Designing For Rewarding Behavior: Part One
Recently, I’ve spent some time with SQL Server Reporting Services and Microsoft’s Business Intelligence Development Studio. One of my goals was to create a series of dashboard widgets that could be published to the SSRS server and incorporated into various Windows Sharepoint Services team portals.
My first target wasn’t the Team Foundation Server data warehouse, it was our time reporting tool, Web TimeSheet. Like many organizations, it is critical that our IT staff collect and report time spent on various projects in an accurate and timely manner so that our company may, in turn, bill our various clients. Creating the dashboard widgets was a drop-kick. I’m reasonably impressed with the BI Studio (with add-ons from vendors such as Dundas, it can be made quite powerful). The experience, however, gave me some time to consider the implications of designing for rewarding behavior.
Time reporting is an excellent culture media for this particular petri dish. Why? Because only the most very twisted individual enjoys logging their time, but it is a necessary function in many organizations. My own hypothesis is that many companies struggle with this because they haven’t considered the system holistically and, as a consequence, have failed to design for rewarding behavior. By acknowledging the system and allowing the need to design it for rewarding behavior to influence changes, perhaps you can make substantial improvements in the accuracy and timeliness of the data.
As reasonably sentient beings, our actions are conciously and subconciously influenced by the need to be rewarded. Put simply, our nature is to invest energy into that from which we will reap a reward. Everyone’s rewarding mechanism is the product of his or her own experiences in life. Ivan Pavlov’s work on conditional reflex has context here, but the point is that our brains are wired so that we spend our time and make our emotional investments in the things that we realize value from.
So what about time reporting? At our company, everyone is required to account for each hour spent during the week and have that data, in the form of a timesheet, submitted to their supervisor at the end of the week. Easy enough, except that most of us spend time working on hundreds of different tasks that dozens of projects in that time period. We know that the company places value on entering the time accurately and we understand the need to be timely so that our finance team can collect the data and bill our clients. Still, it’s a thankless task that we put off until the last minute only to find ourselves scrambling to recall what we’ve done until we finally get frustrated, exclaim to ourselves, ”That’s good enough!”, and grab our car keys.
I began developing dashboard widgets based on our timesheet data for the same reasons that most organizations do: to provide management with Key Performance Indicator (KPI) data at their fingertips. Shortly after I began, however, I began to realize there was greater opportunity to be had from the same investment of my time. I stepped back from the program and the data. I stepped back from the people and their managers. I stepped back and began consider the system. It didn’t take long to conclude that what I was doing was fundamentally flawed. Creating those widgets for management wasn’t going to improve how accurate or how timely the information was. In fact, I was probably going to make things worse.
When an organization is faced with assigning a task that nobody wants to do, it frequently takes the brute force approach to influencing an individual’s rewarding mechanism. Someone near the top of the organizational heirarchy proclaims, ”Do this thing or else!” and people (begrudgingly) oblige. It works because people want to keep their jobs, but it certainly isn’t an enlightened strategy. The way that I believe the most successful organizations would approach the situation would be to consider the system; to define the desired behavior and the nature of the rewarding mechanism and effect the changes necessary to that system in order to acheive the desired behavior more often than not.
Make it as easy as possible for people to do the right thing.
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