Saving Lives with Simulations

Soon emergency medical technicians and firefighters may be able to practice responding to terrorist attacks using a virtual reality training tool under development at the Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories.

In the emergencies of tomorrow -- when rescue personnel may need to triage and treat mass casualties following release of a nerve agent in a shopping mall, theme park, or subway, for instance -- there will be no second chances. Rescuers who become victims of a terrorist attack can't save lives.

BioSimMER is a VR application that immerses first responders in a 3-D computer-simulated setting -- a small airport in which a biological warfare agent has been dispersed following a terrorist bombing. Simulated casualties with a variety of symptoms are found throughout the airport.

The computer simulation engages the rescuer's eyes, ears, and decision-making abilities through goggles that display the scene's images. The rescuer wears sensors on the arms, legs, and waist, allowing the player's motions to be fed back into the simulation.

"With virtual reality, you can practice over and over again, like in a video game," says project leader Sharon Stansfield. "You make mistakes, you learn. If someone dies, you can hit the reset button."

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Chief Learning Officer / The Videogame Generation

Did you see last week's Chief Learning Officer magazine’s Executive Briefing newsletter?

They ran a full story on “Gamimg and Simulations”, which highlights some of
BrandGames’ recent accomplishments.

Read and enjoy!

July 20, 2005 Volume 3, Issue 29
Executive Briefing:
Kellye Whitney, Associate Editor Gaming in Simulations Not Child’s Play
If you've been thinking seriously about investing in simulations to round out your learning and development offerings, you're not alone. More and more companies are enjoying the benefits of this realistic learning tool, and are taking advantage of the gaming quality in many new products to appeal to younger employees.

Click here to read the full article

Please visit www.brandgames.com/learning for client case studies.

Regards,

Jim Wexler
EVP, Marketing
212-780-0140 x203

Corporate Culture: In a galaxy far, far away

LucasFilms leaves the ranch…

George Lucas has a gleaming new $350 million headquarters in the middle of the Presidio, a former Army post on the edge of San Francisco, where the public can mingle beside the fancy new Yoda fountain with company employees.

For decades LucasFilms, the director’s privately held company, and its two main divisions – LucasArts, the video game producer, and Industrial Light and Magic, a leading designer of special effects – were tucked away in barely marked structures in northern San Rafael and behind the impenetrable walls of Skywalker Ranch.

“We spent a lot of years hidden away,” says Micheline Chau, president of Lucasfilm, “and I’m not sure if it was good for the company as a whole. To be the epicenter of the digital revolution, we have to be out here, evangelizing the cause".

Now, for the first time the two divisions will be at the same location, sharing the same computer system - said to be the largest in the industry - with simultaneous access to a single digital library. "We're not just talking about convergence," said Cliff Plumer, Lucasfilm's chief technology officer, "We're doing it."

The often fog-shrouded Presidio of San Francisco has a long and extensive cultural history spanning back thousands of years, to when it was the home to native people known as the Ohlone. The Spanish arrived in 1776 to establish the northernmost outpost of their empire in western North America. Over 148 years, the army transformed the Presidio grounds from mostly empty windswept dunes and scrub to a verdant, preeminent military post. Not quite a Death Star, but close.

The new 865,000-square-foot Letterman Center campus puts the public in touch with the company, who's goal is to be a Top 5 publisher, and allows employees to enjoy being part of San Francisco’s developing entertainment industry.

As for George… He’s staying at the ranch… with his figurines.

Basic Training Really Pays Off

Some of America's largest corporations are finding that military service has really enabled employees to be all they can be.

Companies such as Adolph Coors, American Express, and General Electric have found that reservists who return from Iraq reach exceptional performance levels, with far more seasoned management, people, and communication skills. These big companies are going out of their way to recruit and retain employees from the pool of nearly 180,000 reservists on active duty.

Federal law requires that employers give reservists returning from military service their jobs back with same level of responsibility and pay. Some companies are going much further, offering perks such as continued pay and health-care benefits when they are called into active duty, setting up transitional programs for military members, and making additional contributions to soldiers' retirement plans.

Home Depot pays the difference in salary for the entire length of duty for reservists called into action, and helps employees transfer to other Home Depot stores if the military moves their spouse to a new base. "These are people who have to deliver results," says Dennis Donovan, executive vice president for human resources. "They have to think not just tactically, but strategically. And they have to inspire people."


For a full story, please see BusinessWeek, 12/13/04

Can't Buy Me (Employee) Love

They say 'money talks', but for employee incentives, several companies are now looking at more creative, tangible alternatives to cash rewards.

The challenge in developing a successful incentive program is in the psychological nuances of selecting awards.

Consider this: employees usually don’t talk to their peers about their latest cash bonus – it’s self-inflating and inappropriate. But award a successful salesman with a trip to Hawaii or a flat screen television and you bet you’ll hear about it around the office. In this sense, tangible rewards create long-lasting emotional responses that cash just can’t match.

Please click here for the full article.

Are You Working This Holiday Week?

