How Do We Setup Workplace Games And Gamification To Motivate And Win New Business

It has already been proven in industry and in government, that adding Workplace Games, also called Gamification, to your business will both motivate and unite your business towards maximizing new opportunities. In an interview, Tom Kalil, (Deputy Director for Policy for the White House Office of Science and Technology) made the point that NASA's use of Gamification had a Return on Investment 5 to 10 times higher than the costs associated with the rewards that the game generated. He shared insights where DARPA and the DOE used prizes and challenges to reward and incentivize. He provided examples of various government organizations as using Gamification successfully that included NASA, DOE and DARPA.

To begin the process of adding Workplace Games to your business you should start by performing an assessment of your business strategy, vision and goals. This will help your company update and align your business priorities so that the game directly supports your business and the necessary activities that can best be rewarded through the game. There are different ways to setting up but we believe that you should keep it simple and directly aligned to your business. We setup many of our games using a Project Management format that initiates the game in much the same way any project should be started. Simply stated, projectize your game so that you follow the same steps in starting your game as you would properly start and manage a new project. Follow the example of others who have already added games to their business to avoid mistakes.

There are many innovative examples where games were used to motivate and unite businesses for success if you look for them. Diverse companies, large and small, public and private, have used Workplace Games to motivate and unite their stakeholders across a wide range of industries that includes: NASA, DARPA, DOE, UPS, Deloitte, Bunchball Inc., Warner brothers, Comcast, Adobe and others. Industries have included the health and insurance industry, science and technology, law enforcement and many others. Don't start over when it isn't required; lessons learned and best practices save time, money and other resources.

Knowing your key competitive factors and comparing them with your peer and competitions may be a good way to look for differentiators. Your own strategies, tactics and the use of best practices are then aligned with your company's existing processes into the game. Look for goals, schedule, desired wins, past business results and so on for possible reward milestones and corrections or changes to your current processes. The best milestones are deliverables of various maturity and specific events in a schedule where activities are completed to move onto the next activity. These deliverables and schedule milestones, when recognized and rewarded for timely completion encourages repeatable best practices in your business. These can be tailored to your specific needs and desires.

One important recommendation is that you remember you should keep the game straightforward and aligned to your vision. Make the game a public competition based on measurable results that align to the desired results that move your business forward. Avoid meaningless rewards as this distracts from the real purpose of the game. This purpose should be aligned to taking advantage of opportunities, new innovations and improving products and services of your business. Expect measurable improvements in innovation and business efficiency. Critical success factors and key performance indicators are good examples for identifying most reward and recognition points where improving the quality, direction and innovative quickness is the focus for both your business and the game. It is most important that the game aligns to your business so that the business and your business results are the clear focus of the game. If the game does not align to the purpose of your business, it will be hard to gain support for playing the game.

The actual steps in setting up the game are associated with initiating the game, planning out how the game will be run and what platforms or tools are needed to implement the game. The preferred tools are cloud, mobile, social media and analysis based tools that leverage Leaderboards or similar score boards where public viewing of awards, progress and innovation are occurring in real time. The need for real time recognition speaks for itself if you desire innovative improvements to your business and the realization of opportunities as fast as possible. Prior to rolling out the game, we recommend that an impact test be done of the features, functions and operation of the game to mitigate risks that may be unknown to your business and it's operations prior to testing. This should involve key stakeholders and subordinates within your company at the level you feel will result in recommendations and forward thinking. You will receive many improvements and recommendations from these stakeholders during this initial testing, but set a deadline to implement the best of these recommendations and then proceed to roll out the game after ensuring the game passes testing. The game will improve as the business improves. Business communication and collaboration improves as recommendations are implemented into the game.

Using Workplace Games and the resulting rewards will encourage your companies to self-motivated towards innovation and improvement. This motivation and self-improvement in turn results in individual and organizational behaviors that are based on self-leadership, knowledge, communication, individual experiences and best practices. These powerful organizational and individual attributes then result in product and service differentiation, value and efficiency that save time and other resources.

