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企业可借鉴电子游戏进步原则激励员工

发布时间:2012-01-16 17:45:34 Tags:,,

作者:Teresa Amabile / Steve Kramer

如果你想更好地调动员工的积极性,你便需要以一名电子游戏设计师的角度思考这一问题。在所有能够推动人们专心工作的方法中,最重要的一大元素便是帮让他们感受到自己取得了进步——即使这种进步只是非常微小的一步。这就是进步原则,显然,对于很多管理者来说,进步原则的激励作用着实让他们大吃一惊。我们调查了来自世界上不同公司的将近7百名管理者,让他们说出5个最能激励员工的机制,仅有5%的管理者将进步列为首要激励因素——远远落后于传统的激励因素,如奖励和认可。但管理者应该重视进步原则。

progression(from relationship-buddy.com)

progression(from relationship-buddy.com)

也许管理者并未意识到进步原则对于激励员工有多重要,但是对于电子游戏设计师来说,这却是他们必须重视的首要成功秘诀。在所有娱乐形式中,电子游戏应该算是其中最受欢迎的一种。人们,特别是15-35岁的年轻人总是愿意花大量时间和金钱于多人在线游戏(MMOG)中探索那些科幻的未知世界。

是什么原因让这些玩家对游戏如此着迷?从很大程度上来看,这还与电子游戏设计师的两个秘诀有关——进度指标和成就标志。而这两点也映射着进步原则。事实上,所有电子游戏都在屏幕上突出了“进度指示器”。这是一种有形的指示器,预示着玩家离下一个关卡,或者当前关卡中的下一个阶段,以及当前阶段的下一个小目标还有多远的距离。而成就标记就像是童子军和女童军在完成特定任务时所获得的徽章。在电子游戏中,每个玩家都能够获得成就——即玩家在游戏过程中完成了各种挑战,并且他们能够将这些成就与其他玩家进行分享。

真正出色的电子游戏设计师知道如何为玩家创造出进步感。真正优秀的教师知道如何为学生创造出进步感。而真正有能力的管理者也知道如何为下属创造出进步感。根据调查,我们发现了一家公司,即O’Reilly Coated Materials各个阶层的领导者,不论是总经理还是小团队的领导者,都至始至终贯彻着进步原则。O’Reilly的领导者使用了3大有效的技巧:

1.提醒自己每天的进步。当然了,你只有取得真正的进步才能将其记录下来。所以你需要做的第一步便是创造一个“关注表”,每天提醒自己不断进步。这也是O’Reilly所采取的方法,在公司里,所有人都专注于自己的工作以及如何促进进步。大多数项目审议会议——即最高管理者会在会上提问项目小组成员一些具有挑战性的问题,并且这总是能够有效地推动项目更好地发展。在诸如这种会议结束后,团队成员将会在自己的工作日记中记录如下内容“今天这个项目取得了新的进展。我们与主管讨论了发展方向,我们的观点也得到了不错的反馈。”

2.寻找小胜利,即使遇到挫折也不例外。在我们所调查的团队中,他们的新产品开发工作非常困难,需要较强的技术性,且他们常常在此遭受挫折。而O’Reilly为此创造了一种“心理安全风气”,即让员工不必担心承认错误后遭到惩罚,或者怕失败而不敢挑战新创想。一名研究员描写了关于挫折变成学习机遇的案例,并因此促成了一种进步感:“我将研究结果展现给团队领导并告诉它其中出现了一个错误。而领导说没关系,只要我们知道自己取得了何种进展即可。”

3.用各种方法记录进步,不论大小。在O’Reilly中,大多数新产品开发团队都会举行每周例会,以明确目前的发展离目标还有多远,从挫折中分析并吸取教训,并针对性地修改进程。通常,从整体来看每个进步的幅度都很小,但是团队的领导者却可以帮助研究员或者技术人员看清楚自己到底向前迈进了多少。以下是关于这种例会的典型分录内容:“在我们的每周小组例会中,我们总是会围绕相关数据,本周的工作成果进行讨论,并明确我们取得了何种进步。”这种低调庆祝进步的方式能够让团队成员在漫长的开发过程中更加投入到工作中。除此之外,公司的高管也会定期举办总公司的进步表彰大会,而这时候不管是个人还是团队都会因为优越的成绩得到公开表扬。其中一名研究员就描写了自己受到激励的一天“在公司的年会上,老板与我们分享了公司所有高管所罗列出的十大开发项目名单。而我们的项目不仅在这个名单内,而且还获得了广泛的关注。”所以,就像在开发电子游戏一样,不需要过多的浮夸,只要你能够尽可能地激励员工们,他们便会全身心地投入于工作中。