Hey -- you’re working on the last day of the year! Experts disagree – does that make you a hero, an efficient worker, or should your whole company have simply shut down?

As many as 70% of your colleagues are out on vacation. Still, some look at this time of year as good for organizing your work area, figuring out priorities for the coming year, and -- not least -- reflecting.

Michael Fox of Fox Architects in St. Louis will read from his stack of newspapers, clean his office, and enjoy not hearing phones ringing. "It's almost like a vacation week that's not charged as a vacation," he says of the time between Christmas and New Years.

Sure, many will complain about how dreary it is to work during the deadest week of the year, particularly when talking to returning vacationers. But this lowly, unproductive, quiet-as-a-mouse week is a terrible week to miss at work.

Why wait in long ski-lift lines, get stranded at airports or pay peak-hotel rates when you can have a perfectly relaxing vacation this week at your very own desk?

The body doesn't have to travel a thousand miles away for the mind to take a vacation. The phones are dead. Meetings are minimal. Best of all, there's the workplace equivalent of a full body massage: blissfully low expectations. There's also a pity bonus: even a 10-to-4 day makes you a hero .

In fact, everyone isn't really gone for the week. It just seems that way. A survey conducted last year by Harris Interactive found that more than two-thirds of those surveyed who worked outside their homes were back at work the first Monday after Christmas. Working wasn't always the first thing on their minds, though. Personal phone calls, shopping and holiday thank-you notes sometimes took precedence. But another poll found that 51% of workers rated their productivity level just as high for the holiday week as the rest of the year, and 25% said it was higher.

Click for the Full Story

Still, some employers find that productivity tapers off drastically in the last two weeks of December. Many people seem to disappear, and everyone has come to expect that, which raises a serious management question:Why not simply close the doors for the week between Christmas and New Year's and let everyone go? Employees' minds already are elsewhere, so why not make it official? Monsanto took the plunge about 10 years ago. Like Boeing, Monsanto considers the down time an extended holiday. Instead of giving employees time off for lesser holidays such as Presidents Day, Monsanto gives them the week between Christmas and New Year's.Boeing started the practice 25 years ago. Boeing uses the down time to recalibrate and clean equipment used to make commercial and fighter aircraft and other defense-related products. However, in our increasingly global economy, shutting down may not be an option.

StlToday.com

A recent survey by Accountemps found that 44% of executives feel employees are less productive the week before a major holiday. While this may be true, there are ways to counteract all of the distractions and stress and help people to be as productive now as at any time of the year.

As you assess how productive (or unproductive) your team has been this December, here are some suggestions to ESCAPE the problems:

Expect good results - Set high expectations and you will typically get great results... Give people a sense of where they are on their annual goals, and encourage them to finish the year strong.

Share spirit - Most people find their spirits lifted and thoughtfulness is at an annual high during the Holidays. Encourage people to show their spirit and sense of goodwill when communicating with others inside the organization.

Celebrate! You probably had a holiday party at a restaurant or hotel. Did you consider doing an on-site workday event to? A little time spent here can help build relationships, bring people closer together and focus them on their work.

Acknowledge the challenges and distractions - Let people know that you realize the holidays are a tough time of year to stay focused. When people know you understand their situation, you gain credibility when talking about expectations and year end goals.

Present positive anticipation for the New Year - Give people something to look forward to. Giving people this forward focus will help the focus now, but will really help people past the doldrums that can come after January 1.

Engage outside your organization. - take the lead by organizing a group to do something as a team in the community.

Full ESCAPE Story

Japan's Shift -- from Team Players to Superstars

A cultural emphasis on teamwork has always made Japanese companies reluctant to single out employees for recognition. Now, after years of toiling in obscurity, Japan's most highly-skilled, specialized workers are officially recognized as a key factor that has given Japan a manufacturing edge for decades.

The Japanese government recognizes the contributions of industrial workers with a title: supaa ginosha, or "super technician." Each of the laureates - 3,800 so far with hundreds of more added every year - receive a certificate and flower-shaped silver lapel pin stamped with a character meaning "technique."

Super technician’s hold jobs in industries ranging from semiconductors to shipbuilding. One 56-year-old Toshiba worker makes semi-conductor molds just one-10,000th of an inch thick. An employee at (Ishikawajima-Harima Heavy Industries Co.) works as an expert at the craft of metal-coating, able to discern surface variations most people can neither see nor feel.

With a large demographic of employees set to retire by 2015, Japanese companies need to get more productivity and skills out of a shrinking labor force – but robotics technology won’t offer any quick fix. “Robots can assemble products or do the heavy lifting, but the work has to be repetitive, simple, and precise,” says Yasushi Tomita, an executive of Yaskawa Electric Corp., a major robot maker. “It will be years before they will be able to do the work of most skilled technicians.”Read the full article from Business WeekFor more info on industrial robots For more info on Japan’s labor force

Business Week: On the Job Gaming

Training Videogames are gaining popularity among major industry players, Business Week reports this week. Cold Stone Creamery Cold Stone Creamery recently commissioned a new videogame that they will use to help train their employees. The game teaches portion control and customer service in a cartoon-like simulation of a Cold Stone store. Players scoop cones against the clock and try to avoid serving too much ice cream. The company says more than 8,000 employees, or about 30% of the total, voluntarily downloaded the game in the first week. “It’s so much fun,” says 24-year-old Cold Stone employee Laura Holshouser.

