Real Life is Broken

Jane McGonigal says reality is broken.  She believes that we need to make the world more like a game.  While designing a college course for game design, I realized the full truth of this.

The biggest reason that gamers prefer game worlds over real life is that game worlds offer consistent rewards.  Each time a player finishes a task, a reward is provided.  The biological effects of this reinforce playing the game as positive behavior.  In other words, the rewards tell the brain that playing the game is good.  Real life is not like this...but it used to be!  This fascinating realization could be the key to improving productivity and job satisfaction on an enormous scale.

Long ago, before mass production and huge corporations, most people worked for themselves.  Even the lowest classes during feudal times typically had a flat or percentage tax that allowed rewards to scale with productivity.  Instead of working up through the ranks of a corporation, most people became apprenticed to an artisan or learned the family business, and once they finished this, they became self employed.  When they produced something, they were immediately rewarded.  Blacksmiths, tailors, carpenters, and other craftsmen were rewarded with a finished product, and when the product was sold, they were also financially rewarded.  Farmers were rewarded with a harvest and money, if they could afford to sell some of it.  Merchants were rewarded in money and traded commodities.  With the exception of domestic servants, who were rewarded much like modern salaried workers, and nobility, who were often rewarded without much work at all (as well as occasional random events, like droughts), nearly everyone was quickly and proportionally rewarded for their efforts.  Even beggars were rewarded fairly proportionally (more time and effort spent, more donations).  It was well understood among the lower class that harder work yielded greater rewards.  Since then though, the world has changed.

In our modern world, effort is not rewarded.  Contrary to upper class clichés, working hard is hardly even part of the road to success anymore (heritage and luck being some of the biggest factors).  A vast majority of employed people do not get rewarded quickly or proportionally.  McDonald's workers do not get paid more for being more productive.  Spending 15 seconds creating a sandwich is hardly as rewarding as spending several hours making a set of horseshoes (though equally mundane), and making the sandwiches in 12 seconds does not result in higher pay than making them in 15.  Helping an endless supply of customers check out at a grocery store is nothing compared to a full harvest at the end of the growing season.  In short, modern jobs are just not motivating.  Unmotivated work is low productivity work.  It is also typically low quality work as well.  Without a good reward cycle, modern workers have lower productivity, work quality, and job satisfaction.

This can be fixed, but it would have an initial high cost.  The problem is that employees are paid based on time.  Either hourly or salary.  Salary pay is the way nobility was rewarded long ago.  Salary is a reward that is given regardless of productivity (we are going to ignore things like getting fired, because they are more likely to encourage blaming and cheating than increased job satisfaction and productivity).  Hourly pay only rewards the presence of the employee.  It does not reward actual work.  Profit sharing can reward actual work, but it ends up being an average.  If there are twenty employees, and half of them work hard and half of them do not, no one is getting rewarded proportionally, and the less productive workers are getting rewarded despite doing a poor job.  If the company makes multiple products, stock based profit sharing could be rewarding workers doing a poor job on one product, when another product is successful.  This kind of reward cycle is only marginally more effective than purely hourly or salaried pay.

Productivity is very hard to measure.  How do you measure productivity for a cashier?  Profits on sales does not work, because the cashier does not determine markup on items or what the customer wants or needs (and the job of the cashier is to get though the line fast, not to spend 5 minutes upselling every customer).  Total sales is an equally poor measure, because over-staffing (the fault of management) or poor business (the cashier is the least likely person to be at fault) could affect it.  In engineering and other higher end jobs, it is even harder to measure productivity, because the apparently least productive employee could be the one holding everything together and helping everyone else to maintain high productivity (this is actually fairly common).  This is a major problem to fixing reality.

The only solid solution I can see is breaking things into smaller units.  Even this won't solve all of the problems, but it would improve things.  More smaller businesses and less larger businesses would make this far easier, but that is unlikely to happen.  Retail corporations could offer more autonomy to local stores, and local stores could offer more autonomy to individual departments within those stores.  Industrial corporations (everything that produces products, including software, hardware, and media) could provide more product level autonomy, and manufacturing could provide more factory level autonomy and even process level autonomy within a factory.  This would allow for more focused profit sharing and productivity measurement, which would increase reward accuracy.

Recently, I discovered a solution to one of the biggest hindrances of modern businesses.  The hindrance is that managers usually have a poor understanding of the processes they are managing.  In tech, this means that managers often have a poor understanding of the technology, which leads to demands and expectations that are impossible to realize or significantly harmful to the workers and the business (for example, CTOs that decide it is better to use just one programming language in-house, instead of selecting the best one for each task).  In other industries, this leads to large numbers of minor inefficiencies, like replacing the towel dispensers in the bathrooms every month, as the prices of different types of towels fluctuates, or retraining employees to put the ingredients of the sandwiches in a different order every few months.  Perhaps a better management model would be to have managers act as oversight, instead of bosses.  Those under a given manager would act fairly autonomously.  The manager would provide guidance where needed but would only make executive decisions when the employees violated rules or specifically requested help.  The reason I bring this up is that it fits very well into the idea of making components of a company more autonomous.  Adding this would further improve job satisfaction, at the same time as eliminating a large number of common inefficiencies in businesses.

At this point, I don't think we can ever return to the reward cycle of the past, but we can adjust things to get enough closer to enjoy many of the benefits.  Our world is so different from the past.  Processes are so much more complex.  Much of modern business must rely on teamwork to get jobs done, and this makes a perfect reward cycle impossible.  If we try though, we can get close enough to realize major improvements in productivity, quality, and job satisfaction, and this will make the world a much better place.