Once the game is rolled out, expect questions. A Frequently Asked Questions list prepared during planning and implementation should be shared on the game. The game will promote workplace collaboration and the building of unity by engaging workers in team-building activities that mirror their jobs and the necessary communication between business entities required to excel in the business. Your aim is to bolster the development of relationships in your workplace and to amp up efficiency. Game activities should be tailored to meet this aim. This will promote the development of your teams while increasing efficiencies between entities of the business.

Lack of communication is one of the major concerns we hear in our consulting business and we agree that this hinders workplace efficiency. The game's public rewards are geared towards efficiency, deliverables, innovation and so on and will help correct communication issues. Cooperation of meeting objectives is necessary to excel and is promptly rewarded in the form of team or individual rewards. This process improves, unifies and motivates the stakeholders in the game. Expect and reward communication between entities for completing activities, using innovation to find new markets or solve problems or by maximizing opportunities and efficiencies.

Start the game by dividing your employees into teams that are mirrored in the business. The game facilitates the business. In all likelihood, messages between entities or the lack of cooperation between the entities will deliver an important lesson every time collaboration expedites or delays an activity and the impacts are shown in the game by performance changes or met and unmet objectives. Lessons are learned that are associated with your business for both winning and losing, for being the best or not in the game.

Turn some of the completion of the game into daily tasks as well as your more strategic goals. Use relay style races or similar activities where workers must complete tasks on a daily or weekly basis if possible. Divide your workforce into teams, preferably that meet a business need, and allow them to move through this race, completing the tasks as fast as possible while still producing quality results that exceed expectations.

A benefit of the game is that the efficiency of activities that produce the best results will become the best practice of your business. This increased efficiency will in turn build employee knowledge of your best practices and processes. Important procedures within your workplace will quickly become more efficient as the importance of more quickly completing job-related tasks rises and becomes the individuals and teams who do this become known.

Business Coaches and Business Coaching - What Are They

Sometimes, friends and prospects ask me to talk to them about how business coaching process would help the growth of their businesses. While they are curious and anxious to do something significantly different from everyone else to change their results, I have had a few individuals say to me... "it's all stupid, it doesn't work." If you fall in the second category of people, it would be a waste of your time to continue reading.

Rather than repeating my thoughts every time I get asked to talk about this, I decided to put it on blog and continue to update it for people to read and understand.

The purpose of every business coaching relationship is to create sustainable transformation. I have not said this because I read it from any book; instead, my training and working as a business coach, helping and inspiring the growth of many successful organizations and leaders across the globe has offered me the opportunity to deeply understand how businesses behave prior to seeking the help of good business coaches, and what they become after the coaching process.

So here are my thoughts on what business coaching, executive coaching, or leadership coaching is...

1. Crystal Clear Vision

Maintaining a crystal clear vision is without doubt the foundation of every successful organization. It is the compass for achieving business objectives and no organization succeeds without creating a compelling vivid vision. Your business coach has the responsibility to help you clarify your vision, ensuring that what you see aligns with your business objectives and passion. Your coach challenges you to demonstrate how your vision evolves in reality over a period of say; three to five years (short term), or ten to twenty years (long term). This time-traveling process is powerful and helps to put you in perspective of the type of goals you want to achieve for your organization.

By applying effective questioning around this objective to clarify the reason behind your vision, the value it brings, and your target beneficiaries (niche); and supporting with genuine encouragement and inspiration, you will begin to see or feel a sense of enlargement in the scope of what you want to achieve, or where you want to be with your vision. This in turn creates a strong conviction and confidence in the direction your business is headed.

You must bear in mind that your vision to accomplish the desired results, the mission and values of your organization must be clearly defined and extremely over-communicated to your teams, customers, and other stakeholders. Your coach or business mentor will help you to achieve this.

2. Strategic Action Planning

Every successful organization I have come across focus intensely on "identifying and doing" only the most important things for the success of their business. The primary challenge here is usually how to identify, and constantly focus on doing what is most important.