The military has used video games as a training tool since the 1980s and now the practice is catching on with companies, too, ranging from Cold Stone to Cisco to Canon. Corporate trainers are betting that games’ interactivity and fun will hook young, media-savvy employees and help them grasp and retain sales, technical, and management skills.

The market for corporate training games is small but growing fast. Industry leaders estimate that such games make up 15% of the “serious” or nonentertainment market, which also includes educational and medical training products. Five-year estimates show the market for serious games more than doubling, to $100 million, with trainers accounting for nearly a third of that.
Companies like video games because they are cost effective. Instead of paying for someone to fly to a central training campus you can just put them in front of a computer. Plus, employees often play the games at home on their own time.

Games are especially well-suited to training technicians. In one used by Canon, repairmen must drag and drop parts into the right spot on a copier. Workers who played the game showed a 5% to 8% improvement in their training scores compared with older training techniques such as manuals.Please see the current Business Week for the full story.

War for Talent: Millenials Reach Business School

Born between the early 1980s and 2002, the millennial generation is of keen interest to both business schools and corporate recruiters because it will outsize the Baby Boomer generation and likely have a huge impact on shaping culture.

It is important to note differences in this generation's expectations, skills and attitudes about work. The Wall Street Journal lists the following charactistics:

-- Millennials grew up with play dates and other organized activities, and prefers well-defined policies and responsibilities.

-- Millennials like structure and will want schools and companies to give them clear rules to follow. They may not like dealing with the ambiguity they will inevitably face as managers.

-- Doted on by their parents since birth, millennials will likely expect more than the usual attention from admission officials, career counselors, professors, and alumni mentors.

-- Millennials also need to clearly see the value of their jobs. "They want their work to be relevant, have impact and offer them a diversity of experiences," says Richard Baird, global managing partner for human capital at PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

"Some career-service centers may have to expand their staffs to give the millennials more individual counseling," predicts Allyson Moore, director of full-time MBA career services at NYU.

Recruiters say achievement-oriented millennials want detailed descriptions of their work duties upfront, as well as a timetable for promotions. "The recruiting experience with this generation is going to be more intensive," says Kermit King, a recruiting executive at Boston Consulting Group.

Schools are starting to become more technology savvy to attract this digital generation. Some b-school web sites feature blogs and online chats and allow applicants to check their acceptance status online 24/7. But MBA programs may have to go further, creating promotional podcasts for prospective students to download, for example, and making admission officials available for instant messaging.

Wal-Mart's Eco-Innovation

Innovation. For most of us it is the watchword for propelling our companies forward. Can innovation save the planet? What role does it play in employer branding?

Compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs) emit the same light as classic incandescent bulbs but use 80% less electricity. If everyone bought just one and screwed it in the place of an ordinary 60-watt bulb, the energy saved would be enough to power a city of 1.5 million people. The typical U.S. house has between 50 and 100 "sockets" (astonish yourself: go count the bulbs in your house). So what if we all bought and installed two bulbs? Five? Fifteen?

As a way to cut energy use, it could not be simpler. While it sounds like a promising idea, it turns out that the long-lasting, swirl-shaped light bulbs known as compact fluorescent lamps are to the nation's energy problem what vegetables are to its obesity epidemic: a near perfect answer, if only Americans could be persuaded to swallow them.

Now, Wal-Mart stores, the giant discount retailer, are determined to push them into at least 100 million homes. Can America’s biggest company, legendary for its salesmanship and influence with suppliers, also be eco-accountable encouraging 200 million shoppers to save energy? What effect will it have on employee relations?

Wal-Mart has been embattled over its workplace policies for sometime, and has had its share of criticism from environmental groups for it business practices. Now the retailer is funding programs like 'Acres for America' which spokeswoman Tara Stewart characterizes as the company's gift to future generations, although skeptics say that the campaign is nothing more than a public-relations ploy . "Wal-Mart thinks it can paint over its record with a nice shade of green, but that won't hide its true colors," says sierra club anti-sprawl-campaign manager Eric Olson.

These moves and its foray into organic foods are part of its strategy to improve Wal-Mart's appeal to the more affluent consumers the chain must win over to keep growing in the united states, all the while promoting and improved employer brand image to employees.
To inspire employees to embrace our corporate mission, we need to have a mission they can believe in and contribute to. Imagine the negative impact on productivity that a negative employer brand image has. Tell people where you work – or be ashamed to – and then try to get inspired to go there every day, much less make a contribution. Corporations are rediscovering the value of positive and visible corporate citizenship. Improving the world we live in while.