"Measure twice, cut once" as the old saying goes. Add to that a number of attributions from management gurus such as Peter Drucker regarding the value of measurement, and it is clear to see that we are measurement obsessed. Obsessed, I say, in the absolute worst way because we try to ascribe measurements to things that fundamentally should not be measured. That is, we attempt to measure things at a high level that are changed at a very low level — measuring something with many contributing factors, but attributing it to only one or a few — and this tendency extends to our employee engagement efforts. However, if we took a simple hint from the world of gaming, we would quickly find that our fixation on measurement in the way that we do now only succeeds in encouraging undesirable behaviors.

What do you mean "gaming"?

When I mentioned gaming, I am speaking specifically of the online gaming community; those who play complex compilations such as World of Warcraft, Eve Online, Borderlands, and the like. The people who play these games, especially the dedicated players, quickly learned that the game incentivizes certain kinds of behavior, certain character classes, certain types of equipment, and a variety of other things go to achieve optimum success. The rub is that many of the incentivized behaviors may not have been the intention of the designers, but rather a way that the combination of rewards and penalties scattered throughout the game coalesce to create a particular blend that achieves greater outcomes (for the individual player or group) than any other way of engaging the content. For example, Eve Online created a system wherein a number of races and factions all had spacecraft intended to fill comparable roles within fleets (i.e. every race had ships of the interceptor class, carrier class, etc.). However, it quickly became apparent with the community crunching the numbers that specific ships in specific roles performed at least marginally better than all of the others of that class owned by other races. The result is that only the optimal ship was used while the others were essentially ignored or used for an entirely different purpose (e.g. build-and-scrap for profit, but that is a different story).

What this created is a situation wherein loyalty to a given race or faction — initially a major component of the game's theme and mechanics — gave way to optimize fleet compositions using the best ships from every class, and largely similar fleet structures throughout the game. The players learn to deal with the way the systems and metrics within the game worked to get the best effect from their perspective and in terms of "winning" regardless of the original intent of the system and its mechanics. In the end, the game designers have had to change the very vision to one that includes ships diversified based on roles and capabilities rather than having somewhat overlapping ships diversified by aesthetics. The player still optimize their fleets and load outs, but at least now there is really only one ship to do anyone role rather than one that everybody chooses and three or more that everyone ignores.

"Gaming" in your organization

Any reasonable review of the academic and management literature will demonstrate severe outcomes from employees "gaming" the system in a way to achieve what is incentivized by circumventing what is intended. It is easy to find articles where incentive systems — especially commission-based programs such as a much-publicized case involving Sears, Roebuck & Company's automotive division — results in individual and business units exaggerating product attributes, misdiagnosing customer needs, or committing outright fraud in the name of meeting performance metrics. We must remember, too, that the flood of results you will get on a reasonable Google search are only those that were caught, and were so egregious somebody wrote about the problem.

Within your organization, take a look at any possible incentive system that it is either in place formally or exists informally based on the culture, management expectations, or some other organizational feedback mechanism. Compare the incentive systems you discover to what the intent of the incentive system is, and see if it is possible for individuals under the incentive system to manipulate their performance to achieve the incentivized metric without outright breaking company rules and risking their job. Do your service technicians have a time window to solve customer problems that includes a provision that encourages service technicians to pass the ticket to second-level engineering to stop the clock on them? Is your call center measured by the amount of time each representative spends on the phone with a customer, with shorter calls preferred, or are they evaluated based on the number of problems they solve within a certain period of time? Are your salespeople incentivized based on the amount of each sale, the amount of particular products they move, or the amount of repeat customers and referrals they get for your company? Any of these situations can be exploited by "gaming" the metric.

I would be remiss not to include a note about the "social gaming" that can happen in organizations. This type of interplay occurs when there are certain social rewards, or social metrics attached to any given worker performance configuration that can incentivize or dis-incentivize individual choices. Some of these may be obvious to state, but difficult to nail down such as organizations that reward "busy" people without any mind to whether the individual is actually productive. In this situation, highly efficient employees are incentivized to hang on to work to appear busy while less capable employees continue to work in circles; this is a product both because the potential stigma of having "nothing to do" and not wanting to take on additional work without additional compensation/consideration simply to stay "busy".

How about the person awarded for taking on the social programs of birthday parties, charity drives, and team building events, while simultaneously neglecting the duties of the assigned position? Are cupcakes and sales approximately equal in this situation?

The potential scenarios for "social gaming" are endless and endlessly complex, but you get the idea.

Put it together

The first step to understanding how your organization conducts its "gaming" is to detach the strict execution of any incentive or disincentive scheme from its intent. Examine it solely from the perspective that you are trying to attain the incentive or avoid the disincentive, with no regard to what the purpose of the policy is. Next, parse-out how you expect to observe the behaviors that increase the opportunities for individuals to receive the incentive if they, too, discard the purpose for the policy. Process the data used to measure the outcomes that are part of the incentive/disincentive policy, but also observe (from as far away as possible) the employees with consistent high-performance based on the metrics. Ask the reasonable questions:

• Does the call center representative that completes all calls in three minutes actually solve problems most of the time?

• Is there a pattern to the "necessary" goods and services recommended by our best service technicians?

• Do we have clear understanding of what the level of productivity is for each of our employees?

The rest of the process involves analyzing the results of your discovery period and figure out how to promote the outcome that you want by making it the most desirable way to conduct business for your contributors. Think like a gamer, understand how to leverage the system for maximum personal gain without breaking the rules, and you will begin to understand how to best create a system that fosters the type of organization you desire.

Note: This post first appeared as a LinkedIn blog by Dr. Mann on February 10, 2015.