One Word - Gamification

I’m so behind the times. I was reading Laurie Ruettimann’s blog Cynical Girl the other day and one of the commenters stated that her company was implementing gamification to induce employees to work better.

“My companies marketing department has now decided to embrace something called "gamification". It seems to have something to do with awarding employees "points" for desirable behavior or something equally as banal and mind numbingly infantile. Shoot me now.”

Really?

Because I too thought it was a totally stupid idea, I did some reading.

It seems that gamification is a way to engage Millennials in the workplace. Since they grew up using computers – and computer games – they are wired to look for the wins, badges, levels, recognition, so they will do their work.

And I say, B.S. And why are Millennials inducing companies into certain workplace methodologies so that we keep them engaged? Weren’t they hired to do a job?

As I am a regular reader of Cynical Girl, I found this post – that says it all...in the way only Laurie can.

But, I’ve been reading further. And since I’m in the business of helping agencies and marketing departments implement software – to manage the day-to-day work – I’m wondering how much gamification will engage staff and actually get them to pay attention to what they have to do; how well they do it; and get them to pay attention to the work itself.

I don’t know much about gamification.

So, I’ve been wondering how adding this extra layer of mayo to the work-day sammich will truly ‘engage’ the Millennials, and why / if it ‘turns-off’ the rest of us.

I come from the generation of expectations and meeting them. Not earning badges because I did what I was supposed to do.

But…in light of something I have read about gamification, I’m doing further ‘research’.

Why would I ever research something I think is stupid? Well, it is hard enough to get everyone in an agency to use the tools we need to use every day in order to manage work efficiently. I wonder how well gamification apps engage, keep engaged, and truly provide relevant data to determine what’s gettin’ done.

What do you think? Is your agency, marketing department, company implementing gamification? If so, what flavor are you using? How is it going? What does your staff think?

I’m going to give the guys at Bunchball a call.

Include Your Team When Evaluating Agency Software

This Forbes article by Avi Dan relates to building a great creative team. But this isn’t just for doing creative – it’s really for solving any puzzle or problem.

When I implement an agency management software solution, I invite people from all areas of an agency – to review, question, and provide the ‘what ifs’. If you want people to use something, give them a voice. And listen. Inclusion and careful consideration of their feedback will go a long way. They won’t feel victimized by some decision that accounting or the partners made for the hope of better performance and reporting.

There is no reason for victims.

Boring things like process and procedure do have real a purpose in any organization and should induce a positive outcome. They provide the framework so the daily hum of an agency has a level of predictability and is logical to everyone.

Why are we doing this?

Introducing agency management tools, along with a ‘new’ process – without input – is usually a disaster.

Putting time and money into tools and process without engaging your agency staff is a waste. And if you’ve done it unsuccessfully once, I can guarantee they will be even less inclined to participate should you look for yet ‘another solution’.

In the article, points number four and five are important:

4. Get naïve feedback. “Beginner’s luck” can facilitate creativity – with a twist. A lot of brilliant ideas don’t start this way, but become so when remarked on by a novice or an outsider. Experts sometimes tend to think in lockstep, and denigrate ideas not their own. Reach out for naïve advice beyond the usual suspects and liberate your creativity.

5. Fail quickly, cheap – and often. Creative organizations understand that success and failure go hand in hand, and therefore they are not intimidated by the prospect of failing. The willingness to absorb failure is liberating and encourages creativity. Simply manage the economics of failure to make it acceptable.

Get feedback – even though you know your business well, when’s the last time you sat in a production artist or coordinator’s seat? They’re the ones doing the work, using the tools and are really important sources of information (why did X happen?). Ensuring tools and processes work for them is essential. They know things you can’t even imagine…

Fail quickly – there’s always a transition to be factored in when introducing new tools or process. Didn’t think of transition? Step back and determine if it is transition – letting go of old, ‘trusted’ systems and using new ones – or if there are situations that you didn’t consider. Review those situations immediately. If the tools or process aren’t working as they were designed / trained /deployed, pull your team together and determine if you need to re-boot.

It’s far better to re-boot, or put off a plan that wasn’t thoroughly vetted than to launch half-cocked – which is usually due to a self-imposed deadline.

This is for the long-haul. No one wants to do this more than once.

I believe in a completely integrated solution to manage agency work, to track projects, to document what’s going on, to assign tasks – everything in one place. Multiple and/or redundant systems don’t provide the level of transparency everyone needs to assure everything is running smoothly.

I also believe that everyone is a stakeholder. Everyone is responsible. That means every individual is accountable for clearly defined instructions, content, budgets, schedules – and doing their part updating / making notes / passing along information – in a shared, structured environment.

That is where transparency in process resides.

You get that transparency through compliance. You get compliance with a system that everyone can use, knows how to use it, and who were given a voice in the evaluation and decision-making process.

They become owners of the process and systems your agency has paid for.

