New Hire Education – Leveling up

What is the experience for new hires in your organization?  Think of not just the campus hires, but also the experienced hires.  What is the education and development experience for them that gets them ready for their new post?

I’m a member of the Advisory Board for the NVWN, and a leader of the Learning Innovations Team at Duke Corporate Education.  I’d like to share a few thoughts on this, as this relates to one dimension (at least) of what the NVWN is examining – the potential use of virtual worlds for learning and development within organizations.

Why new hires?

In most years, organizations are in some degree of growth, and are always dealing with turnover of the existing workforce.  Providing effective learning and development for new hires is an annual consideration for nearly everyone, and as such their needs provide a perfect context for designing in the use of virtual worlds and gaming experiences.  Let’s go further:  New hires are in the positive demographic zone for using computer-delivered experiences.  Even the new managers in their early 30′s are of the gamer generation.  I don’t like to invoke the ‘generation’ argument personally, as I believe that is over-played and prejudices our designs.  Look at the growing number of players that are NOT teenage boys.  Nonetheless, the demograhics do give us some confidence that these approaches might be welcome by the new hires, or anyone for that matter, as long as they are well designed.

Why virtual worlds?

I don’t want to talk about the obvious benefits of using technologies to connect people across distances, and the cost-savings this can represent in terms of saved travel budgets, and the good feelings it gives us in knowing that we are being a bit ‘greener’ in our work.  I do want to go back to the question I posed at the top of this post.  What *is* the experience new hires have?  In my conversations with learning professionals they often lament the fact that it takes so long for new hires (especially campus / college  hires) to become proficient in their jobs, and they struggle to improve retention rates for the campus and experienced hires.  In one conversation, a client suggested that it was taking greater than 12 months for new hires to become proficient in their roles.  TWELVE MONTHS or more.   Think of the cost to the organization.  And think of how unrewarding the job experience must be for the newly hired!

What’s missing?  Why is it taking so long, and why are people leaving?

The answer in part lies in the lack of practice time that new hires are provided – practice time to test out their knowledge, to be immersed in situations that replicate the real-world process, environment and challenges of their new jobs.  It’s quite obvious, but bears examination.  We tend to want to tell our new people what to do and what not to do, and then consider them gifted with the benefit of our wisdom and fully prepared for success, and yet are later shocked when they make mistakes, are slow to perform, and eventually leave.

If a new hire orientation and training experience consists of powerpoint driven, lecture-based ‘exposure’ to rules, requirements, processes and content sources, it may be a candidate for redesign, and possibly the use of virtual worlds to improve effectiveness.  What’s missing is time to ‘be in the job’, time to actively test out one’s knowledge and skills, without the risk of embarrassment and “public” failure.  This is where virtual worlds provide an obvious potential solution.

I say “public” failure because, in conversation with some client gaming participants two years ago, several of them mentioned the ungratifying experience of being brand new in the organization and then, on day three of orientation week, having to stand up in front of peers and ‘role play’ with actors.  A recipe for disaster, especially for the introverts among us.

Instead, the client reflected, we had provided a level of abstraction in the gaming / virtual world environment (a project we had undertaken with them) that gave them a new sense of freedom to speak up, try new things, and really go for it when it was time to deal with the challenge at hand.  Lots of nods around the room as these comments were made.

Not only is the virtual world a great place to create the practice field, but it may in fact be better than face-to-face, especially for new hires who have zero social capital and feel they have the most to lose.

How does it work?

I just spent, oh,  four hours or so playing Forza Motorsport 3 on a new xBox my family got me for Christmas.  That’s right – my *family* got this for me.  How crazy is that?  Probably not the typical gift for a 48 year old father of two sons (17 and 20 years of age).  I’m never going to be the kind of driver that Forza lets me be – driving super-fast, super-expensive racecars with reckless abandon on the world’s premier racetracks, and gaining experience points, leveled access to new cars, and reputation among a growing list of challengers.

I do however race my own car in RL (real life), and have managed to not do terribly.  Here’s the connection:  I owe my current success on the local autocross circuit to my having played driving games in the past.  How does that work?

Immersing oneself in a virtual environment provides a rich set of data for creating long-term memories.  Not only can I recall specific tracks – their layouts, turns, difficult spots, etc. – but I also recall events that occured as I raced around them.  This became clear to me in London some years ago when I realized I recognized the road the cabdriver was taking me down – and I had never been on it in RL.  But I knew exactly what turns were coming, where the trees and concrete pilings were, etc.  All because of a game I had played a year prior.  So when I succumbed to a friend’s urging to take up autocrossing, I took first place in my class.  It is my contention and experience that the immersive spaces that virtual worlds can provide gives the brain a rich set of data – much more rich than sitting passively in front of a presentation – AND provides the context (situation, circumstances, cause for action, people around, resources) for testing new skills and behaviors.  All of that leads to a greater chance of recall, and a faster time to performance.  And think about what this might mean for new hires.

I was fortunate to take this to an actual client who, together with a game developer, helped us create a new hire on-boarding challenge in a virtual world.  This was a game – not the blank canvas that virtual worlds writ large can provide.  By this I mean that we had a specific context/challenge, rules of engagement, scoring matrix, time limits, storyline, roles, and feedback mechanisms in place.    At the end of the pilot game sessions, the participants expressed the anticipation that they were better prepared to perform in the RL version of the challenge we created as a result of gameplay.   I say ‘anticipation’ because we were not able to do a longer study of the impact.  This, generally, is something I would greatly like to see more of – studies of the longer-term impact of virtual worlds and gaming for serious individual and organizational learning efforts.

And more on how it works.

If you have not done so, please play a game.  Preferably an online game, so you can see the potential.  We tend to say that ‘play’ is for kids.  If so, why so many professional athletes?  Why are my wife AND my sons hooked on Angry Birds?  Why do we still play board games at family gatherings?  My 94 year old great uncle John whom I visited just last week is the league champion in bowling – Wii bowling!  What we are not recognizing is that play is a good thing – and that a well-designed immersive experience online is fun as well as challenging, and that fun lowers affective barriers to learning.

One last thought on this for today – for I see this post growing long!  Daniel Pink wrote a book recently called Drive in which he talks about what truly motivates people; Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose.  Well it seems to me that if you can give new hires a faster method for attaining mastery in a new environment, that will help them feel more autonomous.  My assumption is that the organization will make the purpose for the new hires work abundantly clear : )  I’d like to connect the motivation that good games and virtual worlds experiences can create with the motivation that new hires need to excel, be successful, be more connected in the organization, and stay.

Thank you to Robin Teigland for asking me to be a part of this from afar.  I hope to contribute more from the learning and development perspective if that is useful to the readership.  Keep up the good work, and stay warm this winter!

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