When business coaching tools are rightly applied it opens up the best options you must implement to achieve your business goals. Not only will you know them, your coach will inspire you with the required accountability for implementing the agreed actions within agreed time lines. Talking of accountability brings to mind the thoughts of some of my colleague's on this. Some believe that the word accountability is harsh and frightening to clients.

My belief is that irrespective of what you call it, it is the primary responsibility of business owners and leaders to do whatever is ethically morale to make their organizations successful. They owe it to themselves and every stakeholder, and have the privilege to hold their employees liable for achieving them. But who holds them accountable on a continuous basis to ensure that they are constantly focused on doing their own part of the work to achieve the overall objective? The Coach of course!

I have noticed that in almost every organization, employees are either afraid of expressing their minds to CEOs genuinely, or questioning some of the decisions they made. The reason is obvious; they are on the organization's payroll and may lose their jobs for acting in what might be misconstrued as disrespectful or insubordinate manner. This behaviour breeds lack of open, honest, and robust communication in the organization and ultimately creates dysfunctional working relationship that sabotages performance and achievement of goals.

In executive coaching or leadership coaching as the case may be, we fill the gap between chief executives, managers or leaders and their employees. We question some of your decisions to make sure that they are in sync with the mission, vision, and values (MVV) of your organization. We also help you to see the impact your decisions will make on your organization, team, and customers... I hope you're getting the idea?

3. Disciplined Execution

The best business coaching strategy will deliver no results until it is backed up with disciplined execution on the part of the client, in this case you. What you will notice is that every day, CEOs, leaders and entrepreneurs develop all kinds of ideas in the name of strategies some of which are great though. They know what to do but they don't do them, and very often don't know how to do them. This is one of the major problems most executives face, something I refer to as the "knowing-doing gap."

Execution is the discipline of putting the right strategies, actions, and techniques to work to create the desired results. What I have discovered from working with organizations is that it is more difficult to make strategies work than it is to make strategies. Every implementation strategy requires commitment, accountability, and discipline to achieve the set goals. Execution sits in the overall objective of vision, strategy, and result, without which the later is never achieved.

So where does the business coach come into this? Good question. Experienced business coaches understand the existence of this problem and they support their clients to take baby steps, focusing on the smallest but most important part of the actions to get started. As the client progresses in the execution process, week after week and begins to feel positive energy as a result of working with someone he trusts (the coach) that neither judge nor ridicule him when mistakes are made, his confidence increases and he takes on more work. The same is also true with his team as the coach works with them to help develop the same level of commitment and execution.

4. Skills Upgrade

As I said earlier, the primary purpose of every business coaching relationship is to create transformation in the business organization. In an ideal situation, your coach will never leave you at the same spot he met you. It is impossible!

How to Get Financing For Your Small Business

In today's hostile economic environment, access to capital is the primary differentiating factor between those businesses which have been able to expand and gain market share versus those that have experienced enormous drops in revenue. The reason many small businesses have seen their sales and cash flow drop dramatically, many to the point of closing their doors, while many large U.S. corporations have managed to increase sales, open new retail operations, and grow earnings per share is that a small business almost always relies exclusively on traditional commercial bank financing, such as SBA loans and unsecured lines of credit, while large publicly traded corporations have access to the public markets, such as the stock market or bond market, for access to capital.

Prior to the onset of the financial crises of 2008 and the ensuing Great Recession, many of the largest U.S. commercial banks were engaging in an easy money policy and openly lending to small businesses, whose owners had good credit scores and some industry experience. Many of these business loans consisted of unsecured commercial lines of credit and installment loans that required no collateral. These loans were almost always exclusively backed by a personal guaranty from the business owner. This is why good personal credit was all that was required to virtually guarantee a business loan approval.