游戏邦注:原文发表于2011年8月8日,所涉事件和数据均以当时为准。(本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,拒绝任何不保留版权的转载,如需转载请联系:游戏邦

Three Secrets of the Video Game Designer

by Teresa Amabile and Steve Kramer

If you want to keep your team jazzed about its work, start thinking like a video game designer. Of all the things that can get people deeply engaged in their work, the single most important is making progress — even if that progress is a seemingly small step forward. This is the progress principle, unearthed as we dug through nearly 12,000 daily work diaries that we collected for our research. As obvious as it might sound, the motivational power of progress is a big surprise to most managers. When we surveyed nearly 700 managers from companies around the world, asking them to say which of five employee motivators they think is most important, a mere 5% ranked progress as number one — way behind conventional motivators like incentives and recognition. They should have placed it way ahead.

Managers may be unaware of how important progress is to human motivation, but it’s one of the first secrets that every good video game designer learns. Of all entertainment forms, video games are among the most engaging. People, especially young men between the ages of 15 and 35, spend enormous amounts of time and money immersed in the fantasy worlds of the massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) space.

What keeps them hooked? To a large extent, it’s two additional secrets of the video game designer: constant progress indicators and achievement markers. Both leverage the progress principle.

Virtually all video games feature “progress bars” that are constantly visible onscreen as players engage in the game. These bars are tangible indicators of how close the player is to reaching the next major game level, the next step within the current level, and the next mini-goal within the current step. Achievement markers are a bit like the badges that Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts can earn for mastering particular tasks. In a video game, achievements attained by each player — for any of a staggering array of ever-changing challenges throughout the game — are posted for all players to see.

Truly effective video game designers know how to create a sense of progress for players within all stages of a game. Truly effective teachers do this in the classroom for their students. Truly effective managers do the same for their subordinates. In our research, we found one company — we call it O’Reilly Coated Materials — whose leaders at all levels, from general manager to team leader, consistently applied the progress principle. (Not coincidentally, O’Reilly was also the only company, of the seven we studied, to achieve a truly innovative breakthrough during the months we studied them.) O’Reilly’s leaders used three particularly effective techniques:

1.Keep everyday progress on your mental agenda. Of course, before you can mark progress, people have to actually make progress. So the first step is to support progress every day, by creating a “climate of attention.” This is exactly what we found at O’Reilly, where everyone focused on the work itself and how to facilitate progress on it. Most project review meetings, which involved top managers asking challenging questions of project team members, constructively shaped projects for the better. After one such meeting, for example, a team member wrote in his diary, “The project passed start gate today. We discussed the direction of the project with our directors, and we got very good feedback from them.”

2.Find small wins even in setbacks. The new product development work of the teams we studied was very difficult, technically, and they suffered frequent setbacks. But O’Reilly leaders created a climate of psychological safety, where people didn’t fear being punished if they admitted mistakes or encountered failure in trying a new idea. One scientist described an incident where a setback became a learning opportunity — which later resulted in a fine sense of progress: “I showed the team leader the results I got and told him that there was a mistake in one of the trials. He said that is all right, as long as we know what we did.”

3.Mark progress in many ways, large and small. At O’Reilly, most new-product-development teams had a weekly meeting specifically devoted to noting their progress against goals, analyzing and drawing lessons from setbacks encountered, and making any necessary course-corrections. Usually, the overall progress was small, but team leaders helped the scientists and technicians see how they were moving forward on their pathway. Here’s a typical journal entry following such a meeting: “In our weekly team meeting, we discussed the data and work that had been generated for the week and made some good forward progress.” These modest celebrations of progress went a long way toward keeping everyone engaged during long-haul projects. What’s more, top managers periodically held very public celebrations of progress, in the form of all-company meetings, where individuals and teams were called out for their good work. As one scientist described it, on a day when he was particularly motivated, “In the year-end business meeting, our head of this building shared with us the top ten projects he had just shared with the very top management of the company. Our project was not only on that list, but attracted attention.” Nothing dramatic — no bells and whistles like a video game — but enormously motivating.(source:blogs.hbr


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