Game Your Way to a Better Performance Review

Performance reviews?  Yowza.  From Rypple’s own findings to Samuel A. Culbert’s assertion that reviews are “ill-advised and bogus,” it’s clear that this is a flawed process looking for a fix.

While I can’t predict the solution, I have a suggestion on where we can look… games.  One thing that games do, better than anything else, is make people care.  If you asked someone to sit in front of a computer and click a mouse over and over again, you’d probably get a reaction along these lines.  If, on the other hand, those thousand clicks help them create a farm, your results look a little more like this.

I’m not arguing that we can make performance reviews awesome overnight.  Games can’t make everything fun.  But they can make us engage more in tasks we would normally avoid.  Here’s how:

1) Instantaneous Feedback Makes People Stick Around…

The best games you can think of (Charades, Monopoly, Wii Sports) are fantastic at providing instantaneous feedback. I roll the dice and immediately have to pay rent in Monopoly or change my gestures when no one can guess a movie in Charades.  In addition to increasing engagement, this type of feedback has also been shown to increase retention of analytic skills.

When looked at from the perspective of performance evaluations, it begs the question – why do performance reviews only occur every six months to a year?  Why can’t we come up with a way of acknowledging success in the workplace when it happens in April, rather than retroactively in an empty conference room in December? Nearly every game, from Battleship to Call of Duty, provides feedback as it happens.  When you win, it’s not a surprise, just a success.  Performance reviews should be the same way.

2)  It’s More Fun with Others – Be Loud with Praise

Games like Farmville, NGMoco’s We Rule, and platforms like Xbox Live and OpenFeint have done a really good job of implementing what people have known for a long time:  it’s nice to be recognized and visible. When you get a new high score in Bejeweled Blitz, you can put it on your Facebook wall.  Achievements are broadcast and your friends and family can share in the excitement of your success.

Workplace performance shouldn’t be different.  If someone succeeds, it shouldn’t be a secret – it should be shouted from the rooftops.  After all, isn’t pushing a great presentation out the door or winning a client more valuable (and worth discussing) than this?

3)  Progress Bars and Experience Points

Traditionally reserved for Dungeons and Dragons and gamers who tend to think along these lines, experience points and progress bars are actually fantastic motivational tools. Tied to instantaneous feedback and visible praise, progress bars or acquisition of “experience points” (XP) in the workplace can inspire people to work harder by showing them how quickly they are progressing.

As games journalist Tom Chatfield notes, “One of the most profound transformations we can learn from games…is how to turn the sense that someone has ‘failed’ into the sense that they ‘haven’t succeeded yet.’”  I can’t think of a better reason to incorporate elements of games into how we evaluate our coworkers and ourselves.  Performance reviews probably won’t ever be as fun as Angry Birds, but adopting lessons learned from games could make them a lot more meaningful.

Photo of PS controller by Steve.M~. Photo of farmville by Rusty Boxcars. Licensed under CC.