it this way, be assured that 9 times out of 10, you have come across a non-value add process. Question Why and question it five times before blindly following such processes.

Processes exist to enable business and not to hinder it.

The New Wave Business Process - Part II : 'App'lied Business Theory

A conversation I was having with a senior strategist and a vendor conference which I attended this week triggered some further thought process on handling the new wave business processes. So I decided to elaborate on my initial concept in the previous blog - http://fjb-mgmt-class.blogspot.com/2011/03/new-wave-business-process.html - about network linked business capability and online collaboration leading to commercial transactions.

Let us look at some of the changes we are seeing around us -
- Proliferation of apps
- Requirement of information
- Need to collaborate and communicate
- Remote and mobile access to apps and information for collaboration and communication

All of this points to a scenario where business operates more and more in a distributed manner and not from central locations. This also breaks down the traditional central chain of command and leads to empowerment at local levels for taking decisions and executing transactions. The challenge for leadership will be - how to ensure order in this chaos and channelize synergies across these disparate events which make for completion of a business transaction.

Working remotely is indeed supported by the emergence of technologies which support distributed collaboration. Concepts like cloud computing have matured to a level where they have business acceptance leading towards a critical mass needed to support the next stage of growth. The adoption of cloud computing opens up the business to tackle the challenges and opportunities of the future.

Now let us examine how these changes will affect the way people work. First the definition of work will undergo a change. Neither organisations will be willing to commit to fixed number of resources which is akin to sunk cost on a recurring basis, nor will resources be content to dedicate their efforts to one organisation. With that goes the concept of working hours (does it exist nowadays anyway?) as resources are supposed to perform tasks on demand. Whoever has the right skills at the time when the demand for a task to be performed comes up, gets to do the work.

What this means is that people, process and technology gets replaced with skills, capability, connectivity. Strong processes and technology support would simply be the hygiene factors which will enable this new way of working. We are getting comfortable with apps for our social requirements. Wouldn't it be great to have an app to submit your expenses? While you are on your business trip, you make your expenses through your mobile pay app and get a choice to charge it to your expenses which hits your organisations accounts payable.

Now taking this thought process to the next level - how about doing your entire business online? You no longer need concrete buildings full of people to do business. What this needs is an online infrastructure which replicates your steel and concrete structure and allows collaboration amongst your resources, partners, stakeholders, customers instantaneously. With this level of automation being built on the cloud, the organisation can hire resources online, allocate work as per skills and monitor work reports online. This concept can already be seen at work in the freelance community. If we put this in a online structure it results in a virtual organisation being created. Organisations would have administrators of such virtual departments playing the role of HODs.

When you have multiple such organisations created online and communicating with each other, you have online collaborating leading to commercial transactions. Procurement in Org A could then collaborate with Sales in Org B using an app similar to maybe Google Wave. Negotiations are conducted and recorded online resulting in issuance of a PO. This gets sent to resources in the sellers delivery organisation and the resources with the right skills and closest to the buyer get to deliver the products or services so procured.

If this concept is detailed out, it leads to huge benefits in productivity and costs. The ease of doing business also results in higher growth. Resources get benefited by getting the best value out of utilising their skills, doing what they do best.

The New Wave Business Process

Though this post focuses on a particular industry event, I am sure the process concerns raised here resonate across other sectors as well and are just as relevant.

I was at the TM Forum (TM Forum is the world’s leading industry consortium focused on improving business effectiveness for communications Service Providers.) Regional Spotlight in Delhi the previous week. One of the participants brought up the top three priorities for business as -
- New products
- Growth
- Improving Processes

This means post-recession communications service providers are clearly expecting and looking to ride the new wave of growth. At the same time there is a cautious approach to handling this growth by re-using existing infrastructure and improving current processes.
However, this was a CIO view and I would have liked to see more business process owners from operators at this forum participating and gearing up for the changes and improvements required to handle the next wave. (TM Forum's eTOM is the common business process architecture adopted by telecom operators globally.)

Now for improving the business processes, there will be dependence on IT to deliver automation projects that support the process changes or help make existing processes more efficient. No doubt IT will play an important role in process efficiency, but can only act as a catalyst. The initiator of this exercise has to be the process owner who has to have complete clarity on the future roadmap of the organization, the challenges current practices are likely to face in the future and the changes which are required to be brought about to stay current and releavant.

Additionally, newer technologies will change the way we do business. We already have seen the changes in the way we interact with each other in the last five years. These changes have already started seeping into formal interactions and business communication. These changes will further percolate into the business transactions themselves as we see businesses recognize and adopt the power of cloud computing. I am currently conceptualizing a network linked business capability which enables businesses to collaborate online and possibly enter into binding transactions online. You could essentially run your entire business on the cloud. Just imagine the power unleashed by this concept of anytime, anywhere enabling business capability.

The kind of capabilities I am envisaging here changes the way we set up organizational structures, the way we hire and maintain our workforce, the way we interact within the organization, the way we define the tasks essential to carry on business, the way we engage with external stakeholders, in essense everything we call as 'doing business'. Businesses will have to go for a deep introspection and respect none of the currently established practices as valid in the future.

This essentially means the current ways of doing business will just not be good enough to tackle the new wave of growth which will have its own demands of quicker than before delivery, better than ever products and lower than ever costs. In essence this calls for not only looking afresh at business process re-engineering, but also changes the way we look at and perform BPR itself.