Shanda: Management Of Game Science

The core rule of Shanda's game management is that all employees have an experience value like the characters in the game. Employees' usual performance and work performance are recorded by experience value. Employees, like game characters, gain promotion and salary increase through upgrading their experience value through "practice level".

Every time an enterprise gives bonuses and audits to its employees, as chairman and CEO of Shanda Network Development Co., Ltd., Chen Tianqiao feels pain and suffering, for fear of injustice.

"Why can we manage 3 million paying users in a grand way, but it is so difficult to manage more than 2000 paid employees?" this problem has puzzled Chen Tianqiao and the grand manager, but also led to the thinking of "game management players".

In online games, the purpose of players' training is to upgrade, and there is a clear score between each level. As long as the score is fixed enough, players can automatically upgrade without requiring anyone to approve.

Gamers give time, money and games just to give them a virtual sense of achievement, and they are satisfied.

Under this mechanism, even if millions of players are online at the same time, everything is still in order.

In the enterprise, the assessment of employees' rights is in the hands of managers at all levels. Most employees are hard to know clearly how to get promotion and salary increase without a quantitative standard.

The uncertainty of this goal and the employee's subjective will misplace each other, so it is difficult to motivate employees to make more contributions to the enterprise.

Even though the employees have worked hard and the enterprises have paid the wages, the actual effect is not satisfactory to both sides.

The grand manager realised that in essence, the problem of how managers encourage employees to contribute to the company is actually very similar to that of online game designers in considering how to attract players to participate. It is only a combination of the mechanism designers want participants to do with the participants themselves, so that an incentive compatible mechanism can be formed.

In September 2007, Chen Tianqiao put forward the concept of "game management" with the core values of "human nature, pleasure and harmony", and asked the grand manager to manage the company like a management game, and to serve the staff as a service user.

In the next two years and more, we made great efforts to make use of its own IT technology advantage, and did a lot of backstage technical support around "game management".

By adjusting the organizational framework, building information system, establishing mathematical models and improving performance appraisal system.

At present, the grand game management system has matured.

Rules of the game

In the traditional human resource management system, enterprises do performance appraisal and evaluation every year, and employees and managers will encounter such or such problems.

Some employees would think, "I made a very small mistake before the assessment. Will it affect me?"

And these puzzles and problems, grand "game management system" through a comprehensive quantitative assessment system to solve, everything from data to speak.

The core rule of Shanda's game management is that all employees have an experience value like the characters in the game. Employees' usual performance and work performance are recorded by experience value. Employees, like game characters, gain promotion and salary increase through upgrading their experience value through "practice level".

The experience value is divided into two parts: "post experience value" and "project experience value". The former is just like the general upgrade of the game in the game. As long as no mistake is made, the experience value grows naturally over time. The latter is similar to the "do the task" and "do the copy" in the game, and get more experience value in the project.

In addition, employees have considerable initiative in acquiring and accumulating experience values.

There is a project bidding system with "marked price". Employees will gain extra experience value if they have the ability and willingness to undertake additional work outside their daily tasks.

Through "game management", in 2009 alone, a total of nearly 700 projects were set up in Shanda. These projects were not only fully completed, but also correspondingly released 3 million 500 thousand project experience values to employees. The annual staff promotion was promoted to 1.62 ranks, and the per capita salary increased by 14%.

Among them, the fastest promotion staff rose 16 ranks, corresponding to the increase in pay more than doubled.

Double ladder development mode

The organizational structure of modern enterprises is becoming more and more complex. Most employees lack a clear understanding of their position and development path in the enterprise. To achieve staff's self-management through game management, we must first solve the problem of employee's self positioning and development path.

That is to say, employees must understand their position in the enterprise, the direction of development and the distance to reach different goals.

The characteristic of double ladder development mode is to completely open the channel between professional post sequence and management post sequence, and the staff who manage the job sequence also have corresponding professional post rank.

And each post has a corresponding SD rank.

On the basis of this rank system, we can record staff's growth in this system by experience value.

Each SD rank has a corresponding empirical value.

There is a certain difference between the empirical values of two adjacent SD ranks.

In the setting of the difference between empirical value and empirical value, Shanda experienced a process of repeated calculation. The function used at last was similar to the growth process of human beings. It grew very fast at the very beginning, but slowly, with the bottleneck and difficulty in the development process, the experience value span between the two SD ranks gradually increased.

People who play games know that for example, the first grade to second level needs 100 points, but the second level to third level requires 200 points.

According to their SD rank, each grand employee knows his experience value and the experience required to go up to the next level.