Success.

Underwear and Deferred Maintenance and Your Agency

This story in MarketWatch caught my eye: Buy stocks when men buy socks – Socks and underwear sales may be an economic bellwether.

Ok correlation does not imply causation. You learned that in school. I suggest that sales are going up because of deferred maintenance.

I should create the underwear index and base all my plans on the economic bellwether of men’s underwear sales.

OMG! Too late. Wow, and Alan Greenspan followed this index. There’s food for thought.

To look back on the efficacy of this idea, take a look at this article from the Washington Post written in 2009, it states:

“The growth in sales of men's underwear began to slow last year as the recession took hold, according to Mintel, another research firm. This year, Mintel expects sales to fall 2.3 percent, the first drop since the company started collecting data in 2003.

But the men's underwear index -- or, conveniently, MUI -- may also have a silver lining. Mintel predicts that next year, men's underwear sales will fall by 0.5 percent, and as with many economic indicators, a slowing of a decline can be welcomed as a step in the right direction. Retailers are reporting encouraging signs in the men's underwear department. Sears spokeswoman Amy Dimond said stores are beginning to see more sales. At Target, spokeswoman Jana O'Leary said sales of men's underwear have been stronger over the past two months and multi-pair packs are moving.”

That – was 2009. Four years ago. Multi-pair packs. Sears. Target. How are things going now?

Oddly (to me), this is the Men’s Underwear Index. Do women cherish their unmentionables more and are willing to put rent money into a new thong or two? If we included women’s underwear-buying-habits would that skew the data?

I don’t necessarily see this as an upturn. I’m not a pessimist, I’m being realistic. I live in Las Vegas. The turnaround here is s – l – o – w.  A 12% up-tick in socks at American Apparel doesn't say anything to me about the economy. It’s conjecture. I place my bets on actually seeing people getting back to work.

In my enlightened opinion, it’s due to the fact that it is simply deferred maintenance – at some point you just have to buy new stuff.

That knock in the engine, the leak in the laundry room, the stomach ache that won’t go away. Or that mix of old and new – now redundant systems in your agency, that you haven’t realized, are too much work and producing very little data or efficiency. (See – I did get agency matters in there.)

No matter how well – or poorly – we’re doing, sometimes we just have to get a repair, fix a leak or go to the doctor, even if we don’t have insurance (yeah I know about Obamacare) – or search out a stellar system for getting your agency under control. (Did it again)

I think that the economy has been in a rut long enough; people have been un- or under-employed long enough that they just have to buy a new pair of socks.

Your agency is in a rut too, if you haven’t reviewed your processes, tools, and staffing (that includes a healthy review of ROLES) in a long time.

Keeping your head down and working is a good thing. But have you given any thought to the fact that all that mind-numbing stuff in-between – the forms, schedules, estimates, collaboration tools, email, spreadsheets, all that stuff – should be reviewed?

It’s 2013, Spring is here, time to face that deferred maintenance. Take a look in your sock drawer, organize and toss out the old, worn, and mis-matched.

If you can’t face the idea of throwing anything away, old socks, a bad process – call me. I’ll be happy to help. 

Bridging That Pesky Digital Gap

         ​I saw the future...and it was totally cool. It still is.

​I finally found an article that’s worth reading about agencies coming to terms with digital. Allison Kent-Smith wrote a nice piece in FastCompany called Reinventing Your Creative Talent.

It’s time to educate your staff – all of them. Bring them into the technology fold and quit with the silos already! 

There always seem to be silos, but here, the writer says – we all need to learn about technology. How to get it done. We’re better for it.

As the article states: We’re all technologists. We can’t be observers, and then hand stuff off to others to execute.

So, ongoing training is needed. The writer is calling this agency reinvention. We must be relevant – all of us. Or else.

Well, hallelujah!

Part of retaining awesome talent is keeping them up to date on technology. How it applies to our clients’ needs. There are six steps outlined in the piece - that make sense.

Now I'm gonna preach: It’s my belief that not every solution should be online or mobile, or TV, or direct mail (what’s that?!). But we all need to know when to use it, and the requirements – technology, timelines, cost. It is the same for any and all medium.

I have worked in siloed agencies, and for some reason the digital folks truly felt that the rest of us were completely incapable of understanding their magic. The voodoo they do so well.

Well, as an observer, trying to get a seat at their table was tough. Rarely invited, I invited myself. Then came the jargon. Spit out at rapid fire just to prove how uninformed – and stupid – I was.

So, do yourself a favor, learn this stuff. And if they don’t want to share, then take it as the big red flag that they are trying to not let you in on the fact that they might not be all that smart. Then plant yourself at their desk, couch, beanbag - and demand a few minutes of their precious time. It will translate into real dollars (aka create value).

Well, we are smart. After all, we all learned to use computers, cell phones and how to play pong.