During this period, thousands of small business owners used these business loans and lines of credit to access the capital they needed to fund working capital needs that included payroll expenses, equipment purchases, maintenance, repairs, marketing, tax obligations, and expansion opportunities. Easy access to these capital resources allowed many small businesses to flourish and to manage cash flow needs as they arose. Yet, many business owners grew overly optimistic and many made aggressive growth forecasts and took on increasingly risky bets.

As a result, many ambitious business owners began to expand their business operations and borrowed heavily from small business loans and lines of credit, with the anticipation of being able to pay back these heavy debt loads through future growth and increased profits. As long as banks maintained this 'easy money' policy, asset values continued to rise, consumers continued to spend, and business owners continued to expand through the use of increased leverage. But, eventually, this party, would come to an abrupt ending.

When the financial crisis of 2008 began with the sudden collapse of Lehman Brothers, one of the oldest and most renowned banking institutions on Wall Street, a financial panic and contagion spread throughout the credit markets. The ensuing freeze of the credit markets caused the gears of the U.S. financial system to come to a grinding halt. Banks stopped lending overnight and the sudden lack of easy money which had caused asset values, especially home prices, to increase in recent years, now cause those very same asset values to plummet. As asset values imploded, commercial bank balance sheets deteriorated and stock prices collapsed. The days of easy money had ended. The party was officially over.

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, the Great Recession that followed created a vacuum in the capital markets. The very same commercial banks that had freely and easily lent money to small businesses and small business owners, now suffered from a lack of capital on their balance sheets - one that threatened their very own existence. Almost overnight, many commercial banks closed off further access to business lines of credit and called due the outstanding balances on business loans. Small businesses, which relied on the working capital from these business lines of credit, could no longer meet their cash flow needs and debt obligations. Unable to cope with a sudden and dramatic drop in sales and revenue, many small businesses failed.

Since many of these same small businesses were responsible for having created millions of jobs, every time one of these enterprises failed the unemployment rate increased. As the financial crisis deepened, commercial banks went into a tailspin that eventually threatened the collapse of the entire financial system. Although Congress and Federal Reserve Bank led a tax payer funded bailout of the entire banking system, the damage had been done. Hundreds of billions of dollars were injected into the banking system to prop up the balance sheets of what were effectively defunct institutions. Yet, during this process, no provision was ever made that required these banks to loan money out to consumers or private businesses.

Instead of using a portion of these taxpayer funds to support small businesses and avert unnecessary business failures and increased unemployment, commercial banks chose to continue to deny access to capital to thousands of small businesses and small business owners. Even after receiving a historic taxpayer funded bailout, the commercial banks embraced an 'every man for himself' attitude and continue to cut off access to business lines of credit and commercial loans, regardless of the credit history or timely payments on such lines and loans. Small business bankruptcies skyrocketed and high unemployment persisted.

During this same period, when small businesses were being choked into non-existence, as a result of the lack of capital which was created by commercial banks, large publicly-traded corporations managed to survive and even grow their businesses. They were mainly able to do so by issuing debt, through the bond markets, or raising equity, by issuing shares through the equity markets. While large public companies were raising hundreds of millions of dollars in fresh capital, thousands of small businesses were being put under by banks that closed off existing commercial lines of credit and refused to issue new small business loans.

Even now, in mid 2012, more than four years since the onset of the financial crisis, the vast majority of small businesses have no means of access to capital. Commercial banks continue to refuse to lend on an unsecured basis to almost all small businesses. To even have a minute chance of being approved for a small business loan or business line of credit, a small business must possess tangible collateral that a bank could easily sell for an amount equal to the value of the business loan or line of credit. Any small business without collateral has virtually no chance at attaining a loan approval, even through the SBA, without significant collateral such as equipment or inventory.

When a small business cannot demonstrate collateral to provide security for the small business loan, the commercial bank will ask for the small business owner to secure the loan with his or her own personal assets or equity, such as equity in a house or cash in a checking, savings, or retirement account, such as a 401k or IRA. This latter situation places the personal assets of the owner at risk in the event of a small business failure. Additionally, virtually all small business loans will require the business owner to have excellent personal credit and FICO scores, as well as require a personal guaranty. Finally, multiple years of financial statements, including tax returns for the business, demonstrated sustained profitability will be required in just about every small business loan application.

