HRMS Hot Spots

While listening to my 5 and 7 year old daughters play the game that they were making up as they went along, I got an eerie sense of similarities between the conversation that they were having and the ones that I imagine go on in many HR departments:

Girl 1: You try to hit that tree with the water.
Girl 2: Ok, if I hit the trunk I get 1000 points.
Girl 1: Ok... and if you get the water in the circle around the tree you can still get 500 points.
Girl 2: What if I can get that exact leaf on the branch?
Girl 1: Wow! That is really hard! If you get that, you can have 5000 points.

Watching this exchange it strikes me that this is not unlike how we set goals for our workforce. Hopefully, there are some more concrete reasons involved than "Wow! That is really hard!" but the basic concept is the same. You do your work this way and you get paid so much; if you do it a little better, a little more accurately you get a little more; and if you can do something really special there might be a bonus in it for you.

Having worked out the point scheme, play proceeds with the girls alternating turns to try and hit the tree with the water. They are both hitting around the trunk and on the trunk (no body has yet hit the leaf) and I am marvelling at their ability to add in their heads since nobody is calling numbers outloud. After a few minutes, I ask them who is ahead. The 7 year old looks at me and says "I have no idea... I'm not keeping track of who has how many points".

Moral of the story? If you have no tracking and response system for results of a goal based system, you can set up the best reward system in the world, get buy in from the employees, and it will still get you nowhere.