By the way – this was overlooked in the article but very important – It’s not only the creatives who need to be technology savvy. Everyone should learn, and understand technology. From Account, through to your billers. If they don’t know what it’s about, they will sell something that can’t be done in within that window of time/budget (Account) – or just plain wrong; all the way to the end – billing incorrectly for services can kill profits.

If your digital team wants to hoard information – because it’s too technical for our little heads – remind them that they too had to learn it. They surely weren’t born with all that knowledge. And surely, they can learn a thing or two from you.

Like how to blend everything – online to offline – into one cohesive campaign.

Now go forth and learn.

I'm SURE It's DONE!

I have my fair share of self-doubt – or more precisely, I’ll give someone else the benefit of the doubt. I could be very sure about something, but perhaps in the context of something else, I could be wrong. And in my world, my goal is to just find out what went sideways and fix it. Then find ways to prevent a repeat of that particular error.

Memory is an interesting thing. I can remember details of events that are truly insignificant, and then forget that one thing I needed at the supermarket.

So in the course of a busy day at the agency, if I’m *sure* that something was this way or that, it happened, I’m sure I did it – but someone else says, ‘no way, I did not get X’; then I think – well, I could be wrong. And for me, the last thing I'll do is waste time arguing the point and say, ‘Prove it to me. Show me your work.'

I’d look like a total jerk.

Instead, I investigate. What went wrong, and if so, why? And then I want to figure out how to prevent that error – to ensure that it does not happen again. I’m not creating CYA, I’m refining process.

Where was the breakdown? Evaluate process, tools and people. Remind everyone we're in it together. To make the process of doing the day-to-day easier.

So, in the scenario, for a period of time, they did their job and I didn’t do mine.

Who is wrong? Is someone being a jerk because they never admit a mistake, or that they forgot to do something?

But...when I find that I was right - that the other person didn’t do their job, fix the error, pass it along, save it to the server. Perhaps, like me, they were sure they did X, but didn’t. They should fess-up. Yep. They should admit it, 'My bad.' 

Most often, that original declaration of ‘I did do X' is stated in the presence of others. When I confirm that I did my part, and the other person did not, the truth is usually revealed in private.

I look stupid. The other person looks brilliant. Together. Efficient.

So what do you do? Point out what a jerk they are?

Nope, that makes you look like a jerk yourself.

You have a conversation with that person and they say, ‘Oh, okay, I forgot to do X.’ And that’s it. Your reputation of not-having-it-together lives on in the minds of others.

I hate that. Because I’m smart, and I care about doing a Really. Good. Job.

So, processes and tools are put in place so everything gets done with a level of transparency – documentation with collaboration – then you don’t have to rely on your memory. Or someone else’s. And no one looks like a loser with bad habits and, even worse, a weak memory.

This is not CYA, by the way. This is good process to ensure everything gets done, everyone knows what they need to do and work moves along with minimal errors.

And no one looks like a jerk. Unless they are just jerks.​

Now, does Target carry staple guns?​

Advantage Project Schedule and Estimate Templates ... And More

I know it’s Sunday, but let’s start the week talking about those pesky issues like creating a quick schedule or estimate. How are those templates project schedule and estimate templates working for you?

Are you even using them? Do you know how they work and the value they lend to efficiency?

Using templates is the fastest way to build a schedule or estimate. (I’m a sticker for scheduling / assigning / allocating hours for every project).

And for that matter, have you customized your forms? Do you know all the wonderful (well, wonderful for me - I like accurate documentation) things you can create in the custom forms area?

A lot of great ways to document, track and manage your work.

If you need some help, just let me know. I’ve created a ton of templates and can help you make the most of Advantage.

Gun Control

Why would I ever write anything about gun control? Because this is about not understanding your customer or listening to them.

                          ​Oh shoot!

I read a tweet by Laurie Ruettimann that made me laugh so hard I almost fell off my chair.  She was in Target and overheard someone asking a question. Here’s the tweet:

OH at Target: "Do you sell staple guns?" "No, we don't sell guns."

Now, I know for a fact that Target does have staple guns. At least they sell them on their website. So I imagine they carry them in their stores as well. And probably the ammo for them. Like staples.

This is a case of someone not listening – only hearing the word gun, and giving an immediate answer to their perception of what was said.

Target just lost out on a sale. Because their staff is either uninformed of what a staple gun is, or they listen to every fifth word.

How many other sales do they lose because their staff Does Not Listen? They’ll never know. Because as my father-in-law used to say, “Profits hide a multitude of sins.” As long as they're making bank, they don't have to worry about a lost sale here or there.

So, how many times have you come up with the wrong answer because you weren’t listening? Failure to pay attention can kill a sale, an agreement, a smooth project or just a pleasant conversation quicker than you can say Stanley Sharp Shooter.

And you thought this post was about the Second Amendment and things that go bang.​