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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."
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.
Actually, the core problem was not the game - but communications. For whatever reason (corporate culture, most likely) people would make mistakes but not share what happened (and how they fixed it). The whole reason for the video sharing platform was to create and share videos of these mistakes so people don't keep repeating them over and over and over again. (While an individually probably won't, someone in the satellite office might).
DirecTV chose to gamify how they communicate within themselves. It's just one possible solution out of many ways to increase communications and to avoid doing the same mistake over and over again. Some companies can't reproduce the results because they don't "fit" like DirecTV did.
In the end, it's really just a way one company chose to fix a structural communications problem within the company.
It depends on the company - there may be a real need for it - like I think this count at DirecTV would include real helpdesk personnel, who may make up a good 750 of those 800 people who answer customer calls about technical problems like receivers failing or other thing. Or it may be supporting the installers out in the field.
Or it could be that managing programming, uplinking and downlinking and local ground based systems is really hard (needing 1 or 2 IT people per major city to manage stuff like local chnanels and programming?).