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How DirecTV Overhauled Its 800-Person IT Group With a Game
mattydread23 writes "Most gamification efforts fail. But when DirecTV wanted to encourage its IT staff to be more open about sharing failures, it created a massive internal game called F12. Less than a year later, it's got 97% participation and nearly everybody in the IT group actually likes competing. So what did DirecTV do right? The most important thing was to devote a full-time staffer to the game, and to keep updating it constantly."
It doesn't sound like a game. It sounds like Choose Your Own Adventure: Powerpoint Edition. At the risk of snarking with one of the oldest lines ever on the internet...
Pics or it didn't happen.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
So the people that didn't participate.. what happened to them?
We do not talk about those people.
The computer is your friend. Trust the computer.
FIRED! Thanks for sharing your fails.
Why would anyone still work at DirecTV? They're among the worst-of-the-worst employers in the country. Lots of masochists?
I'm sure the next company those staffers move to will appreciate the pre-training and screening that DTV invested in.
Go have a look at what "Thrive Metrics" (linked in TFA) actually does. Yikes!
Bullshit. I've seen plenty of articles like this, and I've worked at many companies that have made the same claims. All of them were bullshit. It is a condescending attempt to re-train employees. There is a Forbes article about this that is more detailed. It shows how they want employees ideas without paying them for those ideas or giving them any credit. My favorite is the quote "It is no longer enough for IT organizations to deliver and operate systems on time and on budget. Now, we must deliver competitive advantages". Well, you could knock me over with a feather. I didn't know that I should be delivering competitive advantages. I thought you were lucky if I got your email working. How about if a few Direct TV employees chime in and comment on what was in these videos that became the awesome F12 game that stirred competition between employees and increased productivity, or to quote, how management addressed your "fear of failure." I'm sure all that showed an increase in productivity earned a raise in salary.
Just make it fucking stop. As someone who works in a Fortune 100 company and deals with this bullshit - just stop. None of it is cool, and none of it helps the bottom line. It's just bullshit the higher ups think up to seem like they're doing something valuable.
I'll take a page from Office Space.
When you come in on Monday, and you sit down at your computer does anyone try to get you to play the most boring fucking "game" in the world to get you to do stupid shit that contributes to meaningless metrics?
No. No man. Shit no man.I believe you'd get your ass kicked saying something like that, man.
Ok, so you got 97% of your IT guys to watch videos in exchange for Hokey tickets and other, unspecified, incentives. That is really... sad
I'll tell you now that if I send my developers a video every single one of them will watch it. With no incentive other that an implicit "this will make you a better developer." If you have to pay people to read e-mails/watch videos that leadership sends your leadership has already failed.
More importantly though there seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding about he role of IT which is to keep everything running all of the time. In other words, "fear of failure" or risk-aversion is a very good thing in your IT staff. Training them to be less risk averse is not a good thing and not something that you actually want.
This sounds like more of this top down let's make the work place a happy fun time fuzzy place. Bottom line is, the worker drones still know they can be fired on a whim while they plaster a fake smile on their face. Anyone remember Mission Statements? The Mission of this business is to provide fullfilling ear wax removal to the customer, or whatever. About 15 years ago the State of California Consumer Affairs Department charged are state licensing boards to waste a bunch of time coming up with a Mission Statement. I'm sure the edict had limitations on how short or long it could be. My profession's board dutifully played into this sherrade. Never mind that the law creating the board gave already gave it a 'mission," the board has something like 30-40 duties and requirements.
This is one reason I like working on my own.
my 2 hour after lunch nap.. err game points winning thing
Maybe I missed something here but this looks very much like kindergarten teachers giving "golden stars" to the eager beaver kids with the added edge that the overall scores are public and it is a work environment where "less golden stars" can quickly be perceived as (or abused as) a list of who will get fired first - which is the only reason anyone is doing it in the first place, not because it is "such a fun GAME" and not because the work culture and how fuck-ups are seen has actually changed.
They might as well have just told people it is mandatory or you can find a new job, because in effect that is all it looks like to me.
"Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." - Mark Twain
Happiness is mandatory!
Coffee is for closers, redux.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
So the good people who think this is stupid left the company, and only the stupid people who think this is good are left?
Do your job correctly and competently and just simply be honest about your failures. That isn't that hard people. I sure as shit don't want to fucking waste my time playing some stupid ass game, when I have real goddamn work to do. Now leave me alone and keep your stupid games away, I have a room full of servers to keep running.
Sometimes these posts are just for hating.. What's wrong with gamification.. I think it can be incredibly effective for teaching employees certain things. I'm not saying I know enough about this story to say it worked or it's even a good thing at all but why take something totally down without even thinking twice..
If these are such good IT professionals, how long would it take one of them to throw together an auto script that would "watch" the videos for them, sending clicks for all appropriate buttons, etc.?
I think the high score competition would show you who your best internal hackers were.
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
I feel stupid, but I can't get a grasp on what this is about? What failure are people fearing? What is the game supposed to accomplish, is it to make people watch some videos? If so, what is the point/content of these videos?
I'm getting a sense that this entire story is an over glorification of an HR pet project that is being attempted in order to get employees to watch orientation videos. It really would be great if there were a Dish employee around to tell us what's really what, but if the article is to be believed, they're all too busy playing this mystery game to be posting on Slashdot.
My last job the district manager changed and threw out all the promises of the last one. Told me he did NOT care what the last guy said and that he did NOT care how good I was with the business that people skills were more important than being knowledgeable. Top it off he started a GOLD STAR AWARD where we got GOLD STARS for doing an excellent job where we got gold star stickers by our name on a post it board in the employee lounge. I complained about being treated like a kindergartener and that's when the demotion started. Took me off the top of the promotion list, moved me to part time and shifted my office to another one 45 minutes drive from my home vs the one I was working at that was less than 5 min from home.
Why would a GAME improve a situation? I had one employer who thought taking us IT department to a paintball match would be fun. Was told by a fellow employee DO NOT shoot at the boss, the last guy who did was fired for it. Boss shows up with this super expensive automatic paintball marker and rest of us get single shot pistols. It was management vs the IT dept. Wanna guess what happened to every IT guy who actually shot at management? I was let go and a friend who accidentally hit the foot of a supervisor was demoted for "demoralizing the company with his attitude" because he was actually firing AT the opposing team.
I guess that is what is "effective management" in todays world.
I think you're massively misinterpreting the facts. With a username like Cobol God, I think that you and many of your team mates were highly and increasingly redundant which lead to office moves and dismissals.
I know that there are still a few bastions, but seriously dude; NetCraft confirms COBOL is dieing!
who get locked out of a tool that other people in IT get to use. Also as a side point they can't really move up as much now.
Now they should turn signal quality into a game. With their static bitrate feeds, a wall of text looks great but confetti falling at the superbowl creates pixels the size of cats. So, every time someone adds a channel to their 10 trillion channel lineup and wastes more bandwidth on something 2 people are "watching" aka fell asleep on the couch, they light your desk on fire. Every time someone launches a pathetically inept satellite that can support like 1Mbps per channel, crash it into that engineer's house. Then every time someone loses signal because of snow or rain, that customer is allowed 24 hours to hunt down the original installer of the dish with a crossbow. Eventually the game would make it so everyone wins and they wouldn't be such a complete joke of a provider.
They should sue
The cake is a lie!
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
as an union will not stand for BS like that.
Back in 2007 my friend and I worked in a crap call center for them and we got bored and found out that all of the shares for all call centers CORPORATION WIDE had effective permissions set to "EVERYONE" meaning that any one person could modify everyone else's files. This included IE favorites and any files on the roaming profile, as well as drop zones for operating system ISOs and installer programs used by IT. Would have been extremely easy at that point to steal everyone's password in the entire building, or just destroy everything, and wreak havoc corporation wide. They also only had restrictions on executables locally but you could craft up batch files to circumvent that. We did the right thing and tried to tell them but he got suspended over it and they threatened to make us "disappear" if we told anyone so I just walked out that day. At any other company all operations would have stopped until this was fixed as it was a severe issue but apparently it was just business as usual for them. A move like this doesn't surprise me. Their IT management is a complete joke. They can play games as much as they want but this is how IT debacles like AOL's internal problems get started.
Friendly competition in the workplace: Good. If done right it leads to better morale and an overall better work environment.
I've been on the other side of this competition fence in the work place. It's not cool. I had a manager, and I'm still trying to figure out if he did the following intentionally or if he was a moron. He hired 4 IT temps and told us all he only had two permanent positions.
Now, I'm not a cut throaty back stabbing type so of course I got singled out. One day I came into work to find my manager waiting at my desk to go over the work I did yesterday. Apparently someone had come along and sabotaged all my work. Needless to say he didn't believe me when I said it wasn't me and 2 weeks later with continued sabotage and I was gone.
Good times.
Whenever a player quits EVE to go play WoW, the Average IQ of both games increase.
They're now testers at Aperture Science.
Well I think we were not viewed so much as employees as "things". We HAD to show up for Christmas dinner for them halfway through December. It was NOT optional you HAD to show up. One year my supervisor hosted and his house was maybe 5000-6000 or so square feet with a huge hand laid brick driveway that he JUST had done. Another year one of the owners had it at his house. No raise that year but he had his home theater redone and big wall of McIntosh audio for his theater.
I should have left when I was told even though I was salaried that every time I worked less than 40 hours a week I would be docked a minimum of 1/2 a vacation/personal day. I was 20 minutes late one day and lost half a day. Did NOT matter the last week I probably worked 55-60 hours not including working 10+ hours on documentation at home EVERY weekend.