A failure or lack of ability to provide any of these stringent requirements will often result in an immediate denial in the application for almost all small business loans or commercial lines of credit. In many instances, denials for business loans are being issued to applicants which have provided each of these requirements. Therefore, being able to qualify with good personal credit, collateral, and strong financial statements and tax returns still does not guarantee approval of a business loan request in the post financial crisis economic climate. Access to capital for small businesses and small business owners is more difficult than ever.

As a result of this persistent capital vacuum, small businesses and small business owners have begun to seek out alternative sources of business capital and business loans. Many small business owners seeking cash flow for existing business operations or funds to finance expansion have discovered alternative business financing through the use of merchant credit card cash advance loans and small business installment loans offered by private investors. These merchant cash advance loans offer significant advantages to small businesses and small business owners when compared to traditional commercial bank loans.

Merchant cash advance loans, sometimes referred to as factoring loans, are based on the amount of average credit card volume a merchant or retail outlet, processes over a three to six month period. Any merchant or retail operator that accepts credit cards as payment from customers, including Visa, MasterCard, American Express, or Discover, is virtually guaranteed an approval for a merchant credit card advance. The total amount of cash advance that a merchant qualifies for is determined by this three to six month average and the funds are generally deposited in the business checking account of the small business within a seven to ten day period from the time of approval.

A set repayment amount is fixed and the repayment of the cash advance plus interest is predetermined at the time the advance is approved by the lender. For instance, if a merchant or retailer processes approximately $1,000 per day in credit cards from its customers, the monthly average of total credit cards processed equals $30,000. If the merchant qualifies for $30,000 for a cash advance and the factoring rate is 1.20, the total that would need to be repaid is $30,000 - plus 20% of $30,000 which equals $6,000 - for a total repayment amount of $36,000. Therefore, the merchant would receive a lump sum of $30,000 cash, deposited in the business checking account, and a total of $36,000 would need to be repaid.

The repayment is made by automatically deducting a pre-determined amount of each of the merchant's daily future credit card sales - usually at a rate of 20% of total daily credit cards processed. Thus, the merchant does not have to write checks or send payments. The fixed percent is simply deducted from future credit sales until the total sum due of $36,000 is paid off. The advantage to this type of financing versus a commercial bank loan is that a merchant cash advance is not reported on the personal credit report of the business owner. This effectively separates the personal financial affairs of the small business owner from the financial affairs of the small business entity.

A second advantage to a merchant credit card cash advance is that an approval does not require a personal guaranty from the business owner. If the business is unable to repay the merchant cash advance loan in full, the business owner is not held personally responsible and cannot be forced to post personal collateral as security for the merchant advance. The owner removes the financial consequences that often accompany a commercial bank business loan that requires a personal guaranty and often forces business owners into personal bankruptcy in the even that their business venture fails and cannot repay the outstanding loan balance.

A third, and distinct advantage, is that a merchant credit card cash advance loan does not require any collateral as additional security for the loan. The future credit card receivables are the security for the cash advance repayment, thus no additional collateral requirements exist. Since the majority of small businesses do not have physical equipment or inventory that can be posted as collateral for a traditional bank loan, this type of financing is a phenomenal alternative for thousands of retail businesses, merchants, sole proprietorships, and online stores seeking access to capital. Such businesses would be denied automatically for a traditional business loan simply because of the lack of collateral to serve as added security for the bank or lender.

Finally, a merchant credit card advance loan approval does not depend upon the strong or perfect personal credit of the business owner. In fact, the business owner's personal credit can be quite poor and have a low FICO score, and this will not disqualify the business from being approved for the cash advance. The business owner's personal credit is usually checked only for the purpose of helping to determine that factoring rate at which the total loan repayment will be made. However, even a business owner with a recently discharged personal bankruptcy can qualify for a merchant credit card cash